Customer Reviews

Tropico 3

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I never played Tropico 1 or 2, but I do enjoy Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress. I love games that let me build up an empire and repel attacks without being completely focused on combat all the time as in a standard RTS.

This game has a lot going for it. Think "Sim City" with the additional need to balance out political factions and put up with rebels. In Sim City, unhappy sims would simply leave. In Tropico 3, they're more likely to pick up a gun and try to overthrow you directly.

That said, the game has some faults that are making it into a pretty short lived affair. I've put in maybe 8 full sandbox rounds and I don't think I've got many more left in me.

The problems I had:

* It's too easy. It's not hard to go through the whole game without a single rebel. Factions are easily made happy and the extreme measures of dealing with rowdy individuals available to a tropical dictator seem to be unnecessary. Even if I configure a custom game with politics as unstable as it will let me and with "Rebel Yell" turned on, which makes my citizens even more likely to rebel, I still find rebellions aren't that big of a threat. They're even less of a threat than the occasional invading party in Dungeon Keeper.

* Combat is too forgiving. You don't really have any control during combat, which is fine, really, but the mechanics of it are still rather silly. When the rebels do finally show up, they will try to sabotage a structure and run away -- except before they do this, they will politely stand near it until literally your entire army has shown up. Consequently there's no reason to plan out how to distribute your guard towers to deal with threats quickly. Just build all your military stuff in one place and put a parking garage nearby. The rebels will wait until you show up, no matter how long it takes to get there.

* No "win" condition + no persistent scoreboard for the sandbox missions. Although the campaign has victory conditions, in "sandbox mode", which lets you play a randomly generated island, there's no victory condition. You rule for a set period of time and then the scoreboard comes up. The only measure of whether you did well or not is your score, and it doesn't save your score, so you have nothing to compare it too short of writing down your previous scores. So I love that there's an ability to play randomly generated maps (something I wish more games would do) but I think it could be implemented better.

* The foreign invasion is literally just a "game over" mechanism. I once played the game aiming to annoy the US because I wanted to see what it was like when the US invaded. Could I make a big enough military and fight them off? No. The scoreboard just pops up. You lose immediately. Rather anti-climatic.

But it's not all bad news.

The game is beautiful. 3-D, high degree of zoom-in and zoom-out, individually modeled citizens are roaming around and clicking on them shows you all sorts of useful information: what does this citizen think about their job, their health, crime, freedom, etc? What's really annoying them? What are their thoughts? (Thoughts are a good quick way to see if people are missing something in particular, e.g., "I wanted to go to church but couldn't" -- you may not have a church or you may need another one or you may just need more priests for the churches you already have.) The level of detail involved in managing your workers keeps you busy too. Tropico is not an equal opportunity employer. Some jobs only take men. Some only take women. Some take both. Sometimes you have to fire the men working on the farm to make room for unemployed women while the man go off to fill out the lumber camp. You have to deal with education because some jobs require high school or college to work there.

So there's plenty to play with in just running your town.

Basically I think this is a fantastic "sim tropical island" and if you want it for that, well, look no further. If you enjoy Sim City type games you'll definitely enjoy this. I was mainly disappointed over the lack of depth to the combat. Not that I was expecting a full on RTS but I definitely expected more than the rather weak and unstrategic rebel elements the game has.

I'm still holding out hope that they might change how combat and politics works with a patch. There needs to be more room to up the difficulty. It could be a great game with just a few minor adjustments.

As it stands, I rate it 4 stars for fun, because it is fun, but 3 stars overall because it just isn't something I got a lot of longevity out of.

Every regime turns old and stale. Every banana-republic runs out of national resources to sell-out for kickbacks. And every dictator can hide only so many populist aces up his sleeve. So in the end he calls for ...degenerate capitalist image-makers to reinvent his persona and make the beard hip again. It's the same old story.
Power corrupts - and absolute power corrupts absolutely. True - but aren't you tempted? Not even a little?

The original Tropico and its expansions were of those rare RTS games that manage to blend absurd stereotypes with classic gaming genres and reinvent them with humor. From the old Dungeon Keeper to the unsurpassed Evil Genius most of these games are hard to fail. And how could they - what is there not to like?

The economy must be tended to: from agriculture, fisheries and tourism, to oil and mining, you must decide on how to keep your regime solvent and well into the black. On the other hand, neglect the well-being of your citizens at your own risk. Both superpowers as well as brewing guerrillas are always at your heels, ready to dispose of you and install their puppet in your boots.
So make sure to strut around and let your subjects take a good hard look at their leader. If that is not enough to discourage dissidents, making a long-winded populist speech surely will. Push come to shove, you can always rig the elections of course...

