Tropico 4 Demo

While some people dream about being astronauts, engineers and Formula 1 drivers, others go bigger and flirt with the idea of being the supreme ruler of a country, with the freedom to do anything. However, ruler does not have the same significance in this context, since a president is not exactly free to do as he pleases without being declared a dictator by the rest of the world.

Tropico 4 is part of the franchise with the same name and it basically is the very same game with every new release, except for the fact that a lot more content and possibilities are added, not to mention the facelifts when it comes to the graphics engine. Thus, in this title, just like in all the others before it, your main goal is to become a well-respected dictator, while maintaining a strong economy, a pleased population and good international relations with the world’s greatest superpowers.

You start off with barely a few dollars to your name, although you can quickly make more by completing objectives. The objectives are given to you by your advisors, who ask you to do certain things, at least in the beginning. Obviously, you can just ignore them and apply your own recipe for success, although you really need to be familiar with the series in order to know what to do and how to act whenever something goes wrong, such as starvation, or economical collapse.

Just like with every other dictator, there will be people that are unsatisfied with your means of getting things done. You can choose to let them protest, but you can also pay the secret service to arrange an ‘accident’ for the leader of the faction in question, in order to calm them down. In essence, it is pretty much impossible to please everyone, but every situation can be resolved in more than one way and it is incredibly fun to tackle crisis after crisis when you can just shoot your problems in the head.

Gameplay-wise, everything is more or less as it always was, since the interface is intuitive and you can certainly find out everything there is to know about the game from the included tutorial. The camera is very responsive and easy-to-use, since you can easily zoom, pan or rotate around as much as you want and observe your island from every possible angle. This provides you with the chance to admire the beautiful new graphics engine, as well as relax to the nice guitar tunes playing in the background.

In the end, if you consider yourself a long-time supporter of the franchise, then Tropico 4 should hit the spot and provide you with everything you asked for. Obviously, it isn’t perfect, but it is certainly better than the previous release and you can have a lot of fun with your own tropical island.