Tropico 4 Demo on a netbook

By Corporal On August 23, 2011 · Leave a Comment

You always start like this in Tropico.

NB: Tested on an ION 2 netbook, won’t run on an Intel integrated graphics netbook

Imagine Sim City spun with a lot of Latin American flavour. A healthy dose of español, corruption, Swiss Bank accounts, tenements, Cold War politics, dictatorship, and elections which you can play around with. This is Tropico, and the series is now into its fourth iteration. So far, it has been great playing Tropico, but what does Tropico 4 bring as compared to its predecessors?

Not much, it seems, judging from the demo. The game will come out on sale on the 26th, and therefore you’ll only be able to see it in its full glory on that fine day. Now, however, you can have a taste of what Tropico has to offer by playing the demo – which has four tutorials on various aspects of Tropico management such as handling Cold War politics, handling rebels, the economy and one campaign mission where you’ll take on loads of quests and get lots of kickbacks from being El Presidente.

The joy of playing Tropico has always been in its comedic nature – since your ministers will always hint you in all the wrong, corrupt ways. They’ll request that you arrest a political opponent, issue a Building Permit so you can tax housing developments where a portion goes directly into your Swiss Bank account. Then there’s always the Americans and USSR which you’ll have to appease so that they offer you aid, which you’ll sorely need in the first few years of development.

Unfortunately, Tropico 4 doesn’t seem that much different from Tropico 3. It seems like the interface has only improved a little, and there isn’t too much improvements over Tropico 3 in terms of game content or quality. Basically, you’ll start with a barren island with not much in it, then build up the primary industries such as farms and mines, then progress onto value-added industries such as rum manufacturing or jewelry manufacturing. If you manage to survive the first few years, you’ll probably have no problem completing the game, since you’ll be rolling in cash.

Corrupt? Yes.

Perhaps that’s the joy of the game. It is easy and very enjoyable at the same time. The way your right-hand man, Penultimo, doles out the jokes is also one of the draw of the game. And then watching your secret police cause an “accident” against your opponent makes you feel omnipotent… until the rebels start storming your palace because you didn’t beef up your army.

But this is only a preliminary judgement from a demo. And yes, the demo plays OK on a netbook with discrete graphics. At the lowest setting, you can play the game quite well, even though you will be hovering around 10-15fps. No matter, since this isn’t a FPS and quick reflexes isn’t too critical.

You can get the demo at the official website.