[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.

[Review] Rock of Ages (PC)

Rock of Ages is a game featuring a popular character in Greek myth, Sysiphus, who, in case you don't remember your Greek mythology, must roll a stone up a mountain for all of eternity in the land of the dead as punishment for his hubris in life. The narrative begins where Sysiphus, tired of his eternal punishment, decides to use his extensive rock-rolling experience to escape the underworld, enabling him to roll his rock in other places in history, meeting other popular historical/mythological figures with a similar interest in rocks. The player traverses a world which accurately documents the historical development of five popular eras, each distinguished by the art of the age.

The game is divided between defending your castle and Marble Madness-like navigation. The player is given a period of time between rolling their rock to cultivate a delicate garden of a variety of fortifications, ranging from tall and stoic towers that no rock may ascend to fierce mammal-beasts with a particular predatory predilection to stones. Wind turbines, trebuchets, and exploding barrels are all crops that a player may grow to slow the progress of the opponent's stone marble. Once an amount of time has elapsed, the player is then given the option to begin the marble madness, in which the player controls a surprisingly nimble stone rock across a winding and trap-ridden path to the gates of the enemy castle, where the enemy hides. Victory is achieved by exploding the gates and subsequently crushing the living torso of your enemy under the weight of your rolling stone. Failure is achieved by your opponent doing the same to your own gate and living torso.

The game has a tremendous sense of humour. Cutscenes in between levels offer a rather maniacally cobbled setting which matches well with the general feel of the game. The player is given very little tutelage on the proper strategy for defending their walls, so the time spent navigating an often wide and unmanageable battlefield tends to be time wasted planting cows in the shape of a smiley face, which the enemy will adroitly leap over with all the grace of a hippo in a tutu. This is not a problem though, as the player quickly learns through trial and error how to take advantages of the opponent's platforming habits and how to take advantage of the play field to leap and fly over enemy obstacles. So in between cobbling together a marginally organized defense and simultaneously navigating your stone marble over barrels, elephants, and ramping gaps, the player may sometimes feel as though organization and control are lost causes, which is perhaps the most important lesson to learning and enjoying the game.

In addition to the multitude of variously and creatively designed battle maps, there are boss battles against huge and imposing creatures of myth and legend, such as a dragon, or Michelangelo's statue of David. These boss levels are exciting at first, but as soon as the player realizes that they can't actually lose, the boss battles become merely a tedious activity. Without the gravity of danger to moisten the brow of the player, molesting the tender weak points of the boss is simply a matter of time, which the boss battles tend to take a generous amount of due to the sudden shift in game format. Your stone marble is not exactly the most nimble of creatures, so the tedium enhanced by torpor can turn boss battles from an initially exciting concept to a boring and grating chore.

Luckily, boss battles are rare and accessible only with the accumulation of keys gathered during gameplay, which tends to be a neat way of validating a player's increase in skill. The game overall remains fun and manic enough to obfuscate any glaring mechanical flaws, which is evident by my laughing more than half the time I played the game.

Available on: PC, Xbox 360; Publisher: Atlus Games; Developer: ACE Team; Players: 1-2; Released: September 7, 2011 (PC); ESRB: Everyone; Official Site