It’s a weird time to be playing a dictator sim. If you pay attention to politics at all, it can feel like we’re tottering on the edge of a dark and weird era and about to fall in. I covered a lot of those weird feelings in my preview, but know that they’re still there in the release version. Tropico is a series with its tongue in its cheek, but maybe not enough.
Tropico 6
Developer: Limbic Entertainment
Price: $49.99
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, and PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review
For the uninitiated, in Tropico you are El Presidente, the 1950s-style dictator of a 1950s-style Caribbean island where you do things like balance the great powers against each other, fend off citizen revolts, and try to build a great country while shaving a little off the top for your Swiss bank account or in case the foolish peasants actually succeed in overthrowing you. There’s games like Evil Genius or Dungeon Keeper where you play the bad guy but it’s silly enough to not feel too bad. Tropico 6 has a sense of humor–pirates can steal all kinds of landmarks like the Statue of Liberty–but you still wind up torturing and assassinating dissidents. It can make you a little squeamish.
If you’re able to get past those feelings by making a pink uniformed-Lady Gaga to rule over Tropico, then you’ll find it’s a pretty decent economic and management sim with some nice features that don’t quite make it an all-time great, but it’s a fun way to waste some time and a fun continuation of the series. The best economic sims function like an extremely complicated but very rewarding machine where you start off making wild changes to see what happens but soon it becomes all about micromanaging various inputs to keep things running. Futz with settings to get a little more high productivity and make a little more money. Tropico 6’s economy works like that but is extremely fragile. Make one change too many and your entire economy enters a death spiral and you’re stuck in exile plotting your revenge.
Likewise, on the population management side, you eventually find your way to the limits of what the game can do. Citizens frequently want the absurd and won’t be placated by anything less. I can’t put a police station on every block and some crime is inevitable. There’s just a point where you can’t do anything else but people still complain or are unhappy. Which is authentic, I guess, but it’s a bummer as a player.
Series veterans will notice that there are missions and sandbox mode, but not a wider campaign. While one of the big box features is the archipelago–managing multiple islands rather than just one big one!–the overall play area doesn’t feel as large. I’m speculating here, but I’m wondering if the archipelago is a way to spin that as a feature, not a downside. The space constriction also limits your building. This can lead to interesting decisions–what kind of plantation do I build in that super fertile area? Cash crop or food crop?–but it can also lead to stagnation, where there’s no upside to demolishing anything so there’s no room to build anything else, so here we are, staring at each other.
Tropico 6 feels more like a Cities Skylines with a “Caribbean dictator” mod than a Tropico game, which isn’t a bad thing, but it does change the nature of the game. Traditionally Tropico has been about building a dysfunctional state and trying not to get overthrown, where this feels a lot more like building a functional city and torturing its inhabitants if they get out of line. Maybe that failure to commit is why there’s the weird dissonance to it.
The Final Word
Like I said above, if we’re going to go dictator, let’s push the envelope a bit more. I can steal world wonders, sure, but give me some Dr. Evil-level zany schemes. The tongue is in cheek but not far enough. I mean, torturing dissidents is still kind of gross, but at least make it a funny gross. Let me feed them to angry chihuahuas or something. Even Robert Moses didn’t get away with torturing people or having them assassinated, though I’m sure he wanted to.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
