Tropico is known for its construction strategy, where you need to manage a tropical paradise and political factors to maintain your dictatorship presidency. The creators invited Webedia for an exclusive insight during Find Your Next Game and showed what the latest installment, Tropico 7, does differently. MeinMMO editor Benedict Grothaus was immediately reminded of a game from his genre, Survival.
What kind of game is this?
- In Tropico 7, you play as El Presidente and build cities on tropical islands, manage your citizens, and, of course, aim for growth.
- You need not only a (somewhat) satisfied population whose needs are met but also income, such as through tourism.
- Politics has always been an important part of the series: factions on your island can support or oppose you, and world powers must be kept satisfied to prevent them from overwhelming you. This is where Tropico 7 delves deeper.
This is what sets Tropico 7 apart: Compared to its predecessors, Tropico 7 places a greater emphasis on politics. You now manage factions on a screen with 3D models of the representatives and can view your relationships directly from there. As seen in Tropico 6, there are:
- Communists
- Militarists
- Intellectuals
- Environmentalists
- Capitalists
- and Religious
What’s new now is that within the factions, significantly more details contribute to the overall picture and can bring you support or hostility – depending on your decisions, constructed buildings, and kept (or broken) campaign promises.
Your own political position and chosen constitution also influence the edicts you can select, meaning: bonuses and penalties that apply to your island. For instance, Communists cannot tax trees, but Capitalists can.
In total, there are 6 global superpowers with which you must maintain good relations to boost both the economy and tourism, as well as to prevent anyone from going to war against you.
What does tropical economy have to do with survival in ice?
A very similar system with factions that partially dictate how you should govern and can otherwise rebel is found in the survival game Frostpunk 2, where you must manage a city in the ice apocalypse.
In Frostpunk, you must sometimes make difficult decisions that affect the survival of your citizens, which is significantly more serious than in Tropico. The impact of the factions on your options is also greater, but fundamentally very similar.
If Tropico 7 plays similarly to Frostpunk in this regard, it is probably quite easy, to become an absolute dictator, even though you wanted to be democratic…
In addition to politics, Tropico 7 offers extensive terraforming, allowing you to connect islands, a more detailed building menu, and enhanced interactions between buildings. For example, hotels become more attractive when leisure offerings are nearby. Furthermore, there are smaller innovations like 3D advisors, shipwrecks to explore, or drones to target individuals.
Tropico 7 is set to be released in 2026 for PC (Steam, Epic, Game Pass), Xbox, and PS5. An exact date is yet to be announced.
If you are more interested in antiquity rather than tropical paradise islands during World War times, the new Anno 117 might be for you. Our colleague Maurice Weber already had the opportunity to test it here: German building expert seized every opportunity to play the new Anno, hence racking up more hours than anyone else
