Back in the day, way before the tween-friendly micro-management of the superb The Sims franchise, Sim City was where it was at. As the mayor of the town, you were tasked with building your city from scratch, managing the expectations of its inhabitants, and generally making sure that things ran like clockwork.
Fast forward to the modern day, and players seem to have forgotten that the city-building genre even still exists. That isn’t surprising, given that European coding teams seem to trot out version after version of their own take on the game type every other month, with relatively little in terms of improvement. The closest thing you’d find on a modern day console – until now – is the likes of the dire A-Train HX, if you can find a copy, that is.
So, Tropico 3 (the previous two titles have been PC/Mac only) steps into a somewhat uncrowded arena and therefore, you’d expect some lazy development to come to the fore as the game pretty much takes that “best in genre” crown by default. That isn’t the case, however, since the game is solidly constructed, good fun, and somewhat addictive once you get into it.
The game tasks you with building the island of Tropico from what is initially either nothing (in Sandbox mode) or very, very little (in Campaign mode.) Depending on how you choose to play, you’ll be set a specific task or goal and will start at a point in the not-too-distant past, with eras ranging from the 1950s all the way through to the present day. As the cartoony representation of Fidel Castro on the box would suggest, this island is none-too-dissimilar to the beautiful island of Cuba, and you’ll find that a lot of in-game references and tasks are based on situations that have occurred in that area of the world. Managing your relations with the USSR and – of course – the USA and in some cases, playing them off against each other, is the primary example that runs throughout your time with the game. Poor relations with one will lead to an invasion, and if you have weak relations with the other, they won’t step in to help – causing you to be overthrown and your game ended.
Such is the range of Tropico 3. Previous entries in the genre have seen you occasionally cranking the taxes up or taking out bank loans, but not many have seen you undertaking a full political career. And certainly, none have done it as well as this. You’ll be giving speeches from the balcony of your palacial home, issuing edicts such as banning the use of contraception in order to grow your population, and trying to win elections by making promises (that you can choose to keep or not, depending on who you don’t mind offending) and praising different groups. All of that of course, comes with the standard city-building and micro-management that you’d expect. Only here, you get a real choice as to how deep into that micro-management you want to go. If Pascal Valazquez has decided to “out” himself as a vocal opposer of your presidential reign, do you really want him managing your main farm? If it doesn’t bother you, leave him at the helm. If it does, select your farm, head on to the tab showing the list of the farm’s staff, and fire him. If you don’t want to go that far into things, you don’t have to, but it’s nice to have the option.
There are a good selection of scenarios and challenges on offer here, but no online play, although the ability to download online challenges designed by players of the PC version of the game is a nice one. Thankfully, for those who were looking for online play, those offline modes will keep players going for a good few weeks, I’d say, especially given that in my first attempt at the game’s first challenge, I ended up spending a good hour and a half of playing time before the Russians invaded and ended my game. That did bring about one negative point, and that is that after playing for that long, you expect the game’s climax to be well…a little more climactic than it actually is. Win or lose, you’re presented with a simple screen stating the final outcome in bold text, and that seems to be about it. There’s not so much as an animated sequence showing your island’s demise when you lose or a fanfare-encased sequence showing your people’s love for their newly-born country when you win and whilst this doesn’t spoil the game outright, it would have been nice to have something to boost the feeling of achievement somewhat.
I didn’t hold out much hope for Tropico 3 and I’m happy to say that whilst the majority of the games of this ilk that have been released over the last few years (be they PC or console-based) have been nothing short of tragic cash-ins from struggling development teams, this is far better than the average mix. In a month of incredibly strong product launches, the game is going to find it hard to get a real following behind it and this may damage the online community – if it hasn’t killed it stone dead already – but if you’re a fan of the genre, you really shouldn’t miss this. Thoroughly enjoyable.
