Anyone have any dark fantasies about being a Banana Republic dictator? Ever wonder what it would be like to smoke a few innocents and quash any complaints with a military armed with automatic rifles and mirrored sunglasses? Well here you go, muchacho, all geef-wrapped an' everything...Tropico, despite a few faults, is an excellent game.

First, talk about imaginative. Games run the entire spectrum of strategy these days, but the little tyrants over at GOD have managed to come up with a ween-er with this one. The premise alone is remarkable - run your own island - and the interface is good. There's even a tutorial for all you Yanquis who don' like no steenkin' manuals. Err, Manuels. Err...whatever.

I usually like to play games from a good, benevolent, feed-the-people-and-make-them-happy standpoint. Most games make you do just that - or else. Need proof? Try any of the great 'Civilization' titles. But in this one, you can choose to be a bad, bad ruler and shoot civilians for whatever whimsical reason you want, starve them and underpay them, keep them stagnant in an economy that would make Stalin-esque era collective farms look like Utopia. Of course, you'll need a healthy military to keep the revolting, unwashed masses from damaging the paint on your nice palace - and they better be paid well unless you want to lose your throne at the point of a gun, usually aimed at your back.

Your perspective is good, as you're looking from an angle down on your little paradise of an island, but one of my complaints is the damned clouds that like to float in the way of what's going on. Once your island starts to grow, you need to zoom out in order to keep tabs on what's going on...and the clouds like to drift right over the parts of the island that you'd like to keep watch over. Now, this is part of the rather realistic rainfall-environment model in this game, which is important in the building of farms, for without agua you get no food. But they could have made the clouds transparent, or allowed you to turn them off altogether; after all, you can bring up a plethora of information about your island, including rainfall, to help you determine where the best place is to plant that coca...err, corn farm.

Other than that, the game can drag for a while, especially with building large projects such as the airport which can take upwards of twenty years to create - which is why it can get dull fast, especially if you have no deniro and can't do anything but watch the time tick by. Sure, there's a speed control, making the years melt by faster than butter on a hot tortilla, but the whole point is to be doing something while in power, not minimizing the time you have.

But that's a minor point. I loved this game, and think it would bring the tinpot dictator out in anyone.

Recommended: Yes