Tropico 3 is fun to play, but is not without it's faults.
Gameplay:
The gameplay is very similar to the previous two games of the series. You are the El Presidente of a small Caribbean island that you have to develop and manage. Your economy is mainly dependant on the exportation of raw materials and or tourism, depending on your scenario goals. Some Islands might have a wealth of oil, some might have large areas of fertile lands to farm, some might only have trees for Lumber mills and others might have nothing but a sandy beach to attract tourists. It's fun having to concentrate more on specific economic opportunities depending on which island you are in charge of and makes things a bit less repetitive.
You need to provide for the basic needs of your citizenry of course. Housing, of which there are three different levels according to wealth. If you have a lack of housing buildings your citizens will begin setting up their own shanty towns around the island. Food, you have several different farming options as well as production of cattle and goats. Healthcare, you will need to build some clinics. You get a yearly death toll from "poor health care" if you are neglecting them, as well as a death toll from starvation if you're not providing enough food for your people.
As in past games you can issue a number of different edicts, from Social Security and Tax cuts to Military Crackdowns and the creation of your own Secret Service Agency. There are different factions in your island, such as the Religious, Nationalist and Enviromentalist groups which will request different edicts from you, appeasing them will increase their support for you, but you might annoy another faction in the process. These things become more important around election time.
Speaking of elections, they are quite a nice little touch. You choose what the main issue of your campaign will be, you can make promises during your campaign and be rewarded with respect if you make good on your promises after you've been re-elected.
The US and the USSR are the two background powers that influence the game. They will often send you financial aid to help you out and there are a number of different edicts which can help or hinder your relationship with them.
There is the "almanac" which is the general lists and graphs present in all city builder type games, giving you information about demographics, living standards, finances, etc. I found the layout and information a bit lacking in this area as well, could have done with being a bit more comprehensive.
Roads, roads, roads. This is my major gripe with the game. Construction of roads is the most badly implemented feature in Tropico 3. They are extremely wide compared with buildings so take up a huge amount of space. There are loads of obstacles on the maps, such as big rocks and steep inclines that you simply can't build roads on at all, which make laying at the roads a major pain in the posterior. Make sure one of the first things you do when you start a new game is lay out all your roads as best you can, because if you have to try and fit them around buildings, you're going to have a hard time of it.
There is a decent amount of buildings in the game, but I wish there were more. It does get very boring building the same things over and over. One nice touch is that most buildings have a little menu that will differentiate them from other buildings of their same type. For instance, you can have one police station that has just general training, and another that has special ops training. The options come with various different benefits and tradeoffs.
I thought the game was a bit too easy. Now you can make it harder in custom games, but that all just about numbers. Start with less money, get less money from foreign aid, start with less resources, etc. In Tropico 2 your main investment was in Pirate ships that you sent out on cruises to plunder money for your islands treasury. The ships could, and did, get captured or destroyed which made it a bit of a gamble and made things harder. There's really no challenge like this in Tropico 3, you might have a bit of trouble getting started sometimes, but once you're established it's all pretty smooth sailing from then.
Graphics:
I don't know what quite what to say here. The game does look very good, but for me personally I think the performance is below par for what you get on screen. I have a Core2Duo e8400, ATI 4850 graphics card and 4GB of RAM, and the auto settings it gives me for graphics put most of the options right down on low. Indeed if I try to up the graphics settings the game starts to lag very badly. Considering I can have a game like Empire: Total War, or Anno 1404, which I think look much nicer on high graphics and still get great performance, I find this very strange. It just doesn't seem like the graphics are very well optimized to me.
There is a dissapointing lack of variety in the building models. In many other games, such as Sim City 4 or Anno 1404, there are huge amounts of individual buildings which makes for a much more interesting game world. This is lacking a bit in Tropico 3, I found myself trying to place the buildings at different angles to compensate.
Conclusion:
Tropico 3 is quite a good game. But I think it lacks longevity due to it's limited variety of building and economical model options. I think it also lacks a bit of the humour of the past games. There were lots of little things in Tropico 2 you could do, like fitting your pirates out with peg legs, hats and parrots, building graveyards inhabited by ghosts, etc. Those little funny things really made me fall in love with that game, but I don't feel that at all with Tropico 3. The graphics are OK, but not spectacular and they come with a big decrease in performance, at least for me. I think that with an expansion, bit of cleaning up of bugs and performance issues, this game could be brilliant. But as it is now, it's just a -decent- game, without the flair that put the other two among my all time favourite games.