Tropico 3 Review

I have been a fan and player of city building games dating back to the original SimCity. While SimCity has always ben the top city builder, after its last outing diverging from the norm, the time was right for someone to take over. Tropico 3 is the latest in the Tropico series, putting players in charge of the tropical island nation of Tropico. As El Presidente you need to create an income for Tropico, jobs for its inhabitants, build adequate living and entertainment, draw tourist to your nation, all the while pleasing the different political powers of the world. Tropico 3 is an amazing game which will keep you stuck to your PC screen for hours.

While most city building games are rather similar, make money, construct buildings and make your people happy, Tropico 3 does all this a little different and also adds a political system into the mix. The campaign portion of the game sees you jumping from island to island completing different tasks in-order to finish the mission. These tasks can vary from achieve a certain Happiness Rating or export X amount of a certain export. All the while you need to watch out for attacking rebels or losing your presidency during elections.
The game has a variety of buildings to construct. Some of the buildings have different options, for instance their are different types of farms, be it corn, papaya or others. Your choice all depends on what the land on your island can handle. At first farms will also be your main export, but as you get further into the game you will begin to mine different minerals and even drill for oil. Once you get your basic industries established you will be able to add more advanced industries like a Cigar Factory to turn high amounts of tobacco into much higher priced export cigars.
Besides constructing buildings for income you also need to establish proper housing for your citizens. Tropico 3 offers gamers differnet levels of housing depending on the wealth of their nation. While at first you will only be able to provide low income dirty housing as your progress citizens will require higher priced and nicer apartment blocks and even high priced condos.
After you have a good grasp on providing for your citizens your going to want to start adding to your income int he way of tourism. While not all islands will be great tourist destinations, those that are will gain you lots of money. Tourist require high beauty areas and various accommodations and entertainment. Just like buildings for your citizens tourist buildings also various from low wealth bungalows and slummy motels to high priced skyscraper hotels. The more money you spend on tourism the more wealthy tourist will arrive. And watch out sometimes those tourist get into trouble.

Up to this point this all sounds rather normal, but what makes Tropico standout is the need to balance the different political parties. Through out the missions events will occur that will require you to make various decisions. For instance a tourist steals and crashes your limo, you have to choose let him go and lose respect with nationalist, let the religious system handle him and gain religion respect, lock him up and you USA relationship suffers. Now this one incident doesn’t end here. Many of the events continue as story lines, if you throw this tourist in jail, don’t be surprised if you find out he’s the son of a USA diplomat. This really make the game more fun and interesting, as it gives you a sense of story while playing.

Graphically the game looks great, even on my older pentium 4 machine. Your islands are covered in lush trees and as you zoom in you’ll see a good amount of detail as your citizens live their lives. The only graphical negative is that there is a rather limited number of building textures, your islands will all look the same and there will be very little variation. While the texture do look good, only having 3-4 different apartment blocks makes the game graphically repetitive.
Sounds on the other hand are great, the cities really are a live and the Caribbean music is great. As rebel attacks unfold you’ll be able to watch and hear the gun shots as your army defend the buildings as the rebels attack.

Overall the game is great and I have been spending hours playing. While there is a limited number of missions, there is a great online community right in game that offers additional custom made missions for fun, or you can just jump in and play in a sandbox mode. The game looks great with the only graphical negative being the repetitive building textures. The HUD matches a Tropical feel and looks great throughout. If you enjoy city building game and are tired with the old SimCity give Tropico 3 a look, the storylines and political aspects are not only presented comically but add a level of fun.