Tropico 6 Preview: Don’t Cry For My Poker Face, Argentina

It’s pretty weird playing a game about being a petty dictator in a former Caribbean colony in The Year of Our Lord 2018.

The dissonance starts in the opening cutscene: A man in a Fidel-style uniform and beard, smoking a Cuban-style cigar, sits at his desk listening to a 50s vintage radio. Tidings on the radio are from the modern day: Brexit and so on. If you were a writer, your editor would throttle you for hack symbolism, but this weird duality percolates through the entire game.

Like its protagonist/mascot El Presidente, Tropico 6 is a product of our time looking back to a time that never existed. In this, our hell timeline, is playing a Caribbean dictator that promises to “build bridges instead of walls” and “make Tropico even greater” something we can casually indulge in? On the other hand, it’s only a game, and a game with quite a pedigree.

The first installment came out in April 2001, believe it or not. Tropico is a pre-September 11th game and reflects that tremendously. A “pre-9/11 mindset” is usually an epithet used to paint liberals as wooly-headed hippies that think they can hug people that want to hate us, but at the same time, ironic fascism and dictatorship harkens back to a world when all was sport for Americans.

It’s a relic of that halcyon period between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 when political violence was something that happened elsewhere (or, when it did happen here, it was aggrieved white guys with truck bombs). It’s a relic of the last years of American Empire and Pax Americana. Rome is burning and I’m writing about Gaul Manager 2018 the same day a right-winger with rage issues was arrested for sending mail bombs to every important Democrat.

Tropico was also a product of a pre-New Games Journalism world, where reviews tended to be GRAPHICS: AMAZING, GAMEPLAY: OUTSTANDING, MAIN CHICK’S HONKERS: HUGE.

The first installment was developed by Poptop Software–famous largely for Railroad Tycoon games and a bizarre but enthralling Second Civil War game called Shattered Union–and published by Gathering of Developers, edgelords even in those days of yore, mainly famous for publishing Rune and Age of Wonders as well as their “alternative to E3” lot full of beer and scantily-clad schoolgirls. (In these respectable times, of course, we save that for the E3 parties, because just having it on-site is gauche).

The politics of games in that era tended to be insisting that they were art worthy of first amendment protection to fend off the government and Jack Thompsons of the world, and the matter was still very much in doubt in a post-Columbine world. It was a world, in other words, where playing the dictator of a small Caribbean island could be an artistic statement of some kind, rather than “just a game.”

I bring this up because reality was always gnawing around the edges and making me wonder what, ethically, my duty is here. As I played, the Trump administration started making noises about legally defining transgender folks out of existence. It certainly makes “throwing your political opponents in an asylum”–something that really happened in many countries, including here–a lot less of a jolly good laugh between friends. Even pre-Freud, mental illness was used on oppressed classes. Slaves that wanted to escape could be diagnosed with a mental disorder called Drapetomania. The prescription was beating the living hell out of them in advance. If they kept it up, you cut off their big toes so they couldn’t run. It certainly makes running plantations in the colonial era much less of a giggle, even if it is just a game.

But then again, maybe what you need to escape the current trash fire of our existence is to play a genial Caribbean dictator. And there’s always the excuse of “You don’t have to use it,” since I could always build the socialist paradise of my dreams, assuming I can keep the Americans and Soviets off my back. It’s only a game, after all.

That, in itself, is a troubling road to go down. “It’s only a game” is kind of what got us in this spot. It was only a game to play with ethnic and racial slurs, until the ironic racism and sexism turned out to not be so ironic at all. Embracing Nazi rhetoric was just trolling and then there were subreddits devoted to fascist recruiting and violence in the streets, and people still insist it’s just trolling, and to get riled up about it is to lose the game because it’s just what They Want. We turned Nazism into a joke and an automatic argument loss, then the Nazis turned up and gamers started complaining about SJWs ruining Wolfenstein because you’re fighting Nazis.

It does seem silly to complain about being able to throw dissidents in an institution and brainwash/torture them into loving you (if you even bother to let them out) in the same game where your marauding band of pirates can steal Stonehenge–sadly no Declaration of Independence, I apologize to you personally, Nicolas Cage. Here again, reality intrudes on the joke, when a man in Salisbury really did try to steal the Magna Carta.

Using the character creator, I was able to make a very nice Lady Gaga in a pink military uniform with bug-eyed sunglasses and a wide-brimmed sun hat and gave her a lovely palace with fountains and hedge mazes, a sort of Caribbean Versailles. The female voice actress had a Latin accent that sounded like a smoker’s worn voice. Don’t cry for my poker face, Argentina.

