by Le Yao Tang - https://www.metacritic.com/user/leyaotang?myscore-filter=Game&myreview-sort=date

July 3rd 2021

Tropico 6 is quite fast food compared to what it appears to be the impact it is trying to make.

Tropico 6 unlike Tropico 3 and Tropico 4 (while having some of the charm of Caribbean culture) lacks that soul of Tropico 3 and Tropico 4 that have attracted so much in the past decade.

No politics soul!

If we think about what would be the moto in the current Tropico games that followed the isometric old Tropico games, it could be: the promise not of another type of more complete simulation, but of an emulated interactive social integration that could bring perhaps a non-realism of a structure in which the player could venture into the tropics comically and politically. It's a problem with several games from various western franchises that moved from isometric to 3D. When we imagined in 2D and text-based we used more our skills, knowledges and creativity. At a lower resolution we were able to figure out how to venture into what the game couldn't offer visually, and sometimes this was very positive as the game designers themselves invested more in plot and dialogue to compensate. However, with the promise of 3D, the sides that we could show in these games didn't show up very well as power of involvement, immersion, flow. Tropic 3, 4 and 5 carried out this change reasonably - right there it already seemed to be the limit of this change from isometric 2D, there would be no way to expand the game much. In Tropic 6, we can sense the limit in plot weakness and auxiliary character interactions in short, repeated dialogues, which already existed in reasonably the same way in previous Tropico games. There hasn't been a huge expansion of what we'd really like to experience in Tropico - politics. I want to be more tyrant, or more hard-line or more corrupt!

With Tropic 6 the multiplayer online game could be the big change but it wasn't enough. The online mode could keep the player for a few more hours of gameplay, but overall at around 10 hours of gameplay the average young adult player who already knows similar games tends to drop their saves.

Optmization - Low. That Unreal Engine build needs 16GB RAM and SSD to run properly.

Accessibility - very low.

Strong suit - in Tropic 6 it's relatively easy to enable an infinite money mode and unlock more features and quickly advance the ages (including the dark Swiss Broker feature - that it is very fun -) - although this facility makes the player quickly resort to an overpower path/ god mode.