This installment's sin is that it offers little new besides improved graphics and minor gameplay touch-ups. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
If new to the series, buy all means buy it! Not only will you greatly enjoy the gameplay but you will also experience it in its best incarnation. If you already have experienced the previous installments of TROPICO, I know you have to see what the original game looks and feel like in 3D and Shader Model 3 graphics.

The game comes free for any intrusive DRM nonsense. Neither online activation nor any limit on installations, just a serial key. What you know, even ruthless tyrants have more sense than game publishing executives...

Thwart those insolent revolutionaries before they gain traction!
Send them for cultural re-education to the banana fields.

RECOMMENDED!

If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Calypso has created Tropico 3 to the full extent of the maxim.

Other than the different scenarios and the new ability to customize your own avatar, Tropico 3 is essentially a Tropico 1 + expansion pack with 3D rendered graphics.
However, I'd hasten to add that it's still as fun as the original and you will spend countless hours managing your banana republic.

THE GOOD:
- Still as fun as the first one
- Graphics have been updated
- Ability to Customize Avatar

THE BAD:
- It's still as fun as the first one...because it's almost identical to the first one plus the expansion pack...gameplay is identical.
- ...in fact, it has lost a few of the cool little features (i.e., the little videos that followed the issuing of an edict are now gone :()
- Tropico reloaded, the bundled pack, is available for download at much better value, it's not in 3D but Tropico has always been about gameplay and not graphics.

5 stars for fun, but 3 stars for overall value. Imagine if Civilization 4 was simply Civ with 3D.

I've downloaded and played this game without any problem. Issues mentioned by the previous reviewer seem to have been resolved. Great graphics and storyline--lots of fun to play.

Tropico 3 is pretty much the same game as before but with way better graphics and a few new additions. I rate this game a 4 because I like the game but it just gets old fast. I downloaded and installed this game from Amazon, and I have not had a single problem with how it works on my computer.

Great game but gets old fast.

If you've played previous versions of this game and liked it, you will like this game. I played the demo a few times prior to the release and found it very entertaining...it's easy to use up at least an hour every time I sit down to play this. If you're on the edge about it, try the demo first!

I used to play versions 1 and 2, over a year ago, online. Then I saw this one and had to get it to try out. I would have gotten the download version but it cost more for some reason. I have only gotten a couple of levels into a campaign but it is alot of fun. Very similar to the first ones , only with more islands and scenarios. If you enjoyed 1 or 2 then you are going to enjoy number 3.

Awesome game for spatial-thinking fun-loving types who loved SimCity and Civ. Graphics are great for the times, all gleaming and photorealistic, and the salsa score is perfect but gets repetitive after just a few hours. The story feels alive and I think this is the MOST fun a historically accurate RPG-builder game could possibly be! You feel like a cross between Juan Peron and Jack Sparrow; gloriously self-righteous head honcho of a puny banana republic that's a pawn in the (mostly offscreen, which is a good thing) Cold War.

Getting to customize what's good and bad (and even ugly) about my avatar was an unexpected delight. Very easily I picked up how to mine and build functioning resort areas (never figured out how to get tourists to hang out at some of the facilities, but whatever. Never saw the point in attracting cheap tourists, either. Maybe one leads to the other?) so enough money rolled in to solve all my problems and I didn't need to learn much else to get ahead in Tropico. I've stopped playing the game but I miss the stunning island visuals, the feeling of running the show, and all the fun you can have running El Presidente around sprucing up the cabarets and gunning down rebels.

The game needs more challenges at the highly-developed level. Tropico just runs out of fun when you get good enough, otherwise it'd get five stars from me. Maybe more tourist vs. citizen drama would bring back some excitement? I certainly don't miss all the tweaking it took to get the wages/quality of the attractions just right so as to control citizen sentiment, pub profit, and tourist flow. Although I admit the developer did a GREAT job giving you tools to control these variables without as much aggravating micromanagement as I expected there to be in such a complex environment.

A great game, but then so was Tropico I.
And it just didn't seem to be that much better, so if you own the first Tropic series and its add-on, you can skip this one.

But if you're new to the game - it's a lot of fun!

This game is sure to be a hit for fans of Tropico 1.

In fact, it's not too different from Tropico 1. Many of the edicts and personality traits are the same, although there are some new ones. Many of the buildings are the same as well.

The updated graphics are nice, and the geography is much more realistic. The citizens many now drive cars, and your character can be active in fighting rebels, giving speeches, visiting clinics, etc.

Many of the scenarios in the campaign are pretty easy overall, and I don't have to commit election fraud as I did in Tropico 1.

Overall, I'd certainly recommend this game, although I wish it had more buildings or features to distinguish it from it's predecessor.