[Review] Tropico 4 (PC)

When I first looked at Tropico 4, I thought that it looked tremendously boring. Subsequently, I spent nearly twenty-four straight hours playing it, stopping only when my connection to OnLive quit and I was thrown back into reality exactly like Flynn when he was zapped out of computer land in Tron.

In Tropico 4 the player is a god-like entity watching and nurturing the burgeoning population of various islands. The player's avatar, one of a fairly large selection popular despotic political figures, serves as the connection between the condition of the tropican people and the player, and is also the recipient of the tropical island population's respect. For the most part, players will ignore the existence of the avatar, who will wander among the people of the island, visiting construction sites and generally spacing out. On the other hand, players will focus on developing the island's economic infrastructure, which is important because money is important for everything.

The game plays largely like SimCity, where goals in each campaign scenario tend to result in the island being populated by hundreds of people living among the wealth of nigh-omnipotent dictatorship. Victory in each campaign level tends to be oriented towards developing some critical economic infrastructure, be it tourism or product export, while failure tends to be overall economic imbalance or from not being able to maintain the respect and happiness of the island's inhabitants resulting in a democratic or military coup.

The pace of the game can be slow or fast depending on how the player looks at the game: on a macroscopic level, getting anywhere or accomplishing a single campaign goal may sometimes take upwards of an hour at a time. On a microscopic level, however, there is always a tremendous amount of things to do. There are several in-game screens which will show you many, many numbers, and each of those numbers will reflect how well or how poorly you are doing and, additionally, provide clues on how to make those number better. The player who has developed a knack for balancing their micro and macro game will spend a lot of time toying with the time-manipulator function of the game, which is perhaps one of the most important tools in the game. The time-manipulator, which is a simple play-pause-fast-forward bar under the mini-map, provides the player with a way to set their own pace which, consequently, can make campaign levels take several hours to complete.

Speaking of hours, I feel it is important for me to issue a warning: this game is tremendously addictive. I had, on a single occasion, spent enough hours playing this game to warrant trimming my beard twice. Tropico 4 offers many unobtrusive, almost subliminal ways to reward the players for playing. Often, a radio show will play in the background in which Penultimo, the player avatar's personal sycophant, will talk about how the player is doing. Additionally, the game provides many ways for the player to always feel purposeful, such as fulfilling random assignments that appear as floating blue markers to satisfy a particular faction of the Tropical society.

Though nowadays I have a chronic desire to be playing Tropico 4 at all times, I cannot help but feel that it is mostly a result of being prone to addiction (a real and crippling condition for many people). However, as a sandbox game with a necessarily limited building palette with which to paint the surface of the islands, Tropico 4 is pretty solid and offers a lot of space for narrative creativity. Having fun will depend entirely on the player's willingness to design based on algorithmic patterns.

Available on: PC, Xbox 360; Publisher: Kalypso Media; Developer: Haemimont Games; Players: 1; Released: August 30, 2011 (PC), October 18, 2011 (Xbox 360); ESRB: Teen; Official Site

Note: A retail copy was provided to Denkiphile for review purposes by the publisher.