Tropico Reloaded

T2: Pirate Cove is an overlooked classic in the city builder genre, and stands up really well 20 years later. What it lacks in HD pixels and QoL shortcuts, it more than makes up in the humor and creativity that went into the models, the audio, and the pirate/captive needs mechanics. It's easily the most personality to come out of a Tropico game before or since. As for running it on Win 10/11? It's frustrating but doable. My experience: find tropico2.exe in the game folder, right-click it and "Troubleshoot Compatibility." The system will set it to Win XP SP3, and give an error when you test it. Ignore the error and tell Windows it worked. Close the troubleshooter and try launching the .exe. It will probably crash. If it hasn't launched successfully after 3 tries, open tropico2.ini in a .txt editor (will probably open in Notepad by default) and change the value under [DDraw] > SoftwareDevice. Your options are 1 and 0, but it seems like it's changing the value that matters, not which value you land on. So, if it's 0, make it 1, and vice versa. Close and save the .ini and try launching again. Repeat these steps, 3 tries then edit the .ini, until you make it into a game. The only crashes I'm getting are initially loading the intro, or trying to launch a game once you've set one up. Once you're in a game, in my experience, you're golden.

Can't add much to other reviews other than to pass comment on the absolutely absurd bottleneck that are the lazy greaser dockers who want to live a life in the sun miles away from your docks. By the time they arrive to do a day's work, the damn container ships have long left leaving thousands of $ behind. This quickly becomes an eviction mini-game to get them to live anywhere near their workplace. Hopefully you don't go broke meanwhile. Other than that, a solid romp.

I missed Tropico when it first rolled around, and hadn't jumped on the sequels. But, I grabbed Reloaded recently, and am really impressed. Short: It's fun with depth, and there's a lot of content. Each Tropican is represented in the game. Each has a background, a home, a job, and an agenda. So, it's possible to click on a farmer, find out where they came from, what political slant, and where they live. This works incredibly well, and it's not required to babysit each Tropican, rather this tool helps most when there's strong opposition, and can just be interesting. There's a lot of levers to pull: wage level, types of industry, political affiliations, propaganda outlets, US-v-USSR support, etc. The included scenarios have a wide variety of goals: from achieving a certain size, to diplomatic goals, to filling your personal bank account. Multiple strategies are effective in most cases, and sandbox mode allows tweaking the game and map to your liking for more replay. Most of the game management is pretty streamlined once you get the hang of it. Adjusting prices and wages is quick, it's easy to see resource locations, etc. Plenty of time graphs are available, one click to find breakdowns on the economy, political situation, and more data. The game is not a cakewalk early on moderate difficulty, and some of the challenges are crazy hard, but overall there's always a clear path to a goal, and it's fun thinking through next steps while watching your back during elections. I highly recommend, and this has moved into my always-installed list.

Tropico 1 is an addictive political / strategy sim game, more in the spirit of Sim City than Civilization. They did a great job of making every individual citizen of the island interactive, so you could, for example, assassinate or imprison someone who leads one of the opposing factions. The Caribbean island setup is clearly based on real historical places and leaders, but you have plenty of flexibility in mixing and matching or creating your own character. It's one of those games that makes it enjoyable to be the 'bad leader.' Most of the time, there's no combat (only in some scenarios, or if the opposing factions get out of hand). It's more about building up your island's economy while keeping the capitalists and communists and everyone else in check. It has a fantastic soundtrack, to boot. Tropico 2 is a completely different game, that in some ways seems like the younger brother of Tropico. It's set in the same place, but several hundred years earlier. You take on the role of a pirate and build up your pirate's cove while sending ships out to prowl on the European colonial fleets. Unfortunately, the most interesting aspect of the game -- the pirate ships' missions -- isn't very interactive. You can set some options and tell them where to go, but once they leave port you don't have any control until they return. It's also annoying how the ships will often get captured or sunk, leaving you without any real source of gold until you construct another one. The pirate economy is much simpler than the island economy in Tropico 1, and rather than dealing with multiple competing factions (which is very interesting), you're just dealing with pirates and prisoners. It's a fun game in itself, but for the low price of both of these, it's really more of a lagniappe. Buy them and enjoy!

I read about the game from my weekly game magazine back when I was at school. Back then I wanted the game purely for it's nice screenshots. And now I love it for it's immersive gameplay. I already did spend hundred of hours playing this gem by the time of writing this review. The game wouldn't let you sit and do nothing. There is always something happening. A storm way attack your island nation and destroy most of your building which you build because you wanted to save cash instead of building stronger and more durable houses. Lazy contraction workers may spend most of their time in the pub and not building that factory which should save your country from economical collapse it which way eventually make you lose the game. Or people may organize a coo just because you didn't rise their salary in the last twenty years. Tropico maybe hard and will require as much as possible of your attention. But it easily adjustable in the menu. If you want you can remove elections, time limit and make citizens less needy. Then play the builder mode with minimum involvement with nation's economy and politics. Whatever floats your dictator boat. Though it is better that you don't end up in the boat. In the game the boat is what you will see when you ultimately fail to keep your place as the president of your island. I'm not too familiar with latest games in Tropic series but this game is great place to start or just see how it was in the beginning.