Five years late with review, sorry ! But this game is brilliant, buy this old title along with Ascaron's 'Port R
Only an actual forum member very recenty so I am going to review the best of the back catalogue first. What with pirates in Somalia taking massive oil tankers for ransom recently, I was reminded to resume playing Tropico 2: Pirate Cove. This is a small sub-genre of God-sim / strategy games about pirates. As I mentioned in the summary, I would recommend also owning
Port Royale (2003) form Ascaron as this game provides the one gameplay area that Tropico 2 leaves out, the ship combat.
Tropico 2: Pirate Cove plays very like the original Tropic, the characters can only be influenced by you as their leader, not directly contollled. So it is all about keeping you're pirates happy just as Tropico was decided by keeping the voters pleased with the you're rule. The gameplay is fun and takes a leisurely pace.
The music is as would be expected of the Tropico games, very entertaining.
It provides a fun sea-shanty background while playing. Now of course its over five years old so the graphics are not comparable with todays games but as with many colourful PC games from the strategy genre, like Cultures and The Settlers, the animation always looked cartoonlike which saves it from being criticised too much, it looks fine and the ships in the dock for example are well done.
All in all a very entertaining, gentle paced gog-sim / strategy that has held its charm well with time passing and I think the pirate sub-genre is quite rare and apart from Sid Meier's Pirates and Port Royale, this is really it.
Tropico 2: Pirates was great and still is and I give it a 9.0 as I was a huge fan of the original Tropico too.