Released in Europe less than 10 days after Rome Total War, and a year later in North America, this is a forgotten game. There are few strategy guides and few pieces of supplementary information of any kind to be found. There's little youtube content, and you won't likely find someone hidden forum that's been busing discussing the games nuances for the past 20 years. In some ways, that's a shame. There are nuances and interesting management mechanics to be found here. Fortunately the game has an adequate tutorial to explain itself, and that leaves it something of an undiscovered country for new players. On first glance, one would be understandably fooled into thinking this game primarily shares design DNA with games like Crusader Kings and the contemporary Total War Games. You're managing settlements, developing royal families, organizing armies through generals, and can manually control pitched battles. All of that is true, but it would not include the heavily randomization of starting position. For the provinces: The starting city buildings, village type (which determines what they produce), and even the provincial resources are heavily randomized. One start could have 4 villages, a developed city, and horses, and another start could have none of those things. Additionally, your dynasty and diplomatic standing are randomized. You could be at war or trading with the same kingdom depending on your start. The biggest issue with the controls is you'll constantly be wanting to zoom out the camera. Everything is 40% too zoomed in. You can't even always see all of your villages in a province, let alone multiple provinces. Other than that, I find the game controls quite well. It's not a masterpiece, but it's worth playing to see the different ways real time strategy were still approaching historical content at the turn of the century.
Once you make it past a menu that doesn't respond and require alt+tabing out of the game to run, you'll find a game that controls terribly and crashes regularly. The game and this series have a legacy (haha), but you're unlikely to be able to experience that. The game simply should not be on the storefront in its current state.
When Tropico 3 is working. It's still an expressive game with an incredible soundtrack that clearly builds off what the first games in the series did. Unfortunately getting it to actually work is a pain. I've experienced gfx crashes, the game asking for a serial key, freezes/failure to respond, the inability to select campaign levels, and failures to load menus. This need to do a lot of work to make an old game run seems to be a trend with the Tropico series. If you aren't up for that possibility, look for a different city builder. If you're confident you can make it work or wont' have issues, take the plunge into the tropican waters, presidente. Still 2/5 stars because you at least get the game's soundtrack
Tropico 1 is an outdated game, but you still see all the personality and ideas that would shape later games. It's still playable, if rather challenging and basic. It's always a treat to play these older games and see how the series and genre have evolved. 4/5 stars Tropico 2 doesn't work. I can start up that game and get into the menu, and then the game crashes to desktop the moment it tries to load an island. 0/5 stars.
Controlling one character is easy, and fine. Controlling two, moving together is pretty manageable. It just doens't work for me when I need to control two characters needing to do two seperate actions chains at the same time. You can relatively easily set it up for your characters to do two seperate *actions* at the same time using the shadow mode. The problem arises when you need to do anything more complicated. The inability to reassign numbers to each character means you can't just go 1-2 1-2 1-2 swapping between two characters. You have to go 1-3? 2?-3 2-3 2-3 2-3, as you break muscle memory from prior levels. The game's just a little imprecise when it comes to selectign targets partially obscured by objects. It's just all the little thing build up very quickly. Frustrating controls are a problem in a lot of genres, but they are crippling stealth games where you are asked to walk along a razors edge.
It looks great. The music is generally good. The combat is mostly a step up from Rayman 2: The Great Escape. The platforming controls are still pretty tight, and perhaps even better. That should make for a game that is better than the previous one in the series. Unfortunately it's let down everywhere else. The voice acting is a nice idea, but horribly executed. Globox is supposed to be funny but he's just annoying. Doubly so Murfy. I almost muted the game during the tutorial section he was so awful. The idea of adding powerups isn't terrible, but every level becomes a series of short platforming or combat sections to get a powerup to open the door to the next section. It's allowed for a bit more creativity in the types of puzzles that can be generated but makes platforming sections feel more segmented. Here is the grappling section, here is the tornado section, and so on. I mentioned at the top that the platforming controls are still pretty tight. This can not be said for the game underwater. Rayman 2 was one of the very rare 3d platformers that had decent underwater controls and gameplay. This game's underwater level is fortunately brief because your control underwater is abysmal. Those aren't the worst part of the game however. The worst part of the game is the damned driving shoe minigame. Your shoe can not reverse. It can not turn in place. It can only accelerate forward like a Ferrari with the turning radius of a semi-truck. It's awful and you'll be doing it at least once every story beat. Whoever designed the controls for this section and whoever approved it should never touch a platformer again. These sections are so awful and tedious that they drag the entire game down. Lastly I still have no idea what the villains plan was, why he didn't just leave globox when he can apparently fly away and no one was able to contain him, why he needed to build a factory, Rayman 2 wasn't a masterpiece but it goals, motivations, and stakes were clear.
