Do you co-exist and conduct peaceful negotiation, building alliances for a way forward, or will you be the first to declare all-out war? With strangers I generally found the slightest disagreement would end in somebody getting hostile, but the build-up to that moment is consistently fascinating to participate in.
But at some point, somebody is going to tread on somebody else’s toes, geographically speaking, and that’s where it gets interesting. You and up to three other players can inhabit the same island and play as normal.
There is something else that elevates Tropico 5 to the realm of being rather good, and that is the hybrid cooperative/VS mode. So too does the panic and anguish kick in when you find said cityscape being bombarded by enemy troops because you got a little too arrogant in trade negotiations a few months back. All those times you slog through that opening hour still pale in comparison to the pride that always kicks in as you survey your hard work as a bustling, successful modern cityscape. Once you get to back to a certain stage, you find yourself invested in the machinations of your homeland once more and the results start to branch out as you make better (or worse) decisions. Thing is, no matter how many difficulty tweaks you make, how much money you give yourself, or what shape your island country is in, the ever-decreasing enjoyment you get from starting from scratch again is hard to mitigate. The campaign mode offers up fresh mini-challenges for each mission, but once you’ve done those, the meat and potatoes come from sandbox mode, which is less structured but allows you to optimize the way you wish to play Tropico. One problem I had with this dynamic is that repeating those early stages in Tropico 5 swiftly gets gratingly repetitive after a few restarts. Even on lower difficulties, you can find yourself caught out by these ever-evolving situations, but half the fun is learning from your mistakes and trying to perfect your reign next time round. Coupled with an upcoming election, it’s enough to suddenly throw all your good planning in the air as you scramble to claw back the voting majority by any means necessary and avoid being deposed. It may be that you are so occupied with building up an army to combat the impending invasion by another nearby island country that you forget to build enough entertainment venues to keep the people happy. It’s when you combine the building of your island paradise with having to manage political banana skins such as trade routes, treaties, constitutions, rebels, monarchy, and war-hungry foreign countries that challenge truly comes into play. Rather, the deepest part of the game lies with the aforementioned political issues. There are small tweaks you can make, such as adding managers for businesses, upgrading them, and pumping more funding into them if you feel the need, but none of this will be overly complex to get your head around.
The construction side of this is easy enough to handle, as you aren’t bogged down with shaping terrain or laying sewers, pipes, and the like.Things are simply built and require roads to link them to the rest of your country. To handle all this requires a careful balance of management, tactical thinking, and shrewd judgement. Of course, you aren’t some demi-god living for hundreds of years, so you need to build a dynasty along the way, prolonging your family name and maintaining the respect (terror) you’ve earned by ruling so efficiently (with an iron fist). It’s neat that the game seems to be designed to chip away at your good intentions and shape you into an uncaring dictator bent on ticking off the rest of the world with your flagrant bastardry. From choosing to ally with the Allies or Axis and ‘’dealing’’ with problematic elections that threaten to kick you out of power to dealing with rebel militia and balancing independence, the challenges are relentless. All throughout your time as leader, there are obstacles thrown at you. You start at an earlier point in history (colonial times, here) and are given your own island country to rule and raise up through to modern times. The point of Tropico 5 is not too far removed from the likes of the Civilization series.
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