Build the perfect paradise, or make millions with industry.
The game is incredibly fun with the player building a tropical paradise where you are the complete ruler. Do you want to be a benevolent ruler with elections and providing the best for your people or a military dictator who denies any form of liberty? You can be both or even a mixture. This game goes into so much detail that it puts SimCity to shame. While it's nowhere near as large a scale as SimCity, it has a phenomenal amount of detail. You can click on any citizen and you get a series of screens that tell you everything from their health to their likes and dislikes. Each citizen has these and provide a small measure of personality that brings the budding town to life in a way many city builder games don't achieve.
As a ruler in Tropico 4 you can manage whatever you want. All the money in the game goes to you. You are the landlord and boss for every single home and business. You decide what the wages are, how much rent you wish to charge. You can even decide how much a meal costs at the local restaurant! That is depth!
There are three main ways to make money: Industry, Tourism and Agriculture. Each method requires different criteria in order to make the money you desire, such as good soil for agriculture. If using a generated map, agriculture can be a hit and miss due to the varying conditions that could occur. Sometimes you may get an island that grows next to nothing yet another time you may get one that can grow everything. Tourism requires you to decorate your island and place attractions and hotels about to attract the visitors. Industry relies one the natural resources of the island to turn into other goods that you can export. In my opinion this is the only way to make the big bucks. The other methods are a lot harder to achieve to the extent of bringing in the same amount of money.
The Modern Times DLC is a much needed addition to the game adds a bunch of new and interesting buildings that put a different angle to the game. It does make the game very easy, however, since it removes much of the challenge around housing quality and making sure all the needs of the people are taken care of. Often, buildings are replaced by the Modern Times buildings and in some ways that removes some of the variety of buildings in the game such as the cabaret becomes a theatre very early on but surely a cabaret can exist alongside a theatre? You can turn the modern times dlc off but that's only best for shorter games since later on you really need the extra capacities the MT buildings provide.
The humour of the game is great. It has many jokes about political agenda's of communist's, capitalists and the various nations that interact with your small island paradise. There are other smaller jokes that are just general but always give a laugh or two.
The graphics of the game are really good, very detailed. You can go from the point of looking down on your town to zooming up close to someone walking down the streets. The mechanics of the game work well and with the various disasters appearing in the game it can prove a challenging but very varied game. Every game is different.
There are a few problems that I have with the game but in my opinion, they are relatively small. The size of the population that the xbox can handle is half the size of the population that the pc version has and it can mean that you fill up the pop cap really quickly, sometimes before half the game time and that can mean that further expansion in industry leaves too many places with not enough workers. Also, the traffic system can be really difficult to manage. Once you start getting many people traffic starts slowing down your entire economy and it can be really hard to arrange the road system in a way that would limit the amount of cars per road. Without the introduction of the metro station in modern times dlc, it could be real chaos near the end of the game and that is the only plus of having a smaller pop cap.
Overall, I think this game is really fun to play and despite a couple of fall backs there are far more fun features to play with that outweigh them. It is a definite recommendation to anyone who likes to play city building games. I would suggest that if you have a really good computer then the PC version may be the better option for the higher population and I would definitely recommend you get the Modern Times DLC along with it, either through Tropico Gold Edition or by buying it separately. The game isn't especially hard but it does make the later parts of a game so much easier to manage.