Tropico 3 is a surprisingly good city builder or rather a 3rd world simulator. It is very different than games like Sim City and Cities XL. Those two games are more macro city builders, where in two or three mouse clicks you can make city blocks where 1,000 people might live. With Tropico and the Tropico series in general, you need to place each building, each road and your island along with the time it takes your construction company to build it. Your entire island might get to be 200 - 500 'Tropicans.'

Each Tropican has needs... Food, religion, job, healthcare, entertainment, safety and so on. The catch is every Tropican's needs have a certain weight to them based on what political party / faction they believe in. Each faction has major and minor demands. The military will want more soldiers, so you need to build an army base. The religious faction will want a church or cathedral. The capitalist party will want privatization or upscale entertainment. The communist party will want you to enable the free public housing edict or have adequate healthcare.

On top of that, you balance political relations with the USA and USSR. If they get too bad, one of the two will basically take over your country and it will be game over. It is interesting how many ways that you can get game over. The most common way to get a game over is to lose an election. You don't have to have elections even. You're in charge. If you don't want an election, the nationalist party will hate you and your loyalist party will love you. If you opt to have elections, it will be vise versca. People will call for early elections and when you have elections, you can see preliminary results and you can even sway (cheat) elections. Its all at the risk of a party's love.

It is pretty cool having to pick 3 things to make a speech about and then fulfill campaign promises, but its all pretty easy. Winning elections is pretty easy, especially compared to how difficult it was to win any elections in the original Tropico. It was so bad in that game, that it was almost impossible to win an election without stuffing the ballot box.

When citizens hate you, and there will be plenty that do, they will either peacefully protest or become rebels. Once you have enough rebels against you, they will attack your most remote buildings. Your army will then go fight them, but if the rebels outnumber your army, the rebel will win and the buildings will be destroyed. The rebels can attack your palace or flat out assassinate you for a game over.

Tropico has a single player campaign with a lot of scenarios. You don't just pick scenarios, you unlock them. Each scenario seems to have scenario specific events that only occur in the scenarios. Some scenarios last 30 minutes, others a few hours as you take an island from 1950 - 1990 or so. At the start of each scenario you can pick a player character from historical tropican dictators or make your own avatar. You can even make personality traits that will result in pros and cons. It can drastically change your play style if you are incorruptible and never have any crime or have a green thumb and have high farm yields at the cost of low factory production.

Your businesses, mines, farms, and everything requires citizens in them to function and make you money. Every citizen has different education levels that will impact who does what. So you need to build high schools and colleges. Once built, there are options to gear students to military or religion. You can also click vacant positions to hire foreign experts for a price. If you have more businesses than citizens, build an immigration office and let anyone into the country or change it to only let in skilled workers so you keep bums out of your country.

Nothing is done automatically. You place a building, then wait for your teamsters and construction crews to build it. The more crews and personnel you have working, the faster it'll get done. I'm happy with that. Its part of the realism. If there's a building you want developed faster, you can increase or decrease its priority. If its still taking too long, just have your avatar stand next to the building to get it done faster.

The graphics are beautiful and you'll see every Tropican walking around, hopping in their car and driving to locations. The music is nice and very Tropican / Salsa music. The radio DJ and the rebel DJ will provide a lot of flavor to what you're doing. The rebel DJ will always heckle you and every line is said with tongue in cheek humor. The game knows you're all powerful and while being a dictator is usually seen as a horrifyingly negative thing, the humor twists it into a silly positive thing.

The only letdown is the fact there are no Steam achievements, yet it is the Steam Special Edition.

The Absolute Power expansion is simply a must if you happen to ever play Tropico 3. Without it, the game is literally just an HD remake of the first Tropico, which came out in 2001. The store page summarizes the additions, but basically it adds more of most everything; key additions are an entire new suite of great (if balls-to-the-wall crazy) scenarios, a new faction, some new buildings and a whole new category of edicts.

The weird thing is that the DLC integration with the base game is weird, probably because it came out around a time when Steam was just starting to offer DLC for games. This means that if you buy the Gold Edition pack you can't actually play the base game by itself: you must play Absolute Power. It doesn't even give you playtime for the base game, which is troublesome if you want to leave a Steam review...but there's still a way to do that if you're resourceful.

