Recent reviews by Subudai

First off: This is not Cities: Skylines – Tropic Edition, this is more a nation/politics (although Random simulator would suit it better) simulator whereas previous mentioned game is a city simulator, I also did not expect it to be, but wanted to comment on it because many seems to compare the two. There will be no “summary” or “short version” of this. You either read it all or ignore it all.

Having never played any of the previous Tropico games, I had nothing to compare this latest with.
I am however not going to recommend it, based on my experience with playing it.

There are several flaws about this game that makes it not fun to play, some of them are the following:

Simulation of time and agents

Why does the game allow an agent living “downtown” to walk from one end of the island to the other - just to visit a circus? Seeing as it will take them 1+ year to do that travel down the hill and across the plains. This is time they are not working, which means their factory is not producing the goods, so I got nothing to sell in export.

This could had been easily fixed either by having it hard coded into the game with an “area of tolerated walking distance”. Which means that the agent will only want to walk that far to get to the leisure activity, else the agent will be depraved of said leisure and you would have to build something closer by to the agent’s home and or workplace.

The difference in how fast the days/months goes by compared to how slow the agents are walking is just too big. Maybe they should rather have made it a visual thing to see the agents walking and not actual time away from work. One second is one day.


Information

The game does a terrible job at giving you information about the game itself.

For example, under the expenses, it can say “Trade”. Yet I have not imported anything, ever. So, where does this trade “expense” come from then? Don’t know, game won’t tell me.
(This was answered in the discussion forums and explained to be the purchase of a new trade route.)

You can’t find out what a building will cost you in upkeep either.


Politics

You have all these citizens in your nation, each with their own names, education, wealth, age and so on and so forth. Information, right.

When I find one that dislikes me, it tells you by showing a bar with a line somewhere between thumbs down - neutral - thumbs up. It does however not tell me why this particular person dislikes me, what did I ever do to him? Did I cancel an election? Did I not take on a task from his faction? The game tells me some random “funny” thoughts for the agent, such as: “If I don’t do my job… no-one will care. Dang.”

This does absolutely nothing in helping me understand why this person find me a bad leader. The “Thoughts” part of an agent is the perfect place to give you such information, an example would be: “El Presidente did not listen to my faction’s wishes for Random Building.” That would give you a hint as to how to improve his attitude towards you.

In all honesty, I feel the citizens could just had been nameless things. At least as the game is now.


Trade Routes

The one thing I would not mind having pop-up on my screen, also one thing that will never pop-up - unless it is because a trade route finished. But sometimes there are no lucrative trade routes and you want to wait until 12 months passed, for new routes to appear, it is easy to miss that a year has passed because the trade routes will not alert you that new offers is up. It will only tell you that you have an unused trade route space.


Demands

The demands system is seriously annoying. Build a Teamster’s Office, build a Teamsters Office…

If I say no, I mean no. I am supposed to be able to simulate a dictator. What they demand is random, we may not have a single need for whatever building they are requesting, but they sure want that extra building. Does not matter if I just built a Teamster’s Office not long ago either, this faction suddenly found out that it wants one.

I understand that in real world people will have things that are close to their hearts and wish for it to be built in their community, but they do not go to the politicians every single month asking for it.

I was hoping this was a deeper politics simulator than it is. Not just do this or get -5 standing.

It really is a shame that the game is being hindered by badly implemented systems. Taking into consideration that this is the sixth iteration in the series.

There is also a widespread bug with, at least the female Presidenta, that whenever you load up your game, her haircut is reset to default. This is a “minor” thing, but something I am not happy to see in a fully developed game for full price and this long after the release with no fix.

I often see on the Steam forums something along the lines “Have you never played a Tropico game?” In reply to people having some issues with something. Well, everyone may not have played these games, and even if I had played it, should we really “applaud” developers for not knowing how to code a game to make it fun instead of making it frustrating and forcing us to do workarounds so that we do not get totally wrecked financially because workers decide to take a five year walk somewhere?

Plantations and such are normally not right in the city center, they are usually placed outside of it, where there is room for big fields. There is not a minor town surrounding every single farm you find in real world, with bars, circuses and whatnot right next to it.

It is a game - yes. But it is also claiming to be a simulator, but what does it simulate? How to not code a game? How to not evolve with the series?

I bought this game at full price; I am going to continue playing it and hope some stuff gets fixed.
This review is for the base game. Any changes the DLC will bring - will not be reflected in here.

It is a good-looking game, nothing wrong with that, and the concept is enjoyable, just badly executed. This is only my opinion and what I expect from a “finished” product. I am not a reviewer – I am a player. And right now, playing this is not very fun.

Full price, fully developed game - should not have to deal with badly implemented systems like if it was a beta we where playing. Rather have a prolonged beta period and actually listen to what the testers are saying. Or do the ever popular Early Access route, at least we would had gotten the game for a lower price - with the same flaws.

If I have not moved on to something better by the time they get to fix the issues – if they ever fix them – I will update my review to reflect that.

I will leave comments on, but as I said – this is my opinion of the game, no matter what your opinion is – that won’t change mine. If you bought it and loved it? Great! Go and write a positive “review” yourself then, I have no interest in starting a discussion on your review. People do not have to agree with me or my opinion – just as I do not have to agree with their opinion.

*Last minute addition*
So, my save game has a bug in it now, which makes it so it crashes at a certain point – every time.

No matter what I do, it will crash. I am now forced to start a new map, this happened in the Cold War era. This is what made me decide to publish my opinion on the game – now.