Tropico 3 is the third installment in the twisted sim series “Tropico”.  In the series you are a dictator of an unnamed tropical island and you must build an island to either help or wreak havok on your citizens.  The Tropico games have always been pretty simple.  Basically the goal is usually to avoid getting kicked out of office or killed.  And that’s not really too different here.  While the other two Tropico’s and their add-ons were released too long ago for me to have a proper memory of the details I can guide you through this installment.

 

One of the things I like off the bat with this is the non-intrusive DRM.  The publishers of this game weren’t going crazy overprotecting the game and in doing so wreaking havok or installing a bunch of shit on the computer.  Really the protection here is simple serial number authentication.

 

But onto the game itself.  The game itself is pretty straightforward and there’s not much of a learning curve.  If you’ve ever played a city builder type game before you’ll probably be familiar with most things.  You can really choose to play simply or have a more in depth way of building your island nation.  One of the things I enjoyed is that you can pick what level you wish to play and are given a description of the plot of that level and it’s goals.  So for example if you wanted to play a game that was more political you could choose a level with political goals over one where exporting a certain amount of a certain product was the goal or a certain happiness level, etc.  There’s some variety in the goals, but the game play is going to still be very similar on every level.  There are certain things every island needs.    For those of you who just wanna have fun there is a sandbox mode.

 

The Edicts which are commands that you can issue to effect your island in some way are often funny, as is most of the game.  The Edicts range from having a papal visit to declaring martial law.  Each one will gain you points with a certain faction but lose you points with another.  As will any actions you take in the game.  There’s many different types of citizen and it’s impossible to please them all, for example you can’t please communists and capitalists at the same time.

 

My problems with the game were that it did become repetitive after a few levels.  Also the roads system really needs work.  That whole area of the game is very poorly designed.  Also it’s part of the challenge of the game but many of the islands are very small and then have even smaller areas that you can actually construct things on where the terrain isn’t too steep, also there’s no way to fix the terrain.  The part of the game that was semi interesting was that you for the first time could actually take your dictator out into the streets and have him visit buildings and make speeches.  I wish this feature would have been fleshed out a little more because I didn’t find it very useful.  I also felt like random events didn’t happen enough.

 

Overall I’d say wait for this to go on sale, or when the inevitable add-on comes out and they sell a 2-pack.  It is a fun game that you can kill some time with, but not much more.