Other than that, if you own Tropico 3 but not Absolute Power, you should probably fix that if you're interested enough in the game to do so and if it's on sale.

The first time I bought Tropico I was looking for something different. Tired of the same old shoot-em-up stuff. Tropico had just come on the market and looked interesting. I was supprised at how much fun it was. i found it very addictive and ended up spending a lot of time in it. I tryed Tropico Pirate's cove but couldn't get into it. I saw that Tropico 3 had gone back to more the way it was and I wanted to play it again so I bought it. I am not sorry I did. There are some things I don't care as much for but overall I think it is a great game. I would recomend this to anyone.

Tropico 3: Absolute Power takes what was already an excellent base game and improves on it in every possible regard. The Loyalist fraction adds another layer of strategic depth, the new Garbage Dump building allows you to manage pollution more effectively, wind turbines allow you to generate clean and cheap electricity, and even the Garages are now reasonably-sized. The Advanced Tutorials go into further detail than the original tutorial, and the almanac now explains how to deal with your people's numerous demands. The Campaign mode has some wonderfully silly missions, which include ♥♥♥♥♥♥ a cryptid to boost your tourism industry, stopping an alien invasion inspired by John Carpenter’s 'They Live', and escaping from a temporal loop.

The only downside (aside from a few minor bugs) is that due to the weird way the DLC was integrated back in 2010, you can't play Vanilla Tropico 3 if you also have this expansion pack in your Steam library. Fortunately, you can still play through the original campaign with the new buildings and Loyalist faction, and having played Tropico 3 without this expansion pack, I have never regretted the upgrade.

Nothing is better than having El Presendente's Solid Gold Statue revolving around the city's town square and Nuclear Launch site, while a Civil War breaks out.
11/10, would worship Glorious Leader

A sweet expansion for an awesome city builder/econ sim. Takes an already great game and adds a bunch of sweet new stuff for El Presidente to enjoy. This is definitely worth it if you are interested in Tropico.

The hardest of all Tropico games IMHO. I personally enjoyed Tropico 4MT more, but this is a great game and beating it is a real challenge

Tropico 3: Absolute Power (2010)

So just a small funny thing about this - Absolute Power is the dlc for Tropico 3. You cannot run Absolute Power without having Tropico 3 installed (you install both of them separate) and if you try to run Tropico 3 it launches Absolute power - This is not a problem but this is one of the few games I own that does this - it's just weird to see. Why don't they just make it Tropico 3, why does it count as 2 separate "games" in your library?

As far as Tropico games goes number 3 is the best compared to number 1 and 2. The game feels refined now and the expansion adds lots of whacky and cool objectives during the campaign. There a lot of new buildings to use and some other optional stuff like things for your avatar. Much like the previous games - keep the people happy and things will go good for you. The game does have achievements but they are all earned in game and not through Steam which is a bit weird for me but no big issue. If you played the previous ones this game is a much needed visual and gameplay improvement in almost every aspect.

8/10

This is a must have DLC if you enjoyed the base game.

The expanded campaign has very detailed objectives and unique obstacles to overcome during a bizarre set of events. The variety is great and takes everything you learn from completing the main game and puts it to the test. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I'm sure you will too.

Absolute Power adds new buildings, scenarios and a whole new campaign to the Tropico 3 experience. I would honestly highly recommend picking it up not only for the new content that it brings, but also to enhance any playthrough of the original Tropico 3 campaign. You can easily get more than 10 hours of playtime out of the campaign before you've even touched the sandbox mode.

The new radio host can get slightly annoying for sure (especially compared to our beloved Juanito) but the campaign has some honestly wild missions which I would say are a little more challenging than the base game itself. This gives you even more Tropico 3, which is awesome considering how good the base game already was.

Pick it up as the "Gold Edition" with the base game if you own neither as that's usually fairly cheap, but also definitely pick it up if you're going to play through Tropico 3 again as the added content is worthwhile.