SAVE $11.04 - Tropico 3 $28.95

A great follow up for the original When tropico came out years ago i found the concept rather interesting. It took aspects of city builders and made them unique enough to be its own game. Tropico 3 is an excellent follow up. The game is absolutely beautiful, i love to just watch everyone walk around. I like the scenarios, which are rather unique from each other, and the gameplay flows enough to be relaxing but not boring. It does have a couple items I thought it could improve upon. The in game stats in the first game was easier to navigate and find what i want. I find the current one just a tad too combursome. The garages just feel huge compared to the rest of the buildings, and a random island generator would be really enhance the game. Overall a great game and quite enjoyable! Rating: 4 (Maddy, 2010-01-03) Product reviewed: Tropico 3

Pretty fun! This game is sure to be a hit for fans of Tropico 1. In fact, it's not too different from Tropico 1. Many of the edicts and personality traits are the same, although there are some new ones. Many of the buildings are the same as well. The updated graphics are nice, and the geography is much more realistic. The citizens many now drive cars, and your character can be active in fighting rebels, giving speeches, visiting clinics, etc. Many of the scenarios in the campaign are pretty easy overall, and I don't have to commit election fraud as I did in Tropico 1. Overall, I'd certainly recommend this game, although I wish it had more buildings or features to distinguish it from it's predecessor. Rating: 4 (Michael, 2009-12-29) Product reviewed: Tropico 3

Play the original instead. I only played the demo and about an hour was enough to realize that this game is worse than the original. There are things that the first one got right, and that is great music, funny satire, and good game play. The decent things about the Haemimont Games version are all shamelessly ripped off from Tropico 1. The descriptions could have been done by a third grader, I mean seriously, no imagination. The only thing that is a slight improvement is the graphics, but everything looks the same, no real creative changes except for an annoying menu and unbearable announcer. Do not waste your time with this game. At least the original Tropico had a latin style that was authentic and not insulting. This game doesn't get it right and is offensive and shamelessly targets the latino demographic without the fun... Skip this one and play the original, which has much better music also. Rating: 1 (C. Bulling, 2009-12-22) Product reviewed: Tropico 3

Great Game I have played the previous versions of the game and am happy to see that some of the things I did not like are gone and some of the things I love about the game were kept in. Gone from previous versions was the shoveling of dirt paths- in its place is an auto-road tool. A little on the fence about whether it would have been better to have created an employment center just for laying down road- but what used to wear me thin about other Tropico versions was listening to the shoveling of those roads. I also like the fact you are still able to name characters individually in the game. Graphics are so much better now that the improvement alone justifys the cost. I guess like a lot of folks for me Tropico is leisure time and a game you can go back to from time to time- but the poor graphics really over time made the game duller. Anyway, if you liked the previous versions then you should love this one even more. If you have not played before but have played SimCity then my guess is that this game will make up for you what SimCity has always lacked, basically deeper politics, the ability to take revenge on political or idealogical foes, the ability to actually control industrys other than just zoning them and watching retarded buildings come and go. Just wait until you build a cannery and get the message that a rival group has planted a bomb in it for extortion purposes or when that homeless college kid leading the capitalist faction trys to run against you in a political campaign. Rating: 5 (Robert Carmody, 2009-11-25) Product reviewed: Tropico 3

Fun, but short lived I never played Tropico 1 or 2, but I do enjoy Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress. I love games that let me build up an empire and repel attacks without being completely focused on combat all the time as in a standard RTS. This game has a lot going for it. Think "Sim City" with the additional need to balance out political factions and put up with rebels. In Sim City, unhappy sims would simply leave. In Tropico 3, they're more likely to pick up a gun and try to overthrow you directly. That said, the game has some faults that are making it into a pretty short lived affair. I've put in maybe 8 full sandbox rounds and I don't think I've got many more left in me. The problems I had: * It's too easy. It's not hard to go through the whole game without a single rebel. Factions are easily made happy and the extreme measures of dealing with rowdy individuals available to a tropical dictator seem to be unnecessary. Even if I configure a custom game with politics as unstable as it will let me and with "Rebel Yell" turned on, which makes my citizens even more likely to rebel, I still find rebellions aren't that big of a threat. They're even less of a threat than the occasional invading party in Dungeon Keeper. * Combat is too forgiving. You don't really have any control during combat, which is fine, really, but the mechanics of it are still rather silly. When the rebels do finally show up, they will try to sabotage a structure and run away -- except before they do this, they will politely stand near it until literally your entire army has shown up. Consequently there's no reason to plan out how to distribute your guard towers to deal with threats quickly. Just build all your military stuff in one place and put a parking garage nearby. The rebels will wait until you show up, no matter how long it takes to get there. * No "win" condition + no persistent scoreboard for the sandbox missions. Although the campaign has victory conditions, in "sandbox mode", which lets you play a randomly generated island, there's no victory condition. You rule for a set period of time and then the scoreboard comes up. The only measure of whether you did well or not is your score, and it doesn't save your score, so you have nothing to compare it too short of writing down your previous scores. So I love that there's an ability to play randomly generated maps (something I wish more games would do) but I think it could be implemented better. * The foreign invasion is literally just a "game over" mechanism. I once played the game aiming to annoy the US because I wanted to see what it was like when the US invaded. Could I make a big enough military and fight them off? No. The scoreboard just pops up. You lose immediately. Rather anti-climatic. But it's not all bad news. The game is beautiful. 3-D, high degree of zoom-in and zoom-out, individually modeled citizens are roaming around and clicking on them shows you all sorts of useful information: what does this citizen think about their job, their health, crime, freedom, etc? What's really annoying them? What are their thoughts? (Thoughts are a good quick way to see if people are missing something in particular, e.g., "I wanted to go to church but couldn't" -- you may not have a church or you may need another one or you may just need more priests for the churches you already have.) The level of detail involved in managing your workers keeps you busy too. Tropico is not an equal opportunity employer. Some jobs only take men. Some only take women. Some take both. Sometimes you have to fire the men working on the farm to make room for unemployed women while the man go off to fill out the lumber camp. You have to deal with education because some jobs require high school or college to work there. So there's plenty to play with in just running your town. Basically I think this is a fantastic "sim tropical island" and if you want it for that, well, look no further. If you enjoy Sim City type games you'll definitely enjoy this. I was mainly disappointed over the lack of depth to the combat. Not that I was expecting a full on RTS but I definitely expected more than the rather weak and unstrategic rebel elements the game has. I'm still holding out hope that they might change how combat and politics works with a patch. There needs to be more room to up the difficulty. It could be a great game with just a few minor adjustments. As it stands, I rate it 4 stars for fun, because it is fun, but 3 stars overall because it just isn't something I got a lot of longevity out of. Rating: 3 (Pecos Bill, 2009-11-22) Product reviewed: Tropico 3