The game is quite gripping when played for the first time. I myself have spent, what must have been, around 6 hours on the first day I launched it. It seems I just liked the concept of travelling through the seas and doing business in the Caribbean. But the longer one plays this game, the more shortcomings, goofs and boredom shows through. Just like Jolly Roger appearing on the horizon out of nowhere... It it generally fun to travel the sea and build businesses in this game - trying to find the most lucrative deals in the Caribbean to gather wealth. But this is where the fun ends... One problem are the missions in the game. There are few of them, they are boring and extremely repetitive. In some cases, governors will stubbornly offer exact same missions over a course of several months. Moreover, many missions are complex, one-time only and available only during several first months of the gameplay. At the very time where players generally lack the resources or money to get these missions accomplished. In other words, players have only two options - either decline the mission and never have it offered again or accept it and fail miserably. Crashes in the game, which have been mentioned by other reviewers, are a fact. For some weird reason, it's always the German developers whose source codes are a mess. If you played Tropico 1 or Tropico 4, you'll understand what i mean... Crashes can happen anytime. Even during such mundane actions as selecting Inn or a Governor's Palace. Fortunately, the game has an autosave function which can minimize gameplay losses from frequent CTDs. One of the biggest let-downs is also the story ending, which is very anticlimactic and, to be honest, hugely disrespectful towards the player. It is presented in the form of a note in the player's logbook... A NOTE. IN THE PLAYER'S LOGBOOK. Not even a cutscene of any sort. Just a notepad memo... Overall, a game good for sick leave or prison term. Hardly exciting after the first playthrough.
