Hello, I've played Caesar 3, Sim City 3000, Anno 1602, Railroad Tycoon 2... Tropico 1 is, hands down, the best of them all. Note, also, that this game is much better than many other (unrelated) games that were published around the year of 2000. Like Shogun - Total war, for instance. Tropico beats them all. The secret is in the gameplay. Unlike Sim City and others, aforementioned, here you're actually interacting with your population. When you build a new appartement building, you see people move in and abandoning their shacks to ruin. When you open a clinic, you make sure your physicians are well paid. (Yep, you are adjusting the salary of all your workers.) Each person runs it's life. Getting married. Having children. Going to a pub, to a church, eating, sleeping and visiting a doctor. And doing much more as you build more entertainment. You can see a person's education, place of work, what he is thinking, what's his political stance. Economical aspect has also succeed well. You can choose to build an industrially strong tropical island and, in that case, you must study what crops are growing the best. How many forests are there on the island? How much fish? Similarly to Anno, you then build production chains, converting harvested tobacco to cigars and exporting it. Second popular path is building and developing tourism. In that case you need to make sure you have nice beaches and hotels. And a lot of Cuban style entertainment. When you link the two, the personality of every human being on the island and the industry building, you start realizing why no game managed to compete with this one. Here, everything is transparent. Caesar 3 was the only one that was close to matching it. Watching people going about their daily lives on your island and (most importantly!) staying happy, is the biggest reward you can get. Because happiness is here the key. You'll start each scenario in 1950 and try transforming your island in the next 50, (cold war) years, to a modern state. You will vacillate between the superpowers of Soviet Union and the USA, trying to win every elections transparently or cheating at them and purging your armed forces if they dare to undertake a Coup d'etat. Music must be commended and the whole band playing it. It did contribute massively to the success of the game, that's for sure. Expansion is also included but it wasn't done the best. New buildings don't match the Cuban style of the original ones. Nevertheless, you get a lot of very good, hard and long scenarios. This will give you years of gameplay. It has also brought new music tracks from the same band. And those are a marvel again. I've never played the sequels. 2D is where the beauty and gameplay remained. 3D is also not needed because this game, although 2D, still has slopes and you build on them by the rotating the camera. Note, this is latino style game. People don't drive cars. They're walking the island barefoot, enjoying the hot climate. Eating fish and bananas. Thinking about serving as presidente's soldiers or joining the rebels. Wishing to vote. Being grateful on every house you build for them so they don't need to live in favelas. Living and dying. When they die someone else moves into their house. Now, if this means you will steal some money for yourself, it's OK. As long as they are happy. As I said. Very latino. Maybe not for protestants or puritans. A true gem. Cheers.
When I first played demo in 2003 I was amazed with the beauty and played it many times all over again. When I later bought the whole game I was negatively astonished to see the effort was put arguably in only the first third of the game. The rest falls flat completely. Today, when I am explaining it to me I can only come to the conclusion that the ambition was too high and the budget insufficient to decorate each location properly in the new 3d world. I really think 3d was a bite too much to chew. Last boss missing and empty locations with little characters (savings on acting) support this theory. Escape from Monkey Island, although much more difficult is better with 4.5 stars rated by me. This barely, and I mean barely, only on account of its first third, gets 3 stars.
