Tropico 4

A cheeky city builder. Decent Campaign mode/story. Gets a little redundant after a while, but overall scratches that city builder itch while adding a comedic tone!

7/10;
-Good follow up with expanded economic and political systems.
-Minimal technical issues.
-Game play loop is more of the same, with some added depth for population and economy.
-"Still no education for the children"

I would recommend this game on sale at 70% or greater.

Plain city builders can get dull. Not this one! You have a lot going on but you can get by without going super in depth. Different challenges and events keep things interesting as well. My only problem is not knowing when to quit. It;s easy to get caught up trying to build the next thing or resolve an issue. I stay up too late playing.

Its fun, humorous, creative and seems to cover the "island" life. Take hours to make a perfect town or far less to complete task, you play your way.

fun and addicting

Tropico 4 is the pinnacle of the Tropico series. Could it be improved upon? Of course, but Tropico 5, unfortunately, did not improve upon it. In fact, Tropico 5 was far worse. I came back to Tropico 4. It oozes charm with it's wacky characters, it allows chaos by not requiring you to build roads, and the military system actually made sense. If you want to truly experience the Tropico series at its best, play Tropico, Tropico 3, and finally, Tropico 4.

Solid game, lots to do, reminds me of classic Tropico

Get this one instead of 5 or 6. It has everything but better.

An absolutely addicting game of strategy, manipulation, thinking-ahead, and improvisation. The scenarios can keep you entertained for hundreds of hours (as evidenced by my numbers, and I still have some scenarios to clear) and provide meaningful differences in every play that keeps the game feeling fresh. The humor and voice acting are top tier. Whenever you lose a scenario, it feels fair, and when you win and create a thriving city, it feels amazing.

A unique and very different take on the genre of city builders. Its also a political simulator in the sense that you manage both internal and external groups that effect your island nation. How much and to want extent you can adjust to your liking in the random island setup.

RPG elements are present in the form of your avatar, El presidente. There are dozens of preset historical figures, but you can make your own. Rule as a Communist, Capitalist, Dictator or a gangster boss. There are structures and edicts that you can build and pass that will enforce these positions, along with random choices that come up in game.

There is a great deal of depth not just in structures but the ways you can develop your island. Industry, agriculture, minerals, tourism, or a combination of all. Its why I like the random map generation over the campaign because it allows for different builds and play styles. Its the reason I keep returning to the game, year after year. The replay value offered here is incredible.

Its aged very well I think. The music, graphics, Latin-American music are all very good. The humour is also very good, and I never get tired of reading the setting choices for my shopping mall, always makes me laugh. Voices overs are of very good acting quality and also make me grin. Its a serious game/simulation though, there can be war and revolution, not good, unless thats what you are aiming for. But the game has its own charm about life things.

I bought the collection when it was on sale years ago, and I'm still coming back to this. Its got a learning curve due to its depth, but that depth gives it its longevity. I still havent built a stadium or airport, maybe next game.

I know there is a Tropico 5 and 6 now, but I'm not convinced if they are that much better than this to the point that I should spend my massively debased currency on it. When this is on sale its very affordable and I need to watch my dollars these days given food and rent have gone up 400%, so Tropico4 wins for value in my book.

In conclusion and in the light of Tropicos humour, if you are rich and have access to your moms money tree, go buy Tropico6. If not, then put this game on your wish-list and wait for the sale. You wont be disappointed.
Adios Comrade...

Tropico 4 is a highly entertaining economic simulation. While it’s no longer a new game and the graphics are somewhat dated, the addictive gameplay remains as strong as ever, even though the missions can be a bit repetitive at times.

Achievements

they should kept more things from this version. Like the prison farm is genius.
This version is very nice like if tropico 3 had baby with tropico 5 but baby keep more traits of poppa tropico 3. Yes very nice.

Undependable commitments from Production team with presence of efforts in numerical harassment further then art and gameplay

Feels more free to do what you want.

Sim City meets Civ.

fun

Amazing game. Campaigns are so so good.

It's tropico! Great game, easy to get on with. Different amount of campaign to allow you to experience all aspects of the game and a sandbox mode to just keep on building forever. Once you've got the hang of what keeps who happy then its pretty straightforward but just when you think you're on top the game will throw a spanner in the works and you have to work your way around it to succeed again.
Never fear, El Presidente is here!

Game doesn't hold up so well compared to the improvements made in Tropico 5 and 6, but is still overall quite good. Better in some aspects.

This is the peak of Tropico goodness!

yes

Yes

Easy to play, great music

Absolut unbalanced garbage. You wait forever for specific job posts to be filled, even if you build schools and the immigration office. If you do the mistake to pay for specialists from abroad to fill open job posts, they will 100% leave the job posts within the next 1 to 2 years and you will have lost the money you paid to hire them. Another kicker are the tsunamis and earthquakes, which OF COURSE will hit your most important buildings like power stations or your most profitable tourist income building of the scenario. Gimme a break! Spend your hard-earned money on more balanced and refined games, this one is broken and not playable.

