I’m rather surprised by this game. I had the first one on a PC and dug the heck out of it. Apparently, Tropico 2 was a turd, but this one seems to have really returned to its roots. It’s simple, yet complex, and that’s a hard act to pull off with city-builders. With Sim City going dormant after Sim City 4 (and really, what can you do after that, unless make it unnecessarily complex? Then again, I’m not a video game designer, and that’s what video game designers are paid to do.) Tropico 3 is a pretty nice way to get your building fix. The graphics are beautiful and the controls (I’m playing it on the 360) are rather good, once you get used to them.
I enjoyed it. It seems slower than the first one (in that I won’t be playing to the year 2155). I like the new stuff it added, like cars. It made it a lot easier, so has becoming an oil baron.
I’ve been wanting to buy this but I’m not sure if I should get it for PC or 360. I know I’d like the control scheme better with the PC but creating a tropical communistic worker’s paradise from the comfort of my couch has an appeal as well.
You’ll be fine with it from the 360, if the couch is that big of a draw to you. You hit X to go into your building queue, hit right and left bumpers to go around the types of buildings, A to select them, and then rotate them with the D-pad and hit A to finalize it. Other measures are done by holding the right trigger and hitting A to issue edicts, B to move your ruler’s avatar, X to get data about your island, and the right thumbstick up and down to change the angle of your view.
I played it and it was fairly fun, but it was REALLY easy and all the maps started to feel mostly the same after a while.
Tourism, like the original Tropico, felt very useless - why bother when your churning out kegs of rum or cigars faster then you can spend the money? Oil was similar - interesting idea but you had to hold on to it for decades for the price to rise above rum/cigars which are infinitely renewable, massively scalable, and immensely profitable.
Roads are a VERY nice addition though. it still takes forever to get your builders to actually build anything (I swear they are the laziest worker type) but at least everyone else can zoom around the map now.
Anyway, I had fun with it for a while but I never finished all the campaigns because, like I said, it was ridiculously easy and I was spending most of my time watching my swiss bank account rise waiting to run the timer down to win the map.
Yeah, there does seem to be a bit of that. The scenarios and challengers offer some diversity in the gametype, where there’s nowhere on the island to farm sugar/mine/get oil, so you have to vary the approach, too. I think the sandbox modes would get a little easy and repetitive, but I’m not done with the challenges and stuff yet.
If they wanted to make Sim City 5, hre’s what I’d do:
Take Sim City 3,
Modernize it in terms of graphics and sounds, and
For God’s sake, make the World Wonders cost something and have an effect on the city. If I’m going to plunk down the CN Tower or Empire State Building, make it so I have to pay a lot of money to get them and they have an actual effect, like everything else. Then you’d have something to work towards.
There isn’t too much modernization they can do, really. I suppose they could let you build arcologies like you could in Sim City 2000, and I agree with you, but what could they do to the gameplay? They’re pretty much gone where they can go and mae it as advanced as they can.