This is a positive review with a giant warning.

The short version: This is a good game, but it's missing some things you might expect if you are a long time Tropico fan.
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The long version:

I've played every version of Tropico over the past 20 years with 1000's of hours in the series (long before I had any of them on Steam). What Tropico has always been in the past was a Dictator Sim that happened to let you build cities. Tropico 6 is a city builder that happens to let you be a dictator. That's a subtle but distinct point that only long term fans will truly grasp. The vast majority of new fans seem to think Tropico is "just a city builder", that's never how I've viewed this series.

What's new? Groups of small islands that form one nation. The ability to build bridges and tunnels. The ability to steal monuments from other nations. The broker that lets you spend your Swiss bank account on short cuts.

What's returned from previous games that was missing for a while: raiding, immigration office, ministry building and a few other things.
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What's missing from previous Tropico games?

1. There's no real campaign (compared to T4 or T5) both of which had a campaign and stand alone missions. T6 is 15 stand alone missions, much in the style of T3. Some people may prefer this, but they can feel a lot like simply doing 15 sand boxes with slight goal variations instead of one long interconnected story where your choices early would effect you later.
(EDIT: Some of the DLC now have campaigns, not just stand alone missions)

2. Complete lack of island customization. If you've played T4 you had 100's of individual trees and decorations to pick from that could be placed. I used to like lining my main sidewalks leading up to the palace with palm tress. T6 uses grid restricted parks and no individual decoration placement. This works as a city builder, but it's lacking that personal touch of T4. (EDIT: This feature was added in the Return to Nature DLC released in 2025, six years after launch of the game…)

3. No dynasty system. T5 let you build a family with various global bonuses, that's gone.

4. No presidente background depth. T2, T3, and T4 all let you customize el presidente's background traits or pick from various dictator styles. T6 has a single trait to pick. A big step back for the series if you're into the role playing aspect of being presidente.

5. The islands are mostly small. There's a couple of big ones, but overall these are much smaller than what most Tropico's have presented. ~ edit: over the course of years they added several additional larger islands to the sandbox options.

6. The radio DJ is generic and repeats the same lines in every mission. This is primarily because there is no campaign. T3, T4, and even T5 had DJ's that commented on what you were doing, kept track of your long term achievements and were aware of the progress over time. This DJ just resets with each new mission and says the same generic lines.

7. deleted complaint ~ version 7.0 they've added social security and several new edicts in a free update.

8. Micromanagement of wage/rent is still missing. T1, T2, T3 and T4 still have the superior wage/rent system. T5 and T6 use a blanket "building budget" that presets the wages and rent and then classifies people into wage tiers for what housing types they can afford. It's really a dumbed down system. It's what you would expect from a city builder for dummies, not what you would expect from a detailed dictator sim like this series used to try and achieve.

9. They disrespected the Tropico Llama by making sheep wool equal to llama. In the real world llama have superior wool. In Tropico's past the llama is a respected animal much prized for its wool, just like the real world. Somehow Tropico 6 has managed to ignore the real world and disrespect Tropico's past. Is this a minor complaint? Probably, but it's an example of 100 more minor complaints that show how little respect this game has for its own franchise.

10. Gone is any depth to the raiding system. Yea, it's back, but Tropico 2 did it better in every possible way. The new version of raiding looks and plays like a bad facebook social media game. Click a box, watch a timer and wait.

11. Housing options are limited, disjointed and make no sense for which era they are unlocked from. EDIT: Some of the DLC have added more options, especially Tropico Shores.

12. Building managers are gone.

13. Worker skills are gone, no more people specializing at specific tasks. It's just generic education level

14. We were told before launch and at launch that "full mod support" as well as "island editing & scenario creation" would be added soon EDIT October 2023: It took nearly 4 years, but the game does finally have a full suite of mod tools to create maps and mods. However, these tools must be downloaded from another site and the mods managed through mod io. Steam workshop support is only for trash random maps. ~ EDIT And as of 2025 mod tools were discontinued and the mod io site they were using to host is not reliable to show all.
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So why the hell is my review even positive?

The game is functional. The engine (assuming you meet the requirements) is very well built. It's a good looking, good playing game, overall. Honestly this engine is so good that I'm just annoyed that they didn't fully flesh out the game to be everything it could have been.

If they just add what's missing from some of the previous games, a little more depth, a little more respect for Tropico… The foundation for it is "right there" and then they just kind of simplified it and dumbed it down.

Well, for the idiot masses, it's a functional game and I can't bring myself to thumb it down.

But as a long time fan it's also really hard to hold in that they just didn't bother making it better. I still love this franchise, and maybe just maybe they'll flesh this out to what it could have been with time.

