• Story

  ◼️ Writing The game develops on maps, each one has its main missions and quests that tell a funny and kind of nonsense “historia” about “El Presidente” and your aide “Penultimo”. Those, presented as an anthology of past adventures, narrated by your trusty companion throw in entertaining curveballs to overcome. Each focuses on a different aspect of the game, be it the spread of propaganda, the ecologist/industrial conflicts, the challenges of mass tourism, the balancing act of international relations, the benefits of light piracy. ◼️ Characters and Dialogues Tropico is made of recurring characters with a wonderfully build personality and sharp dialogues, figurative archetypes and stereotypes leaders of each faction. Satisfying some of the needs of the ruthless capitalist and industrialist, closed-minded militarist, stoned ecologist or authoritarian nun will usually put them in direct competition with others, which leads to interesting outputs.

• Gameplay

◼️ How it plays It is a construction, management and political simulation game. You take control of a dictator tasked with leading their island nation and wallet to glory. How things play out is dictated by you and by the demands of the factions that represent the different interests of your people. Ignore their demands for too long and you risk a rebellion. ◼️ Particular game characteristics During each game, there are four eras: The Colonial, the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Modern. Unlike previous games in the series, where Tropico consisted of only one island, this one allows players to build on an archipelago of smaller islands, allowing players to build bridges (in the World Wars era and later) from their starting island to the other islands in the chain. This feature is delusional, maps have small size and the bridges you can build up can be placed only in some areas. Other than that you have two “new” additions. The first one is the raid system (seen before in Tropico 2) is a powerful tool, essentially by gifting the player a regular trickle of goods, immigrants and, in later eras, beneficial propaganda, falsified tourist reviews and even international monuments (special buildings that add unique and useful features to your island). The second one is that finally, you have a worthwhile incentive to manage the Swiss bank account. On top of everything else you can use it as your savings account for indulgences, unlock buildings, increase some faction rating or amending the constitution. ◼️ Overall difficulty I can say that the new faction balance feature made me constantly rethink and change my tactics. Some maps are really hard and need a bit (sometimes a lot) of trial and error to achieve. Overall is a relaxing game that everyone with a “see the numbers growing” syndrome will enjoy but some advanced missions got me pinned. The learning curve makes the completion of the last levels against a skill wall. You have to master every single building setup and edict to overcome the challenge. It’s tough, not for everyone.

• Graphic

◼️ Art Design It’s colourful and nice to see. The graphic design had no changes in the last three games. The updates and improvements are minimal and relative to some in-game features.

• Soundtrack and Audio

◼️ Music It’s well done and fits the setting, with two and more hours of upbeat of Caribbean trumpet music. The playlist isn’t random, so how much your sanity can handle the same songs over and over again is up to you. Would have been nice to have different songs and music styles for each Tropico’s Age. ◼️ Voice Acting Good voice acting made by professional actors. Further repetitiveness crops up in the factions dialogues and in tongue-in-cheek campaign speeches you give as glorious leader before each election.

• Extra

◼️ DLC Like all the Tropico games you’ll have tons and tons of DLC. Most of them aren’t worthy. Is it worth to pay for a building? I don’t think so. Nonetheless, the total free-to-use Steam Workshop adds tons and tons of map to play. ◼️ Replayability The missions are too limited to inspire a rematch on them. Other than the sandbox there is a cooperative “multiplayer” mode that can be played with a max of three friends. Overall the game can get repetitive fast. ◼️ Game length Ending all the mission maps takes around 70 hours. A lot more if it’s your first Tropico run. ◼️ Achievements 40 available, more than half obtainable by doing the story missions. Overall it's really hard to complete it because of the difficulty of some maps. ◼️ Steam Cards 6 cards to collect. ◼️ Points Shop Items 5 profile background and 6 emoji.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2281382061

◼️ Some missions are a pain in the ass. You have to “cheat” the game mechanics to beat some absurd requests and objectives. The game AI doesn't follow logic, usually the factions ask for impossible demands on some maps or worse they repeat themself by asking the same request over and over again.
◼️ The setup makes it seem like you have the power to be as evil as you want to be, but it's never a sustainable approach. Only on the sandbox mode, you can experiment different and crazy approaches.
◼️ Disaster features are amiss on almost all the maps. You don’t have random tornadoes, meteor strikes, tsunamis or earthquakes like in the last games.

◼️ Bugs & Issues
Some annoying bugs on buildings placement and for some raid features. Roads placement works out the way and buildings need to be relocated all the time on hills and slopes. The raid building features are bugged and can’t be activated on a queue line.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2281382510

Tropico 6 is not the revolution. It’s the same game as usual. A little prettier, with some nice new feature, many challenging missions and a lot of weak points. Is it bad? Not at all. But it’s repetitive, sometimes boring and annoying. Don’t take it as a starting point in the Tropico series. It’s a game for experienced players.