After finishing five or six sandbox games, most as a benevolent leader and one as a brutal kleptocrat, I think I’m done with this play mode, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. Instead, I like to see how effectively I can develop the island of Tropico (thriving economy, good healthcare, clean environment, educated populace, etc) within the constraints of money and time. The fear of failure keeps players on their toes – training enough heroes to fight off monsters in Majesty, building apartments and clinics to prevent an uprising in Tropico 4 – but as far as I’m concerned, actual game-overs should be easy to avoid.Īnd in this regard, Tropico 4 is perfect for me: with the default settings, it takes a lot of doing to lose a sandbox game. Oh, it’s one thing to have failure lurking in the background. To me, these titles exemplify gaming as a “narrative of continuous progress”, and as such, I prefer them nice and relaxing. When it comes to city-builders, I’ll take the second type of challenge over the first. If the game requires skilful play in order to meet those goals, then this is another form of challenge. However, even when the player is not at risk of game-ending failure, difficulty can still arise from self-imposed goals. If the Game Over/You Died screen is a constant companion, then we can say the game is “challenging”. In many (most?) games, from Shogun 2 to Dark Souls, the primary challenge comes from trying to make progress or avoid failure. They are:ĭifficulty in a game can come from two sources. Tropico 4 does a number of things right, and while none of them is individually ground-breaking, each of them illustrates a principle of successful design. I haven’t started the game’s campaign, but I’ve played enough of the sandbox mode to know I like it – and to know why. The week and a half I’ve played Tropico 4, the Latin American-themed city-builder, has been time well spent.
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January 2023
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