TROPICO 3 REVIEW Posted by The_PC_Gamer on Oct 26, 2009 22:26 (311 days ago) |
Tropico 3 is a city builder game with a tropical twist (what a metaphor, I’m a genius). You have the usual menu layout with various buildings categorized by function. You have the farms, mines, apartment buildings, restaurants, hotels, resorts, roads, and tons more. City building fans will have a lot to see and do here, as the possibilities of creating your dream paradise island are endless. To keep your population happy, they need to be fed, living in good condition and making good amounts of money. To that end, it’s your job to try and reach these perfect conditions for the majority of the citizens. You start off with a construction yard where workers are based, and if you go and set a farm to be built elsewhere, you can watch the workers get in their trucks and drive to the location, get out, and start hammering away. You can’t actually control individual characters, so to this end the game may seem slow as workers sometimes take a bit of time to get to their work site and start work. But remember to move your Presidente over there if you want construction to finish sooner. The economic game in Tropico 3 runs very deep and it will definitely take most people a few missions to get fully acquainted with the system. There are many resource types to juggle, imports and exports to send to USA or USSR (all while waiting for the freight ships to arrive at random intervals).
Another big part of the game is the political game. You are an island that starts off with mostly neutral relations to the only other two nations in the game, USSR and USA. From here, it is up to you if you wish to remain neutral or start forming good relations with either of these nations. It’s impossible to be allied to both at the same time, so make your choices accordingly. Depending on who you choose, it will bring various positives and negatives to all aspects of your island. For example, allying with USA will be a major boost to your tourism industry, but it will also unsettle your military when the US decides to build a base on your island. Similar positives and negatives will occur if you choose to ally with USSR. If you decide to stay independent, there will still be small incentives here and there, such as private firm in the US offering you a contract on your cacao exports. You are also in full control of how your island is run politically. There are tons of different acts or laws you can issue, each with a specific effect on either your population, or your economy, or both. These contribute to the flow of the game in the same way your avatar’s character traits do that you’ve chosen at the beginning. Some acts are permanent (until you choose to cancel them – such as a curfew) while others are event-based and will end after a short period of time. Unlike other modifiers in the game, the acts you issue do not always have a balancing negative effect, however those acts often require specific objects to be built or simply cost a lot of money to implement. A fun twist on the political game also comes with the ability to set even the smallest things such as what TV stations are broadcasting and newspapers are printing – so you could force a ton of propaganda on your people regarding your honest ways while you eliminate party opposition during the night.
The part of Tropico 3 that separates it from other games in the genre is definitely its complexity. Unlike other games, where you really do not have a choice of selecting any individual person because they are merely random spawns, in Tropico you are able to select any individual and literally follow their daily routine, which is extremely realistic and detailed. You can see where the person works (watch them go to work), see them work, eat, go home to rest and repeat it all again in the morning. You can watch them get married, have kids and change careers, and even emigrate if things on the island aren’t going too well. They also grow, age and eventually pass away because of old age. It’s an extremely well presented level of detail that is very fun to follow. Another example of the game’s complexity is the ability to adjust many different functions for most of your buildings. For instance, you could set your workshop to work the employees for very lengthy days with no weekends, which will get things done faster but will probably not make them happy. The alternative is to let them work less but live a happier life. For most of the buildings you can also adjust the wages of all employees based on if they are educated or not, and you can also pay to bring educated immigrants on the next freight ship who will immediately go to work at their new place of employ and add to your population totals. New to the series with this third game are random events. There continue the “tongue-in-cheek” humor of the island setting and range from devastating tornadoes to volcano eruptions to military revolts. This once again further adds to the game’s high replayability and chances for all kinds of fun situations. The complexity of the game is also not helped by the lack of a proper tutorial – the one included with the game is simply not good enough to cover even some of the major political and building aspects. So if you enjoy discovering things on your own, you will have your hands full here.
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