Tropico

"Great game, irritating traps"

It's very rare to see a completely original game for the PC market anymore. Most games seem to ride the various trends in gaming styles, from first-person shooters to real-time strategies, all which change a few details or settings but end up being the same game. Tropico is more original than most, though its roots can be found in Sim City to Railroad Tycoon II, among others.

The true selling point of this game is its setting. The music, graphics, options, gameplay, and humor all derive from the colorful and interesting setting of a carribean island. Anyone who's played the board game Junta (as the designers had) will feel at home--political backstabbing and maximum actions for minimal stakes are paramount.

You're given the (quite amusing) ability to create your own personality. You can choose things such as Rise to Power (Communist Rebellion or Installed by CIA?) and Positive Traits (are you Scholarly or Diplomatic?) For flavor, you also have to choose two flaws (Kleptomaniac? Ugly? Alchoholic?) Each of these choices will give you bonuses and penalties throughout the game. The game also provides a suprising amount of ready-made characters, such as Eva Peron, Fidel Castro, and Auguste Pinochet.

As the ruler of an island, you'll have complete--well, almost complete--control over the development of both the island and its inhabitants. You'll build builings, enact edicts, set wages, and determine how much religion, schooling, and health care your people have. If you don't provide enough of these things, people become unhappy, they may become rebels, and eventually attack the palace. You also have to please the various factions on the island; failing to do so will cause various problems. Displeasing the military may spark a coup d'etat. Annoy the Intellectuals, and you'll find yor brightest--such as your doctors and college professors--hiking it off the island.

To make money, you'll need to develop the island's economy. You can grow your money in the form of agriculture--sugar, coffee, bananas, and the like. You can mine it (gold, iron, bauxite) or chop it down (trees). You can enhance these resources through factories, such as canning pineapples or building furniture out of lumber. If you don't like the idea of draining your island of its natural resources, you can turn it into a tourist haven, providing nightclubs and casinos for Yanquis to throw their money about.

You have control over various edicts, which will alter the mechanics of the game. Many have requirements, usually an initial monetary cost and a minimum relations with a faction (i.e., relations with the Church must be Cordial or better). You can hold a Book BBQ (tends to get those pesky, rebellion-inducing Intellectuals to leave the island in disgust), or hold Sensitivity Training for your soliders and police officers (who otherwise tend to leave the protected with a few bruises now and then, making them feel less secure in their Liberty), or you can hold a Mardi Gras, especially around election time. There's also foreign relations to consider--you can praise Russia or the US, eventually allowing them to build a base (which pays rent); or, you can send trade delegations to either nation with the hopes of getting an increase in export prices or a free electric plant.

Every so many years--about once every ten years--an election is held. You can cancel the election, which will make people very unhappy. You can hold the election, then cheat, which still makes people unhappy but less so. Of course, you can try to win the election honestly. Naturally, many variables affect how unhappy they get when your election is canceled or fraudulent.

The happiness of the people is determined by no less than 10 different factors, everything from Liberty and Religion to Food Quality and Health Care.

You have a set number of years to do all this; this number is set at the beginning of the game. You have a fairly comprehensive integrated difficulty mechanism, allowing you to set everything from how flat the island is to how many people start off living on the island. Each one alters the difficulty percentage, where a score of 75% will net you that percentage of your final score.

The game ends after the alloted number of years, assuming, or course, that you survive any revolutions, elections, or rebellions. Your score is a combination of the people's happiness, the economy of the island, the money you've squirrelled away in your Swiss bank account, and the wealth in the treasury. (You can change the scoring at the beginning of the game if you wish, so it only considered, say, happiness, or money.)

The decision-making process is rather straightforward. What to build and when is a large part of the game, as well as how you wish to deal with the different factions and individuals. You have plenty of choices as far as building is concerned--high schools, police barracks, wharfs and docks, scenic outlooks, hotels--and you are given choices within choices. Should the Rum Distillery have a flavoring facility, to increase the value of the spiced rum? Should your clinic focus on preventive medicine, to reduce future visits, or gerontology, allowing your residents to live longer? Should the tennis court require a dress code, which allows higher-paying (but fewer) patrons?

So, with all this flavor, is Tropico a good game? In many ways, it is. This is a subject that few computer games are based on; those that do are usually a bit more broadly defined, usually in terms of a colonization game. The theme is excellently produced, and you can feel the atmosphere was researched, stereotyped though it is. You'll find yourself immersed in the game until you get that message telling you that you only have five years to go. You have lots of options, various avenues to take, and, with events turned on, you'll find plenty of troubles and tribulations to keep you occupied. Yes, it is a very fun game.

There are, of course, a few reaosnably mild criticisms, mostly shallow. When setting the difficulty mechanism, you can only choose one of them (such as ''A Far Away Place,'' which reduces the number of boats that come to the island, or ''Free Elections,'' which disables the ability to cheat on elections). Permitting you to choose multiple difficulty levels would have been nice, but it certainly isn'y a game-breaker.

Construction time is also irritating. Construction crews will build new buildings quickly...if they're nearby. They'll slow down if the buildings are far away. This is expected--the workers have to walk, and sleep, and eat. But after a certain point, workers simply will stop building, apparently because it's too far to walk. Which means that if you want to build something on the other side of the island, you must build a chain of construction offices that are just far enough away that the crews will go there, builf the building, the go back home. New workers spring up on the new construction office (maybe), and this crew can build the next one...This is time-consuming and altogether stupid. An option to ''rush'' a building--or at least force workers to bunk up nearby a new building so they won't have far to walk, on a temporary basis until it's done--would have greatly helped the game. As it is, all you can do is waste your time and money building offices then tearing them down.

Occasionally, you'll find a ''trap'' in the game that makes the entire session a wash. More than once, I've found that a building that was working suddenly isn't--the evil hurricanes are a great example--and no way to help fix it. Once the hurricane destroyed my dock. I was in the red in money. Since I don't have a dock, I can't make any money. Since I can't make any money, I can't build a dock. Sometimes, you can get enough foreign aid to get you out of the hole, but six-ten years can go by before that happens, and that's a fifth of your game, just treading water.

Another time, I built two docks (I learned from by last mistake). All my teamsters go to the closest dock--makes sense. But no dock workers wanted to work at the dock that the teamsters were stockpiling. Since there were no dockworkers, the boat that was going to buy my stuff just sat there, waiting for one to come load it. Finally, one was hired--who then proceeded to go to the clinic, and the pub, and the church...for six years that boat just sat there, refusing to go to my second dock, and my dockworker just wandered the map. New boats would come, and wait behind *that* boat. They would *not* go to the other dock (which at least had some inventory to sell), even after I reset the dock to ''Yachts only'' instead of freighters. I watched my treasury go down and down and down, since I wasn't selling anything...and the World Bank chopped wages, and again, and again. And the wages got so low that my dockworker quit. There was thirty years (and an hour of game play) down the drain.

Sure, these traps are rare, but they happen often enough to be irritating. All in all, however, the game is well-produced, very imaginitive, and certainly worth the value-priced marketing it was given.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/15/02, Updated 09/15/02