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85%
PROS
Great units, interesting plot, excellent music and cinematics, easy interface.
LOWS
Can get a little boring, no map editor or multiplayer, not a graphical feast.
OVERALL
A decent game that provides something different, but has some issues it needs to take care of before receiving a must buy score.
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As you start off playing Tropico, you are taken through a video maze of your Caribbean island. You enter the office of El Presidente, and take a seat. With the blaring Latin music in your face, you want to just get up and dance.
Instead, you decide not to, and enter the simple tutorial, which explains the basic controls of the game, and how to operate your island. After playing the tutorial, you are ready to be the Presidente.
Before playing a new game, you have to choose some options. This includes the amount of vegetation, minerals, water coverage, population, elevation and map size of your island. As you increase or decrease these variables, the game difficulty range will change. You also get to choose your political stability, economy and game length. There are victory goals like "Economic Powerhouse," "A place in history," and "Don't worry be happy." There are also special circumstances that you can choose like "free elections" or "immigrants out", but if you just don't know what your goals actually are, you can choose to play an open-ended game. Before starting the game you need to choose your character. There are more then 20 characters to choose from and you can edit their dossiers to your liking. Certain traits like which college they went to, their flaws or how they came to office will affect their advantages at the beginning of the game. These choices can also affect your diplomatic relationships with certain countries.
Once you have started your game, you are taken to Tropico, your island paradise.
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The game interface is very simple to use. You can build whatever types of buildings you want, ranging from a market to a university. All of the buildings look different and unique, and when you have a lot of them in your town, you will be able to look at them in wonder. Different buildings include: construction offices, schools, universities, colleges, churches, tenements, and much more.
As you start off in the game, your main source of money is farms. You pay your workers to produce your food, and you pay your ship tenders to ship them out all over the world. My first year, I made about $6000 dollars on farms. After your town gets more technical, you must change your line of production from farms to bigger industry factories. This includes cigar, furniture and cannery factories.
Most jobs require you to pay for the fare of an educated worker to come to your island. This gets annoying sometimes because you end up spending $10000 dollars on 10 people to come over and perform medical, religious, or high school education and other such activities. Once they die, you will just have to pay more money for more of them to come over.
Your island will start to get shipment of tourists and immigrants periodically, and the different types people will benefit your island in different ways. Immigrants that come will need to have a place to live, but they will be able to occupy empty jobs that need filling. Tourists will only come if you have some type of attraction: this ranges from a pub to a casino. Tourists will have to pay whatever price you set for their hotel and attraction fees. You have to check your tourists' bank account before raising the price too steeply. At first, tourists will come in with under $10 in their pockets, but once you start building some more upper class attractions, their spending's will increase.
