Tropico 5 Review

“How beautiful and promising everything is here.”

With these words, your alter ego describes the island that will become the place of your rule, your rise as the Supreme Ruler. Welcome to Tropico 5, El Presidente!

***

I installed the game at 6:15 PM and started playing right away. I only realized it was already night outside when the clock showed 12:09 AM. And now, let’s go through everything step by step.

The first thing that pleased me was creating a character who would play the role of the island’s governor. There aren’t many customization options for the character, but I was quite satisfied.

Let’s talk about the graphics. The developers at Haemimont Games have done a great job with the visual aspect of the game, and the fifth installment surpasses Tropico 4 in many ways. The colors are very vibrant, the faces of the people don’t become like poorly drawn caricatures at maximum zoom, and the nature looks simply stunning, delighting the eye with tropical landscapes.

The picture changes dramatically depending on the weather. When rain falls on the island, the world loses its colors, but gains beauty in a completely different form. When the sky above our paradise corner is not covered by clouds, everything around is vibrant with colors. All of this, combined with wonderful music, created a feeling of celebration for me, and I decided to organize it for my subjects… Which, however, did not prevent them from staging a small revolution and attacking one of my plantations, and then being shot by my brave guards.

I would like to say a few words about the audio accompaniment in the game. The music is very pleasant, it doesn’t get boring and fits perfectly with the Caribbean setting. The voices in the Russian version of the game are chosen quite successfully and don’t grate on the ears.

The gameplay also pleased me. For me, as an infrequent player of economic strategies, managing my tropical kingdom was intuitively understandable and enjoyable, although Tropico 5 has a lot of windows with various information, options, and possibilities.

In the game, there is a huge number of buildings for each historical period (era) during which you will make your way “through thorns to the stars”. By the way, there are 4 eras here: the Old World era, World War II, the Cold War, and the familiar modern era. There is also a research tree here, aimed at the economic, social, and military development of your state.

In the few hours that I spent in Tropico 5, I was invited to a secret Order, I was helped with money by the King of England himself (who later demanded tobacco and sugar from me), I fought against revolutionaries and repelled them, explored the island and discovered new species of animals, rebuilt buildings after a tornado hit my settlement, supported a rebellion against the King, declared a guy in a white suit as my heir, and expanded my empire to huge proportions.

Not everything turned out to be so rosy in our tropics. The main campaign initially offers a variety of tasks, but over time you notice their monotony: build a new building – get new settlers, issue a new decree – improve relations with revolutionaries, etc.

But in games like Tropico 5, players often choose the Sandbox mode to play. Here, there are no clear boundaries for your development, and you are free to build your empire as you please. It is truly interesting and can captivate you for a dozen or so hours. You can turn a shabby village on the island’s shore into the best resort in the Caribbean, or you can focus on raw material production, vegetable crops, or become a center of space thinking. The path of development is determined only by you.

And here it is not without its drawbacks. The thing is, once you reach the end point of development, the game can no longer offer anything. You are free to start from scratch on another island, but the only difference between the new scenario and the previous one is the generated landscape. There is also multiplayer, where you will have enemies and allies, but it does little to save you from the monotony of the island’s development path.

Despite the one-time playability of Haemimont Games’ creation, I liked this strategy game, and I will gladly spend a few more hours to reach the highest point of development of my tropical state. Author: Semplesh