Tropico

So imagine our excitement when we heard that Pop Top were working on a game based around the rather more amusing concept of ruling an imaginary Caribbean island as a dictator. A little like "The Sims", as played by Fidel Castro...

El Presidente

Before you can start creating your worker's paradise though, you must determine what kind of dictator you are. Maybe you are the kind, fatherly, benevolent dictator who genuinely cares for his people.

Or maybe you are the ruthless, heartless, corrupt dictator, who only cares about stuffing his Swiss bank account with as much of his country's wealth as possible, and sends the secret police off to arrest his business rivals every five minutes.

This is all done by selecting from a series of options, which results in an intelligence agency style dossier on who you are, and how you came to power. Your first choice is which of the game's six factions you belong to - USA, USSR, military, religious, socialist or capitalist.

Next you select your background, which explains who you were before you took control of the country. This can be anything from a voodoo priest to a biblical scholar, farmer to royalty, war hero to university graduate. This leads on to how you came to power. Were you installed by a foreign agency such as the CIA or KGB? Perhaps you were swept to power in a military coup? Maybe you even won a fair election - stranger things have happened.

Finally you must select your dictator's personality flaws and virtues, which particularly come into play when you make your annual speech to your people. How about playing as a charismatic orator, who is unfortunately an alcoholic with tourrettes syndrome? Your speeches are moving and inspirational, but every other word that you utter has to be bleeped out.

Cable TV will pay you a fortune for the rights to broadcast your speeches, but your people might not be too impressed when you start talking about "what a great f*cking job you f*cking wonderful b*st*rds are doing for our glorious f*cking country"...

The Proles

At the end of this process you will have created your own unique dictator, and the decisions that you have made will have a great effect on the way that the game plays out.

Every individual person on your island has their own beliefs and qualities, and how they compare to your own will effect their opinion of you. You can get a feeling for their opinions by using a series of options which colour code them according to their conditions, which makes a nice alternative to the endless graphs of games like SimCity and Pharaoh.

In a way it's like ruling an entire island of Sims, with hundreds of them running around and going about their own business as you try to hold on to power and manage the economy of the island. And although you obviously have an effect on their lives with the decisions you make, you can't directly control them individually.

Tropico is very much in the mould of SimCity or the early Settlers games, rather than a typical real time strategy game. So if somebody is causing trouble, you will have to give your secret police orders to arrest him, or declare him a heretic - you can't just click and drag a group of soldiers to attack him.

And because a single charismatic leader amongst your people can start a counter-revolution that could overthrow you, you will have to be on your guard at all times.

Economics

It's not all about looking for potential revolutionaries and locking them away though. You also have to manage your island's economy and resources, construct buildings, and encourage tourism, agriculture and industry - a prosperous country is a happy country.

The problem is that you are based on an island, and space is limited. If you build a huge factory next to your hotels and beaches, your tourist resort is going to be slumping into ruin before long. But if you build your factories near residential areas your own people are going to be unhappy, increasing the risk of revolution.

The good news is that you have a wide range of choices when it comes to developing your country. Farms can grow anything from cash crops like sugar cane and tobacco through to bananas. Tourism is a whole industry in itself, and you can build hotels, golf courses, casinos, restaurants, and even bordellos!

Your people can take on a whole range of different roles, depending on what jobs are available and how well they pay. Prostitutes wander the streets, looking for rich tourists before escorting them back to a hotel. Lumberjacks chop down the island's trees, while teamsters haul away the wood to your lumber mills.

Just watching your people going about their day to day business is strangely enjoyable, in a voyeuristic kind of way.

Paradise

Tropico is based on a highly modified version of the graphics engine from last year's hit Railroad Tycoon II, with improved support for 3D graphics cards to keep things moving along smoothly.

Resolutions up to 1600x1200 are now supported, new lighting effects have been added, and the graphics are incredibly detailed. Terrain is fully deformable, so if you start strip mining your mountains you can produce some nasty eye sores to upset your people with.

There are also weather effects, and you can watch clouds floating over your island, pouring rain and flashing lightning over you as a storm erupts. Hurricanes can threaten your island, and one of the preset scenarios puts you in charge of recovering from the devestation left by one. Other scenarios cover everything from rebuilding your nation after a costly revolution, to pumping as much money as possible into your Swiss bank account before skipping the country.

The most interesting part of the game though is an open-ended free-form mode, where your only worry is holding on to power while you build your own Cuba, Nicaragua or Panama. It's a little like SimCity in the Caribbean, but with your dream city being led by a dictator who would make the alcoholic Boris Yeltsin look credible by comparison, and which is more likely to be destroyed by revolution and riots than earthquakes and floods...

Conclusion

Tropico looks like being one of the most innovative and downright fun titles of the year, with a mix of gorgeous graphics and cheesy latin music to give it the right atmosphere.

With the wealth of options available for developing your country, the range of buildings to construct and jobs for your people to take on, and the sheer potential for mischief in creating your own model dictatorship, it should be a real blast.

Tropico is due for release through the Gathering Of Developers and Take 2 Interactive in November 2000.

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