Clearly the game's trying to avoid a full-on RTS growth sprouting from its well-tanned face, but by forbidding any control of military units its occasional argy-bargies involve either irritatedly waiting it out or frenziedly trying to convince those uncooperative brickies to throw up more guard towers ASAP. Enemy invaders crawl up the beach and swarm around your island being slowly ground away by your guard towers (like a haphazard tower defence game), while any soldiers you might have will amble towards them if you're lucky. It works for me because it's an unhurried game, for the most part free from urgency and big on flexibility. It's not really a problem, more a warning that if you like your city-builders painstaking and blessed with simulation analysis tools which drill right into the bone, Tropico 5's probably going to frustrate you. Sure, it's about proximity and headcounts and a sharp mayor can be mentally on top of what's where throughout, but in most cases it comes down to either waiting or spending spare cash on the option to hurry a build. This means that plonking stuff down is a fairly liberated affair, but good luck, buddy, if you want to try and work out what your builders show no interest in erecting that army base in the south west. This lacks the fancy-pants tools to painstakingly track, say, the flow of traffic or construction workers, opting instead for a generalised red/yellow/green grid to demonstrate the city's need or appropriateness for broad building categories in various areas. Which is just as well, as some of the simulation aspects are either opaque or barely-there. It's also highly unlikely that a butterfly effect will see all turn to ruin because of a logjam somewhere. The range of ways to deal with trouble also mean there's little chance you won't create a satisfyingly sprawling island city. There are myriad ways around every economic or social hiccup, but sometimes the sinister shortcuts appeal the most. A trouble-making military leader was 'escorted' off the island, a group of eco-protesters were bribed into downing their placards so I could retch up more filthy factories, election results were massaged, tenements were further partitioned into grim shoeboxes.Īll of that was optional. Ideally my economy's so strong that I don't need to vote-rig or have people killed anyway, but more than a touch of dark utilitarianism crept in. Usually I find myself gravitating towards social justice warrior behaviour in any given game (or social media), but here I'm all about what builds the best economy, and what keeps me in power in order to keep doing that. I wasn't tittering at any point, but very much in the concept's favour is a consistent sense of amorality. The same series-long gag - you're playing the clownish but brutal dictator of a Caribbean island - persists, and frankly it's a case of It Was Funny The First time. Straddling a fine line between throwaway silliness and strategic meat, Tropico 5 is much more a game to indulge oneself with rather than to truly love. There is, I must confess, a certain shame to this admission - but Tropico 5 turned out to be pretty much what I've been looking for from a city builder these last couple of years. So here's jolly old Tropico, proudly bearing a numerical suffix which suggests a series milked to near-death, but then confidently offering me a box full of toys and giving me plenty of time and space in which to investigate them. As such, neither Banished or Sim City were ever going to be quite to my tastes, try as I might. I also don't like being restricted because a game is determined that I should do things a certain way. Now see here, I do tend to prefer the easy life and for that reason I can grumble at games which require a high degree of exactness. If it matters, I skipped Tropico 4 so can't tell you anything about how it compares to that. I've spent a big chunk of this week with it, and have now left its sun-kissed beaches and mouldering tenements to bring you the following report. Tropico 5 doesn't deviate far from the series' blueprint - real-time city-building on an initially low-tech, low-wealth Caribbean island, with you playing the role of a cartoonish dictator who's as benign or malign as you care to be, now with a revamped campaign mode and added multiplayer.
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