Tropico

Pros • A city-builder with wit and soul • completely customizeable difficulty • priceless leader "traits" • a wealth of detail	Cons • Minor interface quibbles • a lack of event-scripting • a tutorial whose thoroughness is not up to its otherwise vibrant presentation
Bottom Line A unique and worthy take on the city-building genre, suited more casual to hard-core, niggly micromanagers, but playable in any case. Oh, the joys and trials (with or without one's peers) of running one's very own little sun-drenched, cigar-exporting, pisspot island banana republic. The shaky economics, the questionable politics, the superpower ass-kissing, the oppression, the uprisings, the embezzlement, the sleazy sociopolitical posturing, the adorable earnestness that comes with pretending to be a real country; Tropico offers all this and more, served with a tasty Caribbean glaze of customization and appropriately humble, if dry, humor.

You're El Presidente himself, presiding over a fledgling island city-state. Like any city-builder, Tropico requires you to build an infrastructure, set up and maintain healthy business prospects, and keep your political ear to the ground as regards the happiness of your subjects. However, Tropico adds the all-too-often neglected element of sociopolitical interplay and stability. It's true that you begin as an all-powerful civic elder who decides what will be built, and when, and where (and in what starting proximity to your fine presidential palace), but pretty soon you begin to learn the ugly political truth; past a certain point, you're only as powerful and safe as the various factions that support you allow you to be.

Charmingly, Tropico starts right out by dragging your personality defects into the harsh light. Well, maybe not yours, personally, but those of your dictatorial game-self. So you choose the personal and political background of your ruler-character: is he a local-boy-made-good from a religious upbringing who came to power by political upheaval? Is he a former pop star now trying his hand at politics with backing from the West, all the while battling an embarrassing case of Tourette's Syndrome? Or perhaps a womanizing alcoholic who got his formal schooling back in the USSR? (I am happy to report that these are not mere sarcastic examples, but actual in-game choices). Whichever besmirched personality you choose, it all comes down to statistics, and what characteristics go down well with various political groups. Lean in with the liberal, artsy types and you'll ruffle the feathers of the Church; appeal too much to the old-boy network and you'll have the women voters on your case. Between the tree-huggers, the hawks, the doves, the bra-burners, the pulpit-pounders, the commies and the yanks, amongst others, there will always be some faction out there thinking heavy, awful thoughts about you, you can rest assured. Well, you can rest, at any rate... but let's hope you're keeping those palace guards nice and content and well-paid.

Of course, it wouldn't be any fun if you couldn't slap down the occasional hands-on edict (rigging the votes, making the occasional for-the-hell-of-it arrest or imposing martial law, etc.), and those options are open as well...but be prepared for a lot of backlash. A less-radical (and, frankly, less-doomed) approach is to spend your energies tweaking the stats of individual structures--crank rent here, nudge the work pay-scales there, constantly keep track of which factions are happy with which aspects of Tropico life...all baby steps in the larger, adult ballet of making the economic machinery run smoothly (or, depending upon the victory conditions, stacking away a nice Swiss bank account for your retirement). In this respect, Tropico can be an awfully detailed and complex game, if you're up for that. You can also eschew the game's ready-made scenarios with generated games, in which you can even exercise topological control of your empirette--land-to-water ratios, terrain ruggedness, foliation and so forth. In the long run, this sort of thing may be what keeps you coming back to Tropico, since the preset scenarios are a little on the dry side--tragically, there's no good use of the game's innate humor for tragicomic scripted events geared toward your leader's particular foibles.

Structures include the obvious ones like houses, mines, fields and churches---plus later advanced ones such as power plants, casinos, clubs (gotta get those tourists in there), television stations and airports. While no graphical revolucion, Tropico has a lush-yet-muted look (a sun-dappled painting in motion) that perfectly sets the island tone (the music, too, is a breezy Caribbean mix), and looks especially impressive when you zoom in close on a grand structure such as your presidential estate. The subjects walking around in the sun look terrific too, as though photographed from orbit by the highest-quality spycam. Even hardcore sim-nuts won't have any quality issues with Tropico; it's the less-experienced who will find themselves initially bewildered, even with the talky tutorial--there's just a lot of detail here, and Tropico seems to take for granted that players know the city-sim drill. Whether beginner or vet, however, know that Tropico is giving a slant on the realm/empire strategy game that's been largely neglected before--wherein ultimate victory exists by the people, of the people and for the people, to snark a perhaps-inappropriate phrase.

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