Tropico 2 (demo)

[Honolulu Blue]

In 25 words or less: Tropico with a couple of neat twists. Recommended for Tropico fans, try before you buy for city building/pirate game fans.

Where: Frog City has links to the current sites that are hosting the demo. It's a 125 MB download that took me about an hour with DSL. Downloading by modem is not recommended except for the most patient diehards.

Gameplay (demo version): You start out with a small island, one schooner, a few buildings, and some pirates & captives (in brief, captives are unskilled workers that do all the hard work, while pirates form the ships' crew and are overseers). From this beginning, you're required to build another ship, make some cutlasses, and build some entertainment buildings. Additional goals require you to capture a farmer and priest to build fruit farms and a church. You have four years to accomplish all of this.

It's a lot easier than it sounds, at least it was for me. Wood & timber come at a nice, steady pace, and most of the basic buildings don't require money. Cash is easy to get by cruising around the Caribbean Sea and preying on merchant ships. This is not without risk; I have lost ships doing this. But generally the rewards outweigh the risks. Money can also be raised by selling off wealthy captives and through some of the entertainment buildings. And through ship captures and timely shipwrecks, I didn't have much problem getting laborers.

Graphics, interface & sound: All are up to the Tropico standard. The graphics are good enough for me, though I'm not too demanding of such things. The interface is generally fine but I had some problems doing a few things (see below). The music is nice, though it did get repetitive after awhile.

Pro: I'm a sucker for pirate games, so I was attracted to the theme of this game. And as mentioned, the interface is generally good. Any piece of information you could possibly want is available, and the stuff you need to know most is easy to get to.

The neatest part of the game for me was the pirate missions. You don't control the ships directly; instead you give orders like, "find a skilled farmer and bring him back to me" or "cruise around the Lesser Antilles looking for easy prey; try to board when you can". Then they go and follow orders. Usually they come back and provide a log of what they did. The log is nicely done. It has dates, what they saw, what the enemy's reaction was, what our reaction was, the ultimate results, and the spoils (if we defeated them). Even as short as the demo was, I could see some definite trends. Pounding the same area time after time will reduce the reward and increase the risks. From small, poorly defensed merchant ships, the seas started to fill with pirate ships and pirate hunters. Both are bad news.

I'm sure I'll see some reviewers and some grumblers say, "I want to control the ships!" But that's not my style. I'm a little old for that, and I think this way is great.

Con:

1) Can't capture ships
2) Can't send out a true fleet, though I think several ships in the same area may coordinate
3) May be too easy
4) May have too much city building in proportion to fleet management
5) A couple of functions were hard for me to find. To change regions (for ships), you have to go to a different screen. It also took a couple of runs to figure out how to ransom captives. I'm sure with a full manual, it would have all been clearer.

Overall: The demo is good for at least a couple of hours of entertainment for those interested in the subject matter. And based on what I've seen and heard about the rest of the game, it does have some promise. My conclusion is it's not a 1st day buy, but if I happen to see it at Best Buy for $29.99 or so, I would probably get fair value out of it at that price.

[Blackadar]

Heh. I thought the graphics looked very dated.