I quite enjoyed what the demo had to offer. The ground combat feels so much better then the PS2 original, the weapons pack more punch, and the ability to shoot and focus on different things at the same time makes you feel much more like a super powered furon. I also have grown on the newer stylized character designs for the humans. May of the weapons have additional upgrades that were sorely needed, and the saucer has gained the drain health ability from the second game. There were some parts I wasnt fond of though. When flying the saucer the camera seems too close, as if its zoomed in for an accuracy shot. The death ray seems to need precision to hit a target, lacking the area of effect the old ray had. While the game is very pretty, I also notice a hitching effect when the game is in in-engine cutscenes, despite the constant 30 FPS cap. Hopefully this hitching issue can be fixed by launch, and we get a FOV slider for the saucer. Eagerly awaiting the full release.
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.
This is a pretty good game for a niche market, the niche of survival games that have an emphasis on exploring. The game does get repetitive, and I feel like there should be a bit more meat on the bones, but the fact I've thrown 20+ hours in already shows to me that there is a lot of promise. Hopefully hello games makes good on their promises of more content in future updates. I would wait to buy it until that is done, though, unless pure exploration is what you want. (also, yes, this game is a bit of a technical mess) Also, those system requirements are a bit off. 8GB of RAM is the bare minimum. I noticed that NMS was still filling up that 8GB readily, and loading several GB into a page file on my SSD, hammering my storage constantly. Without a page file, with nothing else running, the game will crash quickly and randomly. I'd recommend 16GB minimum for this game. I feel that systems with 8 or even 12GB of RAM are having serious performance problems because their RAM is filling up, and their storage drive is getting hammered constantly with page file, hence why the game has a tendency to hitch when loading new areas.
This game series was my favorite RTS years ago, but the release of rebellion on steam, with it's limited activation keys and online DRM, was a major turnoff. When the game came out on GoG, I bought it day 1. Big mistake. At first, none of the DLC worked. You could not build specializations on planets, and the random events could not be enabled. GoG released a patch to fix this issue, but now none of the firing sound effects work. Guns are silent. In addition, both pre and post patch, the screen will freeze when you change graphic settings, making you ctrl+alt+del, open task manager, and click on the game to get the "accept changes" screen to appear. alt+tab does not work when you change graphics, but does otherwise, like the game forgets it's running when you change graphics. Keep in mind none of this happens on the steam version, which is 1.82, while this is 1.83. The rest of the game works now, hence the three star rating. It's just annoying that all of these issues have appeared only on the GoG version. I realize none of this is GoG's fault, and rather this is the fault of ironclad and stardock for releasing a broken game. Until all of these issues are ironed out, and confirmed on the forums to actually be working properly, I'd recommend nobody purchase this game.
