Tropico 3 Review

by John Kalanderopoulos, Gaming Reviews
November 13, 2010

Welcome to the Caribbean, where you are now in charge of a small island and its populace.  Anyone familiar with the Tropico franchise will have no trouble understanding this game at all, because it is all too similar to its previous iterations.  The game begins as any other standard real-time strategy one would, with a tutorial describing the setting and explaining how to play.  You are now “El Presidente”, a dictator in a small banana republic and it is your job to see to this island’s prosperity.  There is nothing about this game that is politically correct.

The basic idea is simple enough: build up your island, enact policies to keep your people happy, and conduct business for the betterment of your little patch of dirt.  That being said, I found that in terms of game play, you are required to have quite a bit of patience.  The game tutorial tells the player right off the bat that they need to be patient in order to see the results of any changes that they make.  I will say that the game has added a few significant changes from the original that did make me enjoy the game more.  Apart from different constructs like roads and nuclear testing, the player can customize their avatar within the game, and actually construct a statue of themselves on their island.  And while customization is commonplace nowadays, it is still a nice touch that I appreciated.

Much of this is akin to the original Tropico that came out in 2001 and it seems very little has changed.  The graphics are poor at best considering this is a PC (it has also come out for the Xbox 360) game in 2010 and the audio track feels like it’s on a loop with the same midi-quality music playing in the background.  Not to mention the voice of your “advisor” becomes annoying after a while (think Navi in Ocarina of Time, every time she said “listen”).

I can’t say that I really enjoyed this game.  It might be the game play style, it may be the subject matter, but all in all I did not really have any fun.  I really enjoy real-time strategy games, but I miss the games where you can build a wall around your town, gather resources, create an army, and march against your enemy.  I enjoy micromanaging but it seems that more and more games are pulling away from that.