Picking Up Steam: Tropico 4 (PC)
In many city builders, the player is given full control of how a city is laid out. It’s an awful lot of power for someone who might be nominally the mayor, but there is a role that could give someone that degree of power over a civilization: a dictator. The Tropico series is all about playing as a Caribbean dictator ruling over a banana republic with all the perks and problems that come from such a role, because while it gives you the degree of control needed to easily shape the country to your liking, it also comes with the promise that if you can’t keep your people and the world at large happy, you can find your position as El Presidente coming to a swift end.
Tropico 4 is hardly a serious depiction of ruling a nominally communist but truly totalitarian island, leaning heavily into humor and parody that takes most of the edge out of your work. Your advisors and foreign dignitaries are all represented as overblown caricatures, the obviously corrupt U.S. politician basically just Richard Nixon while a character like Keith Preston stands in for the dim-witted Texan billionaire. Not every character is a total joke, the Religious faction on your island is ruled by a well-meaning albeit alcoholic priest. While your right hand man Penultimo may look a tad like a weaselly adviser, most of his humor comes from the absurd information he’s presenting like how your defense minister foiled a rebel plot by spending days undercover dressed as a tapir. Absurdism like the military adviser declaring a tornado to be an enemy of Tropico or foreign politicians being far less subtle about how they can bomb your country if you don’t play nice means when you do get a pop-up telling you about a new opportunity or issue, you also at least get a dose of silliness to accompany even the harshest information.
Keeping everyone pleased really is at the heart of Tropico 4’s city construction, but cash will be what determines how well you can pacify them. You’ll be given a fairly small island to build on and a small starting fund to help build your new society, and naturally, money will be a fairly early consideration. You need to keep people fed, healthy, and working, meaning you must invest in farms, clinics, and housing, but the people will begin requesting entertainment options and places to worship, all while your income might not be the best. You can get working on exports like mining metals or salt, planting crops like tobacco and sugar, and when you have the funds, you can make factories that manufacture things like cigars, weapons, and rum. The game does try to stay in its thematic wheelhouse with a good deal of what you can construct, right down to some dictatorial indulgences like a golden statue of yourself or seedier operations like smuggler’s piers, and considering the beautiful tropical location, you can get into tourism with ridiculous resort options like a large roller coaster or hot air balloon rides despite your island likely to still be dotted with the shanties of the homeless. Construction is rather free form at least, only certain buildings needing to connect to roads so you can cram them together despite the limited space. Your income though is an admittedly difficult element to manage, but bankruptcy is not a loss, and you can even go up to 10,000 dollars in debt while still building facilities. At first, bailouts from the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. that come at the end of the year are a necessary means of survival, but your increased exports and tourism gradually make you more self-sufficient and less likely to experience periods where you’re heavily in debt and just waiting for charity from superpowers or the next ship to come to your island to actually deliver goods.
As you build though, you’ll frequently get requests from the people, factions, and other powers on things you can do or should build. If you displease other countries they may even invade you in a one-sided affair you can’t handle, but you’ll be asked to take sides and sometimes must act frigid to balance the powers at play. At home though, if you can’t satisfy people’s basic needs or overly neglect a faction’s desires, you can start seeing a rise in criminals and even rebels, even a well-functioning island likely to at least see a few small protests and rebellions. If your customizable version of El Presidente or one of the pre-sets like being able to literally play as Fidel Castro or Che Guevara should perish in a rebellion, that is the end of your island, although saving your progress is in your hands and unrestricted. However, elections can also oust you, but you have a good deal of control if they’re held at all with the natural risk that cancelling them increases chances of being deposed. The fantasy of the one man in control of a small country isn’t fractured by these risks, and the game even makes sure to include some of the upsides of a Communist state like education and healthcare being free for all citizens, but keeping the nation afloat is not an easy task when you’re the one who has to set wages, hire foreign experts when your people aren’t smart enough for a job, and even set the prices at the island businesses. Tropico 4 not punishing you too harshly for having wildly fluctuating funds keeps things moving even at its most dire though, although while you can speed up the game action a good deal, it feels like there could be just one speed higher to make the periods you can’t do much easier to breeze through, especially since the game freezes all action anytime something important is about to occur.
Tropico 4 can be approached as a pure city building challenge, the player selecting from a set of pre-made or randomly created islands and seeing how big an island economy they can make, all while some excellent Latin music plays in the background. The soundtrack can feel a little small at times, but most tracks also find a nice balance where they can fade into the background easily enough but are catchy and energetic if you devote some attention to them, Café Tropical in particular such an excellent inclusion that the game makes sure you hear it every time you turn on the game. Different island shapes and available resources will push you to play differently, one island potentially perfect for an oil empire while another you might be scrounging to find any suitable space to even grow fruits or raise cattle. Over in the game’s twenty mission campaign though, the game provides more structured goals beyond just becoming a thriving banana republic. Taking place across a range of islands in Tropico, your rise as a fledgling ruler at first feels like a bit of a means of familiarizing you with systems and learning about how things connect, a player needing to understand in Tropico 4 things take time to build and you need to have the right amount of builders and teamsters to make everyday life on the island functional. When you move away from early ideas like learning how to manage an economy, the campaign starts to build towards a plot where your successes lead to you almost being ousted by a conspiracy, the player then building islands with the express purpose of bankrupting, humiliating, or even more permanently ending those who tried to depose you.
