Having long been a fan of the city building genre since I was a kid with Sim City I was ecstatic when I came across Tropico 3 on my Xbox 360 back in 2010. Since that time the Tropico franchise has been one of my favourite’s as the series is now 6 games deep. While I eagerly anticipate Tropico 7 hopefully coming soon, Kalypso Media has given us another scenario and new buildings to keep El Presidente going just a little bit long in Tropico 6.
Incase any of you are coming to this without any knowledge of Tropico let me give you the cole notes. Tropico is your typical city building game with 2 very big differences that make it stand out. One being the setting as you run beautiful tropical islands and the second is its political themes. You are El Presidente and you rule your country. It isn’t just about building a functioning city, it’s about keeping all the different powers on the island (ie the capitalists and communists) happy as well as foreign countries happy and off your case. And of course your fellow tropicans.
Get Ready For A New Tropico Challenge
With Tropico 6 Tropican Shores we are given a new scenario, a few new sandbox maps as well as many more buildings to work with. The emphasis of this DLC is all about the water. The scenario, “Yachts For El Presidente” is a group of small islands with not much space to build. So naturally, we build on water! Yes the main addition to the game besides the scenario is the ability to build on water now. Floating homes, neighbourhoods and restaurants are the highlights along with the ability to create artificial reefs and the new job of Pearl Divers.
Yachts For El Presidente is pretty much exclusively that. Each island is so small you are only able to fit a handful of buildings on each one, mainly for your mining, industrial and agricultural buildings. Space is definitely at a premium. Your goal is to build massive yachts to distract the foreign powers and keep them at bay. Each Yacht you need to build will advance you to the next “times” in world history and will be quite the undertaking as they require a, pardon the pun, boat load of resources to build. They did a good job with this scenario making it feel very unique compared to the base game while still keeping the core feeling of a Tropico game.
I will say the scenario felt quite difficult to maintain my economy. I don’t know if that’s because it had been awhile since I’ve played a Tropico game (6 came out in 2019) and I was a bit rusty with remembering all the details and best methods to do so or if the scenario was designed to challenge you as much as it did. My guess is its a combination of both. With so many resources going to each yacht it was hard to get any sustainable profits coming in. The islands also wern’t overly packed with the most valuable resources that are staples of a strong economy in Tropico.
On the flip side of that it did seem almost too easy to keep the super powers at bay. For a scenario to be so heavily focused on building something so the foreign nations don’t come knocking I thought i might be threatened a bit more than I was. By the end i had realized I barely even had my own military as i never did feel the need to have one.
The new buildings were a nice addition as well. I’m not too sure I’d use many of them outside of this specific scenario other than perhaps the residential buildings but they served their purpose well for what they were intended to be.
Sandbox was never really my thing so I didn’t really do much with that in this DLC, but the maps seemed fine from what I took a look at. Also for anyone that cares there are no new achievements or trophies associated with the Tropican Shores DLC.
Conclusion
All things combined, Tropican Shores scratched an itch for me. A fun scenario that brought me back to the game and gave me the opportunity to lose track of time in the islands once more while challenging me. I’ve been eagerly anticipating we hear something about Tropico 7 as its been 5 years now since Tropico 6. Hopefully Tropican Shores is the appetizer before the next main course. But while we wait on that main to cook, the appetizer is quite good!
Thanks to Kalypso Media for providing a code for Tropican Shores. It was played on an Xbox One X. Tropico 6 and the Tropican Shores DLC is available on Steam, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X consoles.
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