Tropico 5

I had played a Tropico game years ago and I was excited to try this one. I'm thinking I should have read the reviews, because what I loved about the old one was that if I wanted to just build my town I could do that in Sandbox Mode. I can't do the same thing here, at all. No, instead if I want to start in the Colonial era I will eventually end up having to get invaded, and despite playing at an easy difficulty level it doesn't matter how many troops I have, the AI has more, and every stinkin' time the AI WILL run my units around in the worst way possible (like, oh yeah, let's wipe out all of our infantry by trying to kill the invading tanks, so there's no one left to defend the palace--that'll show those guys!) And despite my opting to pay off the Axis so they wouldn't invade, they took my money and still invaded! I just spent hours building a nicely laid-out town to have it all go up in ruins, so I'm a little ticked off about that.

The game itself is quite fun but the game-breaking bugs that were never addressed ruin the experience. The longer you play, the more blatant and frustrating the bugged mechanics become and you are left with trying to troubleshoot these rather than immerse yourself in the game. And as far as I am aware there are no solutions to fixing these bugs... Shame.

Tropico 5 bring many changes to gameplay to T5, and is much faster paced. Some of those changes are great, such as significantly higher patient loads for hospitals, gender roles being eliminated (meaning no waves of unemployed women in late game) and near instant production making it significantly easier to get your economy running. It gets boring fast. The campaign isnt as zany as previous campaigns, and it gets WAY too easy since you can make money in a single month by building plantations/factories. There is no ramp up like previous tropico games. Much of the strategy has been removed, for instance a church can have up to 200 customers, a hospital 450, ece, and you just need to match those numbers to your total population, you win. For some reason, to have high happiness, everyone on your island needs to be able to visit the hospital, church, supermarket, and entertainment ALL at the same time. The military has 0 strategy. You build barracks and hope your military units go to where the rebels are (you can set priority if there is more then 1 area targeted, but this seems to be a suggestion) and hope they SHOOT the rebels instead of just running past and getting destroyed. Foreign invasions only ever attack from your original dock, so just surround it with defense towers and foreign powers will never be a problem. Then there are the bugs. Traffic is abysmal, there is simply no way to manage it, and without being able to manage it your teamsters get caught up and cant deliver goods to your dock. For some reason, plantations and factories will produce regardless of where their workers are, but the goods? Oh no, you have to actually GET the teamsters to each individual location. And since windows 10 1903, there has been an audio bug with the game that causes near instant crashes. The steam version has been fixed, but not the GoG version, and kalypso doesnt seem interested in supporting the game. Avoid this one, just get Tropico 4 and enjoy that instead.

But still fun. Less humor, but a bit more granular.

I've been sucked into this game. It's great