And remember, a vote for El presidente is a vote for me!

Sim City 2000 if it were on a tropical island ruled by a dictator and everything in game was trying to overthrow you.

I'm a Sim City fan—I still remember the first time I played Sim City 2000 and everything from the graphics to the real-time city animations blew my mind. I got to a Megalopolis in the first Sim City on Super Nintendo as well. The idea of managing a variety of issues to build a thriving city was fun.

Recently, I decided to try the Tropico series. I own a bunch of them and, as usual, start with the first one to see how it was (so I don't play a new one and then feel like the old ones are a downgrade). I enjoyed the elements that were like Sim City, but it suffered from two issues: the scenarios in my version are not in order to help you learn the game (like RollerCoaster Tycoon), and the game has a strange combination of time restrictions along with all the game mechanics conspiring to overthrow you.

The Positives
-The graphics aren't half-bad. While I wish they had slightly higher resolutions for modern PCs, the various buildings and the people and everything are very cute. It is like Sim City 2000 meets RollerCoaster Tycoon, and I really liked them.

-The basic game mechanics are fun and a nice variation on the City simulation formula. You can funnel money into a slush fund for yourself, and there are a bunch of edicts that you can set to keep yourself in power or help your community survive.

-I did like the fact that there was so much variety in terms of things that drove happiness and things that you could build to help the island prosper. A little of everything makes for a lot to do in the ~50 years you have to play a scenario.


The Negatives
-This might be an issue with buying a digital version with all of the expansions vs. back in the day where you would buy this game with a manual, but the game isn't pick-up-and-play at all. The scenarios are listed in alphabetical order, not starting with the tutorial missions, so you have no idea what anything does and have no easy way of figuring out how the game works by playing it. I should've read the manual first because the internet is not designed to help you learn a game like this; it's more designed to explain things one by one through search (and, even then, not very well), which takes an eternity. Read the manual or start with the starter scenarios and then find out the right order to play them in to learn instead of jumping into a difficult one only to fail over and over again and get frustrated with your lack of progress after hours of attempts.

-The game is very much what they call in modern games an "endless mode" where you have to see how long you'll last before getting ousted. I prefer a Sim City-style game where the point is to build a thriving city and handle issues where even the worst cities can be salvaged. In this game, it's Sim City's "you need more industrial zones" game mechanic times 50; you'll be up $90,000 with a growing, thriving city one year and then be $50,000 in the hole the next, sitting and waiting to see if your Teamsters will deliver enough money to bring you back into the black to fix the problem before the scenario ends or you get overthrown.

-My biggest issue with the game is that you have to build the island in a very specific way that matches either the scenario's objectives or the way that the city has to be built, or you'll fail. I don't mind the former, as scenarios are meant for that exact thing—to show you've mastered the game mechanics (but that's where the alphabetical scenarios ruin that experience). However, for the latter, the game never helped me understand much about the relationship between certain decisions and their consequences. How many Teamsters do I need? How far away do construction buildings need to be from each other to be able to reach? How many homes of which type would be good at what point in the game? No idea. I found that I either tried to build the nicer things early and had no money or build the low-quality stuff and then couldn't raise happiness enough at the end of the tougher scenarios (for example). While I enjoyed the swings that caused me to have to build something else, most of my games ended up with a bunch of unbuilt-but-purchased buildings, negative funds due to lack of teamsters, then my citizens went hungry, and then I just sat for 2-3 years until it fixed itself and I could build something else again. And when I completed a scenario and continued, it often turned out that the whole island would go to hell shortly afterwards. The game is meant to be played in a certain way, and it never helped me figure it out so it was mostly frustrating.

-After playing the scenarios for a while, I assumed that maybe it was like Sim City or Civilization and I should just play the main game to get the whole experience. But unlike those games, the Random Map is just a create-your-own-scenario mode and not really a "play the whole game to get to build everything" mode. I never really used the Edicts and never built a prison. It's just really weird that a game has all of these options and yet the scenarios pigeonhole you into building a certain set of buildings. So it basically turned into a strategy of building farms, ranches, and mines along with cheap buildings -> clinic and church -> industry and tourism and more homes -> power plant -> advanced buildings -> hope and pray that you can balance money, housing, buildings that require electricity, and education to staff the advanced buildings or your citizens will be unhappy and you'll lose. Oh, and your environment seems to always get worse no matter how many gardens I plant everywhere.


Overall, it's just a game that is interesting for a while until it becomes either frustrating or depressing. If I wanted to feel existential dread that nothing I did mattered, I'd play a horror or survival (or survival horror) game. I never really played the Civilization or Sim City scenario packs; I always like just starting a random or custom map and going from beginning to end. This game doesn't really want you to do that; it wants you to play scenario-like play where you have 50 years to complete a goal. And my people were never happy on the harder modes, and you are constantly fighting time or immigration, which constantly makes everyone miserable. And the voice seems to mislead you sometimes, telling you to do things that you can let go for years and not have anything bad happen—in fact, you're better off ignoring him. So I have no idea what to make of this game. I played as long as I could stand, but without tips and tricks to help guide me toward good starter strategies that I could build off of (and no scenario order to help me get better through easier starting campaigns), I ended up playing the harder scenarios too early and lost a lot, taking away a lot of fun of the game. It's not bad, but I'm going to try to the newer ones in the series to see if they fix these issues and make the game more fun in later installments.

Abso-lutely.