Classification: Revolutionary...see what I did there?
I never played this first incarnation as my beloved PC at the time was already several years old and soon to be taken permanently off life support, due to an accident involving a screwdriver, extra RAM sticks and a severe lack of patience on my part.
Skip ahead two years and Tropico is now in the hands of California based developer frog city, A games developer and not a description of any cane toad embattled settlement in Queensland, Australia. Tropico 2 was brought screaming and kicking into the world shortly after and by all accounts it was an entertaining effort. The setting had switched to a pirate island with a mostly introverted perspective, where you attempt to please your pirates, so laden with cliché and stereotype it was a wonder they could muster the energy to walk out the door.
The premise for the game was you'd acquire slaves, whom you'd press into farming, prostitution and general servitude, in order to please Captain Cliché and his merry band of cut throat dogs, that they might plunder the seven seas and spread their wealth around like scurvy. I'm serious it's a wonder the game ever passed through the sensors, "hey" said the developers "look at our game with colourful graphics and pirates that go 'g'yaaar' isn't it fun and harmless," all the while conveniently forgetting to bring up the kidnap, slavery and prostitution mechanic.
Anyway fast forward another nine years and the revolving door of developers had completed yet another revolution, the Tropico series is now in the hands of Haemimont Games, a Bulgarian developer and just about the only thing in the entertainment industry to come out of Bulgaria, not including euro-vision.
I have not played Tropico 3 but I am reliably informed by no one in particular that it's basically the same as Tropico 4, minus a few bells and whistles. Tropico 4 like its predecessor sees a setting shift back to El Presidente and his loveable bushy beard and banana republic.
The game basically plays the same as before, you bring people to your island through immigration, not slavery this time, you give them jobs in fields and factories, you ply them with services to keep the little buggers repressed so that they will keep on muddling through, in the delirious belief that it'll somehow work out ok in the end, much like real life really. The money you generate is then used to buy bigger and better service buildings and factories to keep your peons more content and to fill your private stash, money which seems to have no real purpose other than scoring, again much like real life in that respect.
The graphics are nice and colourful and there is a decent level of zoom, you can zoom out and watch as tankers come and go in the distance. You can also zoom in and watch your little minions go about their day to day business, to the point of being able to read their thoughts and desires. Not that I have any real motivation to do so, you can just as easily get though the game by building enough pubs and cabarets to keep the plebs in check and rely on your police and guards to maintain order, without ever having to give a solitary toss as to what any of them think about the whole thing.
The ability to arrest, imprison and murder your people is interesting and serves a small purpose, but this along with the mind reading will only appeal to people who feel the need to intense micro manage or fulfil the desire to create an island of pure chaos and misery, so this is a game that should appeal to any member of the UK government at least. The game also delves into hot topics like immigration and politics both domestic and foreign, trying to appease all the varying factions of your little island in the sun whilst making sure the bigger boys out to sea are happy, so you still get that all important bit of aid at the end of the year, like a Christmas bonus for a job well done.
Voice acting is competent and the music does a good job of creating a Caribbean feel for the game, but after several hours of play through with only the same small selection of tracks it begins to get annoying, like having someone playing the recorder in your ear whilst kicking you repeatedly.
Much like establishing an island nation in real life there's plenty to do and a lot of time to do it, a single level can take up many hours and with a sandbox mode thrown in you can rest assured you'll still be exporting your criminals to Florida, long after every other significant person in your life has given up trying to interact with you and taken themselves off to bed.
Tropico 4 isn't without its flaws but they are thankfully few, the biggest technical flaw really being the frame rate, as your island starts to fill the frame rate inevitably drops like an obese mans trousers after the elastic breaks. This can of course really start to cripple the game as your island becomes more populated; especially with the roads that become so heavily congested they come to resemble the arteries of the aforementioned gentleman. This wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to alleviate traffic but there really isn't, you can build multiple roads heading in the same direction but the pig headed simpletons continue to use the same route like lemmings on their daily commute to the office.
Overall I've enjoyed Tropico 4, probably because it fulfils my desire to be a Tyrannical despot and control every tiny factor of my subjects little lives whilst simultaneously not giving a solitary fart about any of them, or maybe just because it has camels…and beards.