![]() ![]() Once you have built libraries and thrown enough into research you unlock not only new technology, but also more options for your constitution. With Tropico 5 being as cheesy and cartoony as it is, with some welcome humour, you never take any of it too seriously, which is a breath of fresh air in a genre that is often po-faced and drier than a mouthful of Tutankhamen flakes. The game is balanced enough to never really be overwhelming, and despite the feeling that you’ll never get to the list of things you need or want to build and improve, the silly, laid-back atmosphere the game oozes is oddly calming. But that’s a positive – no one wants to sit around twiddling their thumbs, having met every challenge, achieved the perfect happiness rating, and amassed a silly amount of cash. It always feels like you are running to catch up – as soon as you throw cheap houses up, you have to work on public services and entertainment before your approval rating dips (with elections around the corner, this is never a good thing). Trade routes must be maintained, industry cranked into gear in order to produce luxury goods, and the increasing needs of citizens met. With more research and the occasional boost from allies in return for completing tasks, more buildings and options open up, allowing greater depth and complexity, giving you more to juggle. Raw resources can be used or traded, and, slowly but surely, your economy and city begin to grow. The game progresses at a leisurely pace, with plenty of help given to delay time pressure end goals while you research new technology, issue edicts, and draft constitutions. While you are busy fulfilling your citizens’ desires for entertainment by dropping down a handful of taverns and restaurants, pirates or other nations may well be invading your shores because you ran out of cash for guard towers or forgot to research army bases. This being a typical management game, juggling and balance are forever a challenge, as one area invariably gets neglected while you pour cash into other more needy projects. Starting with only a handful of buildings, raw resources must be harvested or mined, research undertaken, and homes and jobs provided for your people. Whether you play the big bad beard or the champion of liberty and justice, however, is left up to you.Īlong the way, a colourful, hammy cast will toss you tasks, most of which are optional but which help you develop your dominion and achieve your overall goal for the campaign, whether it is to declare independence and cut ties with the Crown forever, or amass more cash in your Swiss account than Scrooge McDuck could ever hope to have. In the single-player campaign (I can’t speak for the multiplayer, what with usually avoiding such social things like the plague), your ultimate goal is to progress from humble colonial beginnings, through world and cold wars, to modern times, dragging two islands – upon which you alternate play as you progress through the campaigns – and its people with you. Shying away from both stat-heavy, brain-draining strategy and lite, casual/mobile-friendly management, Tropico 5 manages to tread a fine line between being too impossibly convoluted and dry, and so shallow that you couldn’t drown a dissident mouse in it. Tropico 5 is the latest instalment in a strategy management series that has its tongue firmly in its cheek while one finger picks a large amount of cheese from between its teeth. Now, with Tropico 5 having been recently smuggled to shore, players can once again step into the beard and aviator shades of a low-rent dictator in charge of a fledgling colony. Hell, even Hasselhoff’s luxuriant locks terrified the Berlin Wall into crumbling. Hitler, with his thumb-smudge moustache, Kim Jong Il and his… whatever, and, of course, Simon Cowell. History is replete with examples of dictators and tyrants whose hair, as much as their megalomania, has ensured their place in the halls of memory. Windows PC, OS X, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Linux ![]()
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