Most city building games stop at the common “get resources, build cities, make people happy”. Instead of making you feel like a worker, getting nothing in return from your people, in Tropico 3, you are a real leader of a country.
Your country starts off small — a palace, a few tenements, farms, and a few more essential buildings. Immediately, you are in charge of feeding your people, giving them healthcare, etc.
If you have a surplus of workers, you may earn money by constructing more farms and sell the extra food, create factories, mines, oil wells, etc. To export your goods, ships come to your island which also provide immigrants to your nation. With this money, you can construct buildings, issue edicts, pocket it, and other things.
You must feed the interests of all of the factions — communists who want labor and cheap prices, militarists who want large and mighty armies, loyalists who want to make you feel like a king, environmentalists who hate mining and lumbering, and more.
On top of this, as your population grows larger, people will want hospitals instead of clinics or cathedrals instead of churches. The military would need to grow larger as more rebels would be formed (if you weren’t sufficient to their needs). If you don’t provide enough housing, be ready to face shacks and angry people.
Basically, this game is a very busy one with almost as much to think about as Anno 1404. It’ll be hard for you to let this game run on its own — the people become needy and resources are depleted. To keep track of your citizens’ needs, you have a handy tip window which pops up every so often, for example, a garage over capacity or an understaffed college. You also have an almanac which shows what citizens and factions need, want, and how you will get elected. Unfortunately, the tutorial is not sufficient enough on the almanac, and it may be a bit difficult to understand how these needs work. Once you do understand this, though, you’ll be running the country of Tropico like a pro.
The political enhancements make this game the bomb — manage relations with the USSR and US (Cold War Era), create policies such as tax cuts, and as stated earlier, you have different factions similar to political parties here in the US. Figure out how to please everyone, or brainwash them into one group.
The campaign offers 15 missions, each with their own unique scripted scenarios and objectives. For example, one mission may be to stay in power for 30 years. These scenarios are very nice in their event system — every decision leads to another. A drunk driver may crash into a church. You put him into jail. It then turns out he was the son of a U.S. diplomat. Every scenario is very unique and doesn’t bore you with a similar mission as the last one. Sandbox mode is also objective — there’s a high-score board online that leaves you competing for more. There’s a ton of islands to keep you busy in this mode, so you’ll be playing for a while even after campaign.
Tropico 3′s interface is very intuitive. Tilt by holding down the scroll wheel, zoom by moving the scroll wheel. The construction menu pops up with the right mouse button. The menu is grouped with no scrolling, which really saved me a lot of finger-moving time. I never had to use the keyboard for this game (other than typing in my serial code) and always found it easy to move around the map. A minimap is shown at the bottom for fast navigation.
Detail -- Just... Wow.
The graphics are amazing in this game too — the detail is just wow. You can see the curves of a little boy’s face, or the “POLIZA” on a police car, or how many bricks are on a cathedral. Just look for yourself at the 1080p screenshot I took.
The soundtrack is very Caribbean — not reggae, but more of Mexican-like music. It’s not that large though — it’s repetetive and can get annoying. The radio is often humorous, though.
This game is one of the best city builders out there. Great game, great choice of buildings, great strategy, great campaign — the list goes on and on. If you’re looking for a city builder that you want to play for more than a month without getting bored, get this game. Also, get the expansion pack: Absolute Power. It really has a great campaign — and many more new buildings.
