I called them challenges, but quests might be a better way to put it, as they are never very challenging, for better or worse. However, the requests are never overly hard, but rather add a nice bit of depth to the game. The actual challenges range from simply building a specific building to raising a certain amount of a very specific import to a specific faction. In the campaign, the boxes will generally point you to your next mission or the way to advance the giant, roughly 40 hour, story. These provide challenges in the sandbox mode that get you bonuses such as added reputation points with the various internal or international factions or even just cash. As of writing this it’s £14.99 on Steam – I reckon that’s a bit steep for a game that’s been out since 2011 but I’d watch out for it in Steam Sales, it always shows up.The core addition from 3 to 4 is in the form of small exclamation point boxes that exist outside of certain buildings, usually your palace, the churches you build or factories. Tropico 4, however, I’m going to call “flawed but fun.” If Tropico 3 crashes and Tropico 5 is missing stuff then I guess for now I’ll assume that Tropico 4 is the sweet spot. So I’ll skip it unless it shows up in a Steam Sale for like £1. Stuff like it doesn’t bring anything new to the game. I’ve heard bad things about Tropico 5, stuff like aggressive pushing of DLC in that the game is almost incomplete without it. There’s a part of me that always wants to collect all the trophies for anything but a bigger part of me that wants to try out something else – with Tropico 4 I’m not bothering. I suspect I won’t play a huge amount more, but I’ve tried messing around with the sandbox mode and it’s ok if you’re just looking for free play. Anyway, it was compelling and challenging enough to keep me playing through the main campaign. All the same, I don’t think I ever refused or cheated at an election and I always tried to keep everyone happy. I pretty much love strategy games in all shapes and sizes and the idea of playing as a dictator kind of appealed to me. I mean, it’s a strategy, you can read everything, put on your own music and enjoy (the score is pretty limited). The accents are downright racist sometimes but then, that’s pretty much true in Assassin’s Creed as well. The characters who pop up to whinge, barter or make ridiculous proclamations are grotesque caricatures who, whilst funny at first, do start to grate after a while. So it’s pretty cartoonish but it’s also fun. Keep an eye on how they feel about you though, or they might invade. Your fellow nations will be kept happy enough if you trade what they want and occasionally sling them a few dollars. Funnily enough salt mining doesn’t count as “destroying our natural environment” and is quite lucrative, so that’s a great way to sneak past them. Keeping factions happy is a matter of building the things they want Environmentalists would like gardens and garbage dumps but will get annoyed if you build mines or logging facilities, for example. Also Europe and the Middle East are countries. In Tropico, Africa doesn’t exist, perhaps because of the upsetting history concerning Africa and baddies in the Caribbean. There are several factions on the island who will turn against you if you don’t keep them happy but you also interact with the US, the USSR, the Middle East, China and Europe. You’ll need farms to keep your population fed (and to sell excess produce), clinics and hospitals to keep them healthy, schools to teach them, churches to sooth them, police to keep crime down, an army to keep rebellions down and so on. Then you start setting up your island paradise. Plus you can dress your avatar up in sillier clothes that way. I recommend the latter because that allows you to choose all your boosters and can make a big difference. You can play as one of the pre-created characters, all based on a historical baddie, or you can make up your own. The premise is that you’re a dictator (although you can have elections if you like so maybe leader is a better word) of a small Tropical Island, somewhere Caribbean-ish. It has a hell of a loading time though, seriously, go make a cup of tea or something. In the time I’ve played so far it hasn’t crashed once. To me it looks like Tropico 4 is almost the same game but there’s more of it and it doesn’t crash. I was originally planning to play that first and then move to Tropico 4, but after crashing one too many times I decided to skip it. I have Tropico 3 too, but it’s glitchy as hell. If I’m happy to do something for more than 40 hours I guess then at worst it must be ok. Apparently I’m only ~34% through Tropico but I’ve finished the main campaign and I’ve sunk over 40 hours in it. I’m never sure how much of a game I need to play before I can tell people whether they should play it or not.
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