The campaign missions do all admittedly start a bit similar, getting going in Tropico 4 a process that won’t usually have too much wiggle room. Even when you’re granted the basics you still have a good deal of things you’ll need to put down quickly to make things stable, but the campaign missions can start to get rather strange or require counterproductive actions meant to place an interesting strain on you. Some see you do more eccentric small-time dictator activities like breaking meaningless world records or trying to show superiority through the Olympics, but investments like that strain your ability to satisfy the public or drain funds that you might have preferred to use on profitable projects. For every mission that is something like just focusing more on tourism than usual there will be one that involves more trying designs like being blackmailed into constructing frivolous things. At the same time, campaign missions can have divergence points where you can take things into your hand. You can play along with that blackmail, or potentially work in secret to try and turn things back around on your blackmailer. There are mandatory and simpler missions to find along the path of building an island in Tropico 4 that only sometimes have clear deadlines, the player having a good bit of freedom on what to engage with and many missions promise rewards like cash injections, increased reputation, or even more tangible rewards like building blueprints so that you’re often happy to undertake the extra work to improve your situation.
THE VERDICT: Whether it’s working towards completing missions, trying to please the people and faction leaders, or tinkering with the economy to try and keep the island afloat, there’s always something to do in Tropico 4, even if sometimes you’re waiting on the funds to do it. However, those waiting periods are easy to sit through when excellent salsa music and and a cheeky sense of humor keep spirits high. The city management get quite involved even if many islands go through the same starting phases, but once your island starts to take its unique shape, it’s easy to lose track of time as you try to work your way towards a self-sustaining island paradise.
And so, I give Tropico 4 for PC…
A GREAT rating. It may take a bit to understand some of the systems at play in Tropico 4 even with the campaign introducing them. Figuring out things like how many teamsters are needed to do island deliveries or when performing a quick build to circumvent slow builders is wise really help to smooth out some irritations you might experience otherwise, and as mentioned earlier, while being able to play at higher speeds is nice, having one more slightly quicker speed boost could have helped with how easy it is to dip into the red even when you’re making reasonable building decisions. You have a whole island full of people you need to pay, foreign powers you need to keep happy, and a high dependence on when boats come to your docks, so there are some fallow periods where you’re just waiting for the cash injection needed to keep making decisions. Thankfully, the city building still feels fairly active and involved, the player always given ways they can try to improve things while recognizing there are associated costs. Trying to fit garbage dumps in high pollution areas can be a tight fit on your small oddly shaped island, keeping priests and policemen paid might mean compromises in who you can hire for the schools, and sometimes you might need to delay helpful elements like an immigration or customs office simply because of greater priorities. At the same time, there are so many different people to please that you don’t feel pigeon-holed into pleasing any one with your next action, and missions or other ways to manipulate your situation mean you can claw back some approval even from people you’ve almost made enemies of. Being El Presidente comes with some silly fantasy fun as well as harsh demands, the player able to indulge in ridiculous moments but also not spared from the consequences of their actions. You can be the militarist dictator who uses their military and secret police to silence dissent, but the people will notice and turn against you, or other countries may not want to play nice with such a despot. Try to be too kind though, and people who want a strong leader may be disillusioned and back a different politician come election time. Campaign levels introduce nice complications to force you into playing different ways or more easily see strange situations like natural disasters, and since they often only take a few hours, you won’t feel locked into them for long so you can see the variety in how a Tropican island can take shape even before you swap over to the freedom of sandbox mode.
For most of this year’s Picking Up Steam, I’ve been playing games I had only played for an hour or two and then stopped. However, I had played Tropico 4 for 17 hours before I dropped it. Some players may consider that more than enough for their time with the game, especially if they only play on their own custom islands, but Tropico 4 is an excellent game and I was more than happy to go back and actually complete the campaign. I hadn’t even completed five of the story missions before, instead seemingly spending more time making my own island in sandbox mode, Tropico 4 distracting me from its main campaign by having more good content on the side. At the same time, I perhaps felt I had my fill once my island was at a reasonable point in its development, unaware of the extra layers or unique missions that the campaign could introduce. Tropico 4 feels unique in this specific effort to clear the backlog of unfinished games, it not needing to be finished to enjoy it heartily, but going back revealed the extra breadth of the experience and left me with new fun memories to join the old ones. City builders don’t really need campaigns to be great, but it gives you a good goal to shoot for and for me, a reason to return to a game that definitely deserved a revisit.