![]() Scenarios lurch around in such bizarre ways that you never know the difference between a smart move and a dumb one that will bankrupt the treasury. The Conclave operates like Get Smart's KAOS, with all sorts of kooky plots ranging from bioengineered hiccupping diseases to cloned human beings. ![]() As in most expansions, the difficulty in Modern Times has been cranked up in comparison to that in the original game. One obstacle to getting involved in the campaign is its off-the-wall structure. Blocking access to the likes of Twitter sounds interesting, but it doesn't much over over the secret police options of the good old days. ![]() Edicts from the core game are far more useful than the gimmicky options here. They are grouped in a tab of their own, which is pretty convenient since you spend the majority of your time never even looking at them. ![]() You can power this all with rays from the sun. Much of the time you don't even need to do much, since the new are straight-up swaps for the old, with only cosmetic differences marking one from another. Building your island paradise remains the same, and you need to only slightly alter your strategies to embrace some of the new buildings. Some advancements are simple swaps and some are more esoteric, such as solar farms making wind turbines obsolete and the metro coming in as the modern take on the garage. Meanwhile, traditional farms go out of vogue and are replaced by bio options that produce multiple types of crops simultaneously. The old concrete apartment blocks of the '60s are bulldozed for nicer and almost avant-garde contemporary replacements, complete with helipads on their roofs. So the armory you built back in the '70s gets replaced by the ominous SWAT HQ in the '90s. The main theme here is, not surprisingly, modernization. A lot of new goals are structured around the modern building options, at least. This results in an odd mix of techs and times that give the game a Neverland atmosphere where space shuttles exist alongside dirt farms and shotgun shacks. New buildings give the game a face-lift, but in many scenarios the old mingles with the new so much that the expansion comes off as something like a half-there mod that changes some of the setting but not all of it. Tropico skylines look a little different now, in large part because of the expansion's new modern apartment buildings. Ten new orders for El Presidente let you ban social media like Facebook and Twitter, toss some money at China for 100 instant immigrants, reform the healthcare system, and even throw a Festival of Love that sends women into the streets to kick off a baby boom and entice tourists. You even get to mess around with a space program in the later scenarios, which take you into the 21st century. By the second mission, you're into the 1990s and able to build modern apartments, bio farms, fish farms, borehole mines, and telecom offices to enhance cell phone range. Instead of being stuck in the good old days of Kennedy, Khrushchev, and pals, however, the expansion moves from the '60s through the current day. The goal is to stay on top of an unstable seesaw, keeping the citizens just happy enough with their miserable lives to not revolt and kill you. So you build the same little nations, plant the same farms, dig the same mines, suck up to the same powers-that-be in the USA and USSR, and appease the same mix of battling island factions. There's a new story about the big guy battling a mysterious cabal called The Conclave that is instilling chaos across the globe, but the challenge remains the same as it always has in the Tropico series. You get 12 lengthy scenarios (expect at least 20 hours of play) spread among the numerous tropical islands that make up El Presidente's Latin American fiefdom. Instead of revamping your life as a tropical tyrant, the expansion recycles the core concepts that powered both Tropico 3 and 4, making for a tedious, vaguely irritating experience for all but diehard fans of the franchise.Įven new edicts like the Festival of Love are just gimmicky frills that add little to the original Tropico 4 gameplay.Īn all-new solo campaign forms the heart of Modern Times. But ditching the golden age of Caribbean dictators doesn't work out too well, due to a boring campaign that relies far too much on phony obstacles to make the same-old, same-old challenges play out any differently than in last year's game. Tropico 4 has been dragged into the future with Modern Times, an expansion that moves the Banana Republic simulation into today's high-tech world of cell phones and Facebook. Welcome to life after the Cold War, El Presidente.
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