There was so much effort put into this game and it shows; but at the same time it's like they just changed some things for the sake of change without thinking about whether it was actually better or even respectful of the series overall. EDIT: It's been almost a year. They do keep patching bug fixes and small additions, but it really just shows the game could have used another year in beta. Changes are coming but far slower than would be expected in a game at this price.

TLDR;
Compared to 4 or even 5 it lacks depth of personalization. 6 is a generic city builder with a vague dictator theme. Compared to 1,2,3 or 4 which were dictator sims that happened to let you build a city or 5 which was a dynasty builder with a much grander plot development.
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EDIT: December 2020 The dev team for T6 (Limbic) has been replaced and another new team brought in. So far Realmforge has been busy with much needed bug fixing and massive quality control fixes, the game is much more playable and less problematic even in just the short time since they've started working on it.

EDIT: October 2023 Realmforge has been good with supporting the game and bug fixing and the DLC have been much more interesting from them, than from Limbic. The games in a good place, especially if you get it on sale. Newer DLC add campaigns with longer storylines than a single mission.

EDIT: It's 2025 and after 6 years, many patches, lots of free content additions and a ton of DLC…

It won't ever be perfect, but it's still a lot of fun as-is.
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Bottom line: If you are on the fence and that $50 is make or break for you, the rest of the series is cheap and offers as much or more to play through. You can always buy this later once you finish those.
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This latest entry in a series that peaked with Tropico 4 jettisons a number of useful features in favour of a bland logistics simulation that encourages little more than stamping down basic housing and services and specialising in a couple of obviously optimal production chains.

The old political system in which factions had a coherent set of goals in line with their ideology based on satisfying economic and social needs now revolves around meeting random demands to build or do things you don't need, with relations penalties for declining these nonsense objectives.

Citizens frequently make stupid decisions about where they live, work and meet their needs, happily driving across the country (or spending months waiting at bus stops) instead of using the services in their community. Mitigating this leads to every island devolving into the same few tired optimisation problems, leaving little room for experimentation or visual variety if you want your treasury to stay out of the red.

Avatar customisation is minimal and has almost no effect on gameplay, so the days of setting up your leader for a particular strategy and theming your island around it are gone.

The previously vast array of decorative items is now replaced with a dozen or so park blocks of various sizes, none of which are particularly interesting to look at.

There are one or two interesting features here that weren't present in prior editions, but nothing that makes up for the depth and charm that has been lost along the way.

Tropico 3 was a very good game.

Tropico 4 took a few step forward from that, and has been my favorite city building game for a long while now.

Tropico 5 felt like a few steps back and many steps sideways - it's a bit of a different direction, one that had potential but I don't think they used this potential correctly at the time. I also feel like Tropico 5 really reduced the Tropican atmosphere of the series. Stuff like the building textures, the characters voices and lines, lots of details... it didn't feel like Tropico.

Tropico 6 is a return to the standard of Tropico 4, but it seems to incorporate a few of the things that worked well from Tropico 5, and it takes some steps forward on having a cleaner interface and lots of content right on launch. So far, the impressions from the beta and the now released game are fantastic, and I fully expect that Tropico 6 will surpass Tropico 4 as my favorite city building game.

The most contentious change here is the lack of a campaign; instead the Scenarios are built in a way to resemble a free-form campaign, which might work just as well.

Brilliant! Tropico 3 was excellent, Tropico 4 was good but faced complaints that it was too much like 3 (and it was, with a few minor improvements, because why mess with success?). So Tropico 5 tried to innovate, but suffered from poor implementation and a lack of real focus, new stuff was done just because it was new.

Tropico 6 hit the spot perfectly! They kept the good stuff from the past three games, and ditched the problematic features. They brought back the non-linear mission selection from Tropico 3, so you can choose from several different missions, you just have to complete three missions to unlock the next set, and each mission has a theme (sometimes wacky ones). They improved the Ministry concept from Tropico 4, so now each minister brings individual benefits. They kept the time period concept from Tropico 5, as well as the research feature, but with improvements.

And they've expanded the maps, many of them feature multiple islands, some can be connected by bridges, others will need special docks to allow people and goods to move between the islands. This opens up all sorts of flexibility, like having both industry and tourism. To be honest, one major flaw in my strategy so far is that I haven't done a good enough job of taking advantage of all the space, and it does present a challenge in how to structure your production chains and transportation. Speaking of transportation, they've improved that as well, you can create bus terminals in addition to car garages, as well as some wierd thing that lets you transport people up the sides of mountains (useful for tourist stuff, mostly).

So much good stuff. I mean I seriously just finished a mission that unlocked my next four mission options, and I had to force myself to quit so I can get some sleep and go to work tomorrow (I work for, ah, the governme....shhhh, no, contrary to rumors, I am not Penultimo. I swear!). But I can't wait until tomorrow evening to start on the next mission. I was disappointed with Tropico 5, but Tropico 6 has rekindled my love of this great island nation. VIVA TROPICO!

