Everyone and everything is a caricature: your underling, Penultimo, is a dimwitted, unceasing bootlicker capitalists and opportunists within your staff seethe with delight as they suggest profiting off other nations’ needs, while communist revolutionaries are naively passionate about their cause despite not knowing exactly what they’re fighting for. The characters of Tropico are drawn in broad strokes, but the canvas they’re drawn on is broader.
And gone is your golden age your lifelong citizens, along with the hundreds of people who immigrated into your country seeking opportunity, are poor, hungry, and restless. Gone is the demand for iron, because industrialized warfare demands steel. Gone is the demand for foreign meat, because in the post-colonial world, every variety of livestock has been spread far and wide. But then-oopsie-daisy, Germany invades Poland, and the whole world changes. Your comrades could witness an era of prosperity as they loosen the King’s grip in the Colonial Era you could make a killing exporting livestock and iron to other countries. The changes that occur between eras, though simple, are more than just aesthetic swaps. Your dynasty presides over Tropico across the Colonial Era, World War II, the Cold War, and the present day.īut now we buckle under the weight of the world and teeter according to its whims. But whereas most cities in city-building sims traditionally exist in continual stasis, your island in Tropico 5 is subject to the passing of time. You control everything: housing, infrastructure, healthcare, international trade, voting rights, hiring managers for individual businesses (given that they’re government-owned), budgets, military/police presence, foreign relations, public relations, and the demands of several factions-communists, capitalists, environmentalists, industrialists, royalists, secessionists, the religiously devout, and so on and so forth. Tropico 5, like its predecessors, casts you as El Presidente, the Communist leader of a fictional banana republic.
And all the while, my heiresses bicker over what our national bird should be. But now we buckle under the weight of the world and teeter according to its whims. Its weight strengthened our suffering shoulders till we could toss it aside, and we finally felt the lightness of the air. Before the world powers butted heads, my people bucked the yoke of a corrupt monarch. My people are starving, and there’s nothing I can do.