This is a surprisingly good city builder or rather a 3rd world simulator. It is very different than games like Sim City and Cities XL. Those two games are more macro city builders, where in two or three mouse clicks you can make city blocks where 1,000 people might live. With Tropico and the Tropico series in general, you need to place each building, each road and your island along with the time it takes your construction company to build it. Your entire island might get to be 200 - 500 'Tropicans.'

Each Tropican has needs... Food, religion, job, healthcare, entertainment, safety and so on. The catch is every Tropican's needs have a certain weight to them based on what political party / faction they believe in. Each faction has major and minor demands. The military will want more soldiers, so you need to build an army base. The religious faction will want a church or cathedral. The capitalist party will want privatization or upscale entertainment. The communist party will want you to enable the free public housing edict or have etiquette healthcare.

On top of that, you balance political relations with the USA and USSR. If they get too bad, one of the two will basically take over your country and it will be game over. It is interesting how many ways that you can get game over. The most common way to get a game over is to lose an election. You don't have to have elections even. You're in charge. If you don't want an election, the nationalist party will hate you and your loyalist party will love you. If you opt to have elections, it will be vise versca. People will call for early elections and when you have elections, you can see preliminary results and you can even sway (cheat) elections. Its all at the risk of a party's love.

It is pretty cool having to pick 3 things to make a speech about and then fulfill campaign promises, but its all pretty easy. Winning elections is pretty easy, especially compared to how difficult it was to win any elections in the original Tropico. It was so bad in that game, that it was almost impossible to win an election without stuffing the ballot box.

When citizens hate you, and there will be plenty that do, they will either peacefully protest or become rebels. Once you have enough rebels against you, they will attack your most remote buildings. Your army will then go fight them, but if the rebels outnumber your army, the rebel will win and the buildings will be destroyed. The rebels can attack your palace or flat out assassinate you for a game over.

Tropico has a single player campaign with a lot of scenarios. You don't just pick scenarios, you unlock them. Each scenario seems to have scenario specific events that only occur in the scenarios. Some scenarios last 30 minutes, others a few hours as you take an island from 1950 - 1990 or so. At the start of each scenario you can pick a player character from historical tropican dictators or make your own avatar. You can even make personality traits that will result in pros and cons. It can drastically change your play style if you are incorruptible and never have any crime or have a green thumb and have high farm yields at the cost of low factory production.

The graphics are beautiful and you'll see every Tropican walking around, hopping in their car and driving to locations. The music is nice and very Tropican / Salsa music. The radio DJ and the rebel DJ will provide a lot of flavor to what you're doing. The rebel DJ will always heckle you and every line is said with tongue in cheek humor. The game knows you're all powerful and while being a dictator is usually seen as a horrifyingly negative thing, the humor twists it into a silly positive thing.

The only letdown is the fact there are no Steam achievements, yet it is the Steam Special Edition.

The first time I bought Tropico I was looking for something different. Tired of the same old shoot-em-up stuff. Tropico had just come on the market and looked interesting. I was supprised at how much fun it was. i found it very addictive and ended up spending a lot of time in it. I tryed Tropico Pirate's cove but couldn't get into it. I saw that Tropico 3 had gone back to more the way it was and I wanted to play it again so I bought it. I am not sorry I did. There are some things I don't care as much for but overall I think it is a great game. I would recomend this to anyone.

The hardest of all Tropico games IMHO. I personally enjoyed Tropico 4MT more, but this is a great game and beating it is a real challenge

tropico's absolute power is its ability to get people to buy expansion packs that don't actually do very much

(seriously I can't even set this as a "no" recommendation because I'm totally one of those people what has happened to my life)

I love this game. It's great fun, the campaign scenarios are creative, it has hilarious social commentary, there are different ways to approach each scenario and it satisfies my desire for games where I get to be an enormous ♥♥♥♥♥♥. I love campaign mode, I love sandbox mode.

I do have a couple of tiny ♥♥♥♥les:

-Occasionally the basic starting buildings (especially garages) are placed such that they don't hook up with the road and it's actually impossible to fix it without demolishing them or the nearest section of road.

-The crap the female avatars say is annoying. They've recorded one set of phrases for all male avatars and one for all females (which is.... twentyish versus about three, I think), fair enough. But no matter what kind of character I'm playing she says crud like "My people love me because I am SO BEAUTIFUL" and "You are late! Come here and do my manicure!" Hello, I'm playing an evil dictator, not just some random self-centered bimbo. Everything else they wrote was creative and hilarious (including every single thing that comes out of Betty Boom's mouth) they couldn't put a bit more imagination into what a female Presidente might say? ANYWAY.

-There are achievements in-game, but not on Steam? I'm assuming that this is because I'm playing through the Classic campaign, so the achievements might be linked to an earlier Tropico release. Poo. I am an achievement hunter and I am saddened.

These are really pretty tiny ♥♥♥♥les, though, the kind of things I only notice because I like the game and play it a lot.