Pretty similar to previous versions of Tropico. In general the game works fine & is entertaining to play. However there is one Massive reason I cannot recommend it & have uninstalled it. The game now punishes you quite badly for not buying DLC. I received a "mission" that required the purchase of DLC; the negatives for not buying the DLC was big enough to ruin my island. This is a horrible sales practice.

i love making a paradise where all citizens are happy, because I kill all the unhappy ones

I highly recommend the base game, but do not recommend any of the paid add-ons/DLC. They feel like they were put together by the developers' B team, with poor gameplay balance and awful dialogue/script editing. The New Frontiers add-on is a great example of this - the Reclaimer building can be easily abused by putting it in range of waste treatment facilities, half of the Broker's offerings become spaceship parts (even in the World Wars era, which effectively cuts his offerings and usefulness in half), and the text feels like it was written by someone deliberately trying to sound cool and edgy but just comes off as cringeworthy.

Tl;dr: Buy the base game if it's heavily on sale (Tropico 7 should be just around the corner), but skip the DLC.

At this moment (06th April 2019) it consists of far too many serious gameplay issues to recommend Tropico 6. I sincerely hope that the developers fix these issues or at least allow modders to do so, because otherwise this game would fall short despite its huge potential. My main issues are the following ones:

1. Tourism is broken. Simple as that. Throughout dozens of hours of gameplay, not a single hotel has ever turned a profit despite me trying out all kinds of variations. Also this is coming from someone who has played the predecessors. If the idea of the developers was to actually have the entire tourism revenue being generated by entertainment buildings, only, then that is an incredibly stupid decision that should be reviewed.

2. The distance that citizens are willing to travel to their workplace needs to be increased severely. Citizens refuse to move into the nicely prepared apartments/houses simply because it is supposedly too far away from their workplace. Earlier Tropicos managed to do that, Tropico 6 should, as well.

3. The military challenge posed by rebels/guerillas is a joke. Guerillas need much more firepower in order to pose a credible threat to the player. Larger numbers or at least anti-tank equipment need to be implemented. Otherwise you can happily have 300 rebels and 60 guerillas and all they do is put a building on fire once in a while. This is not nearly as challenging as it needs to be.

I urge the developers to tackle these 3 main issues or at least delegate this to capable modders, because as it stands I want to really love this game, but I can't due to these shortcomings.

Edit: (23.09.2019) The tourism part got fixed. Hotels now do turn a profit. However, the political challenge is still missing due to rebels being far too weak/preventable. And the distance issue is also still existing. Basically the game got even easier, now, but not more intricate.

So you're a fan of Tropico 1/2/3/etc and are wondering if the series is "good again". That was me, too, prior to this purchase.

Like me, you've probably read a billion threads full of hyper opinionated, often contradictory info. You've watched videos. You've scoured wikis and patch notes. You keep seeing phrases like the following: "No, 4 is still the best!", "5 is actually good!", "4 is trash, 3 is the best!", or "The first Tropico is still the best!" (this one may actually be correct, no wait, 4 is good too, wait actually...)

Uh huh. Okay.

I am here to tell you that Tropico 6 is good.

It looks, sounds, and feels good, and most importantly, it feels like Tropico in the ways that truly matter. As a big fan of Tropico 1 and 3, and someone who played a little of 4, I had fun with Tropico 6.

Are there small differences? Of course. Are there missing features that'll drive you insane? I'll say, probably not? Are there glaring issues? Nothing that dampened my experience. Are there longtime issues that still haven't been fixed? There are a few, mostly UI things. Again, nothing huge, and nothing you can't figure out through normal tinkering.

So, I'm gonna keep it simple, and rather than obsess over little changes, I'll ask you this - do you like Tropico, at its core? If yes, you will probably like this entry.

Your next question - is any of the DLC worth it? The popular consensus is, no, and sometimes, they actively ruin the experience. I will put this statement in bold - your mileage may vary. Worst case scenario, get your refund, uninstall the DLC, and play vanilla. Now, this trend seems to be changing with the latest DLC, New Frontiers, but again, YMMV.

I wish the developers the best of luck in pleasing the fickle Tropico community. I do not envy you. In fact, I am endlessly thankful that my favorite city builder series is still alive to this day. So, thank you. Now, when is Tropico 7 coming out? Because 6 is pretty good, but 3 has some good features, but really, I liked 1 the most, but actually...

Problem:
There is a "please review our game" message, that blocks 40% of the main menu.
Closing the message is only a temporary solution.

Hypothesis:
Reviewing the game should disable the message.

Result:
The message still prompts you to review the game.

Conclusion:
Mobile gaming practices had a negative influence on gaming as a whole.