Tropico

Elections crop up occasionally, but you have the option to skip them. This might make people unhappy, but it's your only recourse if you think you'll lose. Unfortunately, there's no indication of how well you'll do when you're asked to choose whether to hold election. As soon as you accept, you get a readout that tells you how the people will vote. Why can't I see this before I decided whether to hold elections, particularly since losing an election means my game is over? Elections themselves are curiously uneventful affairs. You get a simple letter with the results.

There are edicts in Tropico that let you bend certain elements of the game, but I haven't experimented very much with them. For instance, you can burn books to raise religious happiness and lower intellectual happiness. Some edicts target specific citizens with bribes, excommunication, incarceration, or assassination. Most edicts require a specific building and a cash payment. On the whole, Tropico makes tons of information available to the player; hold the cursor over something and it's detailed in a text readout at the bottom of the screen. Edicts, unfortunately, are an exception to this rule. Luckily, the manual has a chart detailing what exactly edicts do.

Because the game is pausable, complaints about the interface aren't crucial. There's no support for right clicks beyond map scrolling. On the interface, right clicks would have been useful to cycle backwards through various overlays. The thin strip to directly bring up the happiness display is far too thin to be a clickable area.

Tropico could certainly use more hot keys to help get around faster. It would be nice to bookmark parts of the map. I'd really like to be able to bind keys to specific almanac entries. The almanac is a big book of lists and graphs. You can use it to find specific people, gauge happiness, check your finances, and so on. The good news is there's a lot of information here. Nearly anything you could possibly want to know has been put in the almanac. The bad news is that it fairly sprawls. A lot of the learning curve in Tropico involves navigating the almanac. For instance, I had seen an entry for what average pay was on a Caribbean island; this is a convenient gauge for what people expect to be paid at any given time. I spent several minutes looking for it, but for the life of me, I could find it. I finally gave up. For those of you wondering, it's under the "People" tab behind the income disparity listing.

Much of the almanac info is buried a few clicks too deep; I'd rather have more tabs along the right side than have the information buried two or three levels into the book. This sort of information sprawl wasn't a problem in the more focused game world of Railroad Tycoon II, but Tropico is a much more ambitious game.

Oddly enough, calling up the almanac brings it onscreen with the cover closed. It also appears this way when it pops onscreen every January. Why do I need to see the cover of the almanac? Why do I have to spend an extra mouse click to get to the useful information? It sounds like some artist at PopTop went to the trouble of making an almanac cover and they didn't want to waste his artwork.

As for variety and the game's replayability, the random scenario designer allows for a lot of different options. You can choose your victory conditions to allow for different types of games, but so far, my only successful efforts have been trying to make everyone as happy as possible. There aren't very many scenarios and most of them seem skewed towards advanced players. This is too bad, because PopTop has done great things for Railroad Tycoon II with their richly scripted scenarios, particularly the dramatic changes they added in the Second Century expansion. I hope more things like this are forthcoming for Tropico.

In the meantime, there's a lot here to enjoy. This is a compelling game with lots of atmosphere and depth. I must confess I've had high expectations for Tropico and one of the best things I can say about is that I'm not disappointed.

Back to Early Hours