And that’s the sort of line Tropico 6 walks: Fun! Wacky! Probably don’t look at it too closely! You always know you’re running a Caribbean banana republic, but its tongue is lodged firmly in its cheek. It is a little unsettling to have European developers cracking jokes about Caribbean dictatorships for an American and European audience when Europe and the US played a major role in the colonialism that made the Caribbean what it is today. For that matter, there’s still an American territory in the Caribbean trying to recover from a major hurricane, and I’m snickering about unhappy revolutionaries trying to overthrow me from…err…poorly recovering from a major disaster.

Outside of the “Caribbean dictatorship” framework, it’s the usual worker/city management game. The big deal this time is managing multiple islands, new infrastructure possibilities, and the triumphant return of speeches. Build buildings to make people happy and productive, upgrade them, try to walk the line and keep everyone happy, and sometimes give them a good pep talk. Your assistant, Penultimo, even acknowledges that you can’t possibly keep everyone happy in the tutorial, but that’s why the game is fun, yes? I admire its honesty.

With release due in January, the beta is up and limited, but playable. The tutorial is there and does a decent job of covering the basics of political and economic gameplay. What it doesn’t teach you right now is how to use all the information lurking just below its surface in a variety of submenus and graphs. You learn how to build an iron mine, but there’s a whole map screen you can access for better planning of all your mines, farms, and other economic buildings if you look around for it.

One tutorial quest wanted me to expand my power grid to two different islands, but that required building a chain of substations so there’d be a continuous flow of power from the power station to the farthest substation, but it’s not really conveyed in any of the text. I only figured it out when I started building substations at random and suddenly the whole grid lit up. Research doesn’t ever seem to be explained, you have to sort of poke around and start building the right buildings, then get nagged to pick what to research. Research, a splendid idea, if only I’d planned for that at all!

There’s only a couple of missions unlocked at the moment. The first one is simple: Convince the Crown to keep you around while fomenting a revolution, because you’re a colonial governor. An El Presidente to be. This mission feels like an extended tutorial because many of the demands are structured that way. Harvest sugar. Oh, now we want rum, what a great excuse to build a rum distillery. We want wood, what a nice reason to build a logging camp, then later a sawmill to make it into planks.

At the same time, it can feel like one of those farming Facebook games. “Alright, I grew 1000 corn for you, now shut up and ignore the boatload of revolutionaries that just sailed in, please give me my shiny thing.” You do run the risk when you go outside what the game wants you to do next. I built a bunch of corn plantations and it would decide it wanted me to trade corn. GREAT, CAN DO. NEXT? But it never seemed to adapt. Whatever script it was following, I’d gone off it, and could only wait for it to catch up.

I fell into the loop these games usually fall into for me: Build a bunch of stuff, wait until the next drop of currency, build more stuff. There doesn’t seem to be any real downside to going into debt, so may as well go maximum Keynesian. There can also be a lot of waiting around: One of the tutorial missions involved sending my pirates out on a raid, then waiting several months of in-game time for them to get back.

The second mission is focused on dealing with disasters. It’s the WW2 era and juggling the Axis and Allies, dealing with living in the shadow of a volcano, and a disguised penguin saboteur. This gives you a little more leeway with the game since it’s a later era and the technologies are different. The island is also a little more built up and there’s more industry to run and things to do. Of course, the first mission is running gold for the Axis, so there’s that queasy feeling again.

Sandbox Mode is actually fairly impressive. There are (supposedly, since they were locked for the beta) a ton of maps to choose from and you can tweak just about everything: Starting money, starting population, political difficulty, disaster frequency, win conditions, and so on. Where the two campaign missions feel like extended tutorials, this is where you really dig into the game.

I am kind of amused at archipelagos. It’s their big feature and you can tell. Pretty much every map involves islands, connecting them, making them part of your Tropico. They’re in everything. They just can’t stop thinking about islands.

You can set win conditions like getting a bunch of tourists or building a big foreign bank account, for when you want sandbox but not too sandboxy. Likewise, even in sandbox mode, it’s spitting quests at you left and right, and managing relations with various foreign powers is important. So really, it’s not quite as sandboxy as you could imagine.

There’s a perfectly fine colony management game under the “lol so wacky” Caribbean dictator skin, so why bother putting the skin on at all? Why bother with the pretense of being a colonial governor in the Colonial Era when I could be, I dunno, a pirate king trying to run a pirate island? Or why bother with the independent El Presidente schtick when The Crown is going to demand I send them sugar in trade or There Will Be Trouble?

It almost feels like the ambitions of the game have outgrown the legacy of the IP, but they’re too afraid to toss it aside, so we’re in this weird place where we’re pretending to be a ruthless Caribbean dictator ironically but mainly we’re concerned with whether we can get a good trade price on rum and leather from Smugglers while keeping the Crown off our back.

On the other hand, maybe by the time it releases in January we’ll all be glad THAT’S over with and welcome a dive into the colonial past to torment the peasantry. Or we’ll be fighting each other in the streets. Who fucking knows?