This is one of my most favorite free world building games. The graphics is still pretty good, even though the latest versions looks much better. Still it's a fun game to play.

awsome game must say i wish there was a featcher where you unlock all modern times buildings its pretty sad

Great Sim that doesn't take itself too seriously. Totally worth it.

Fun game!!! Makes me want to be a dictator when I grow up

Easy to learn, fun to play! Build and manage your island with deep yet accessible options. Balancing politics, economy, and factions keeps things engaging. A perfect mix of strategy and humor!

Competitive. An old golden el presidente sim.

I enjoy this one a lot. But latest update crashes a lot.

absolute peak

Its Tropico, you love it or hate it. City builder with jingo charm.

this game not good for me.

An updated fun game with real challenge and good time.
Viva El Presidente.

I am cripplingly addicted to growing papaya

Simply the best part of the Tropico series

Still playing 10+ years later

El Presidente, the Middle East have informed me that their second best camel has died and they cannot gift it to us this year!

Game is good but doesn't launch anymore.

good

I absolutely love this game! A hilarious one whose witty, sarcastic humor has not been seen again in sequel games to the same extent, which is a real shame. Lots of references to real life dictators. If you're a history buff you'll enjoy playing this even more.

classic xbox360 greatness

Wasted at least a month to get all achievements but it was worth it.

it is very fun and interactive

I like to play tropital when other games are bored it definitely has the funnest out of all of their games this one is the best on they made so its a "magnum opus" of trocipo games. Haha magnum opus, just like i mangum scopus out the natural resources on my island. The game will take long hours so make sure that plenty of a located time is designed when you want to play.

With the right expension: one of the best game I ever played, top 20. Worth 50$ with DLC. If you love RollerCoaster Tycoon or zoo Tycoon you Will probably love this game

I love 4 and 5. Both version have great music. The music by them selves are worth the price.

Get it just to read the tyrant quotes shown in the loading screens.

Play it to understand what they meant.

Man, I'm late to the party. I think I got all my Tropicos through some sort of bundle, and I've just now come around to playing the 4th entry.

It's a "tropical communist city builder" if you will. And since there's NO competition in that field, you'll either play Tropico or you don't.

What you get is 20 campaign missions, as well as an additional 20 or so with the various DLCs. That will set you back 25 bucks at the time of writing this, less when it's inevitably going on sale.
Personally though, I didn't find the campaign to be all that interesting. There is some flavour text, and the later missions supposedly have more varied objectives, but the first 5 or so are very ... boring, especially since the only thing that really matters in T4, at least at the beginning of a game, is to increase your exports (favourably by building mines) to make money. Once you are making money, you can simply "quick build" pretty much anything you want, instead of having to painfully wait months, or even years, before your construction crews deem it worthy of their time to complete a project. Especially brutal when you're building more than one building at a time, even with multiple construction offices, teamsters, garages, etc.
At some point the game just runs itself somehow and spirals slowly out of control. You'll never be building a "mega city", that's just not what this game is about. Instead you'll be focussing on housing, exports and staying in power by appeasing the various factions in the game, like communists, religious folk, environmentalists, nationalists, etc.

So far, so decent for a little while. It's pleasant enough to look at and play (compared to older Tropico titles), but it's still a hot mess under the hood imho. While you can individually select each Tropican, and have quite a few stats available in your "Almanac", I never quite understood the game's systems, and so I was loaded up on "tasks" I either couldn't finish or didn't know why I couldn't finish them, like exporting "smoked beef", not just any beef, it had to be smoked, so I built some beef farms, and expanded them with smoking huts ... but nothing was really exported. A little bit here and there, so I surmised that maybe I wasn't producing enough food, so I built more farms and stuff to produce food, and my "food rating" was more than good, but still I barely exported any smoked beef! So, I thought, okay, build more farms and smoke more meat ... but I couldn't BUILD anymore beef farms, because for some reason the game, while progressing through time, had replaced all those beef farms with "organic farms", which are much larger and seem to produce a bit of everything, just no smoked beef. And I found no other building to help me out here. There didn't seem to be an indicator how much I was actually producing vs. how much my people were consuming ... or how I could maybe prioritize exporting a certain good, because there's no menu to see those goods.

And that's T4 in a nut shell. It's chaotic and unoptimized, yet full of uniqueness, just like your typical banana republic. I never finished that task with the smoked meat in an entire game (longest possible time period, but you can keep playing afterwards anyway). At one point I was also told to export fish, which didn't happen forever, until suddenly it happened in one go. Beautiful chaos.

F the launcher, though. Completely unnecessary bullshit.