It’s honestly a shame that there aren’t more dialogue options. The deeply shady broker negotiating the deal tells you that as an added advantage your people will “save money on haircuts.” There’s also really bleak stuff like the potential to offer your island as a nuclear testing site in exchange for a huge infusion of cash. The Cold War period is especially fun when representatives of both the Eastern Bloc and Western Powers reach out to you with requests filled with spy tropes. Meanwhile you’re constantly peppered by requests from self-righteous clergy members, military leaders panicked by some poorly explained threat, and seedy capitalists. But this praise also comes with suggestions for how to make sure those factions don’t upset you too much, an entertaining way to provide tips and tasks within the course of a game. El Presidente is assisted by Penultimo, a loyal toady constantly praising his leader’s every decision while casting aspersions on any foolish citizen or world leader that would doubt them. Thankfully the humor softens that bitter reality. I wound up having to literally evict people by constructing new residences right on top of their makeshift homes, which like so much of the game perfectly evokes the reality that pragmatic governance is disturbing. Unfortunately there’s no clear indication of what the commute radius is, so plenty of times I’d build a nice new apartment building and still find my land marred by shacks. Citizens prefer being homeless to living too far from their jobs, but living in shacks will still lead to housing unhappiness which they’ll take out on El Presidente when an election rolls around. But I was still frustrated by how some things remained opaque. I had to just settle into the knowledge that I was going to make a lot of mistakes before I could really run things smoothly. It’s a weird feeling to be both frustrated and impressed by just how deep this game goes. When I started actually playing as Governor, overseen by a contemptuous representative of “The Crown” who kept threatening to send me back to the plantations if I didn’t do a good job, I wasted a lot of time figuring out how to using seaside landings to provide a similar effect. For instance, the tutorial teaches you how to connect islands through bridges, but that technology isn’t available until after the Colonial Era. Even after playing through it I still found myself having to figure things out on the fly. There’s a multi-hour tutorial campaign meant to let series newcomers learn the ropes and introduce new elements in Tropico 6, most notably that you now rule over a small group of islands with their own resources rather than just one main island. While El Presidente can pay visits to buildings to improve their efficiency and will periodically give election speeches, most of the time players are taking a God’s eye view of their nation to better monitor the economy, construction projects, citizen happiness, and myriad other factors needed to keep things running smoothly. Alternately “Corrupt,” riddles the area around your palace with crime but gets you extra payoffs from bribes sent to your Swiss bank account. You can customize your ruler’s gender and appearance and even give them little merits and flaws like “Charismatic,” which improves your relationships with all internal factions and international superpowers. Like the rest of the nearly 20-year-old series, Tropico 6 has players take on the role of El Presidente, the leader of a small Caribbean nation. It’s a deeply fiddly civilization simulation and also a dark comedy about the ways strongmen control their populace to stay in power across the ages. That dichotomy neatly sums up Tropico 6 ’s identity. Load screens are pleasantly rare in Tropico 6, and the few times they do appear they offer one of two types of text: game tips like “make sure to employ enough teamsters” or facts about the ridiculous propaganda efforts pulled off by real world dictators like North Koreans being taught that Kim Jong-un has never defecated.
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