Tropico 4 – Review – PC

Good morning Tropico! Once again your humble leader El Presidente is back to rule with an iron fist! -ahem- I meant head up our democracy! The Tropicans better appreciate everything Presidente has done for them, after all it’s not easy to randomly start a third world country / tourist paradise out of nothing. How you do it is up to you. Communism, democracy, trade, tourism, the choices are yours to make. But does it show significant improvement over the previous installment to warrant another buy? Read on and find out.

Story: There is no story per se, but there is a Campaign mode that puts you in various situations and gives you goals to accomplish. These are typically harder than a Sandbox game because the situation is often something that goes against you achieving that goal. For players that like to have a concrete reason to keep playing, this is the mode for them. While others have the option of simply starting up an island in Sandbox mode and playing until their hearts content.

Gameplay: The majority of the gameplay remains largely unchanged from Tropico 3. You still manage an island with inhabitants and it’s your job to make it prosper. How you accomplish that is up to you. Early on you simply deal with feeding your people, while exporting some of that food for a profit. This in turn allows you to reinvest your money into other areas such as Industry and Infrastructure. What you do is largely based on your island. Does it have mineral deposits, oil reservoirs, or lush, fertile soil?

Tropico 4 adds some new buildings and such to spice up your gameplay. A new blimp attraction has settings that allow all buildings under it to benefit as if the Presidente himself was visiting, therefore increasing output in every way. Satellites give you the ability to scan for aliens, which increases your standings with the Intellectuals, block incoming signals, which causes less subversive activities, and spy on other countries and sell that information for a random yearly profit.

Things like this will keep you coming back for more as you start to use all of the game’s new features. This is a big driving force behind playing, the opportunity to expand and improve your island works as a heck of a motivator.

Some other minor changes include the Stock Market which allows foreign investors on your island. We don’t really see the point of this because you don’t really get any profit out of it. You have to provide the people, electricity, and resources for the building. In return you get the jobs added to your economy, a (hopefully high) wage, and a yearly rent which rarely exceeds a couple thousand. Considering you have to provide those resources, it turns out as money lost, instead of exporting all of that you simply give it to the foreigners who profit and pay you a minimum.

Graphics/Audio: The graphics and audio remain about the same as you would expect. Playing Tropico 4 on the PC certainly meant there was the option to improve the graphics quite an bit and we must say, it looked pretty darn good. The soundtrack is the same latino music that you got in the last game. However, one thing that has changed is the audio, no longer does Penultimo serve as the only person that talks to you through the radio. Others jump in from time to time and Sunny Flowers serves as your new show host.

Overall: Tropico 4 serves as a great sequel to the last game which really took off. There is plenty of new content to make you completely change the way you played from the previous game. But enough stays the same to make those returning be able to jump right back into the thick of things. With new random events such as volcanic eruptions and tidal waves, your game is sure to be more interesting this time around.

Pros:

• A lot of new buildings.
• Added depth means more approaches to the same situation.
• Many problems with the previous game have been fixed.

Cons:

• Foreign investments make no sense.
• Traffic almost always manages to snarl itself.
• Tourism is more difficult to manage and attract.

Score: 8.5/10

A code for this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.

Popularity: unranked [?]