Tropico 5

In the Tropico series, you play the role of the dictator of a small island nation in the Carribbean. It gives you a bird's eye view of a tropical island, and you build buildings, one at a time, to create an economy, keep people happy, and manage the direction of your little island nation.

THE GOOD:

• It's fun and funny.
• Has cheerful Latin-style music.
• It was worth about 30 hours of fun play time.
• I feel like the developers learned from Tropico 4, which was a bit repetitive, especially since you had to restart each mission from scratch. In Tropico 5, while you do restart from scratch occasionally, in general, the next mission starts again where you left off the time before last.

THE BAD:

• You are continually shifting forward and backward in time, and from island to island. I was constantly getting confused (did I build building X? Where is it?). Fortunately, the game offers controls to answer those questions, you just have to root around all the options and you will find them eventually.
• One big downside is that the budget information provided is nonsense. You only ever need to answer one question: how much surplus cash will I have per year? The game doesn't really provide this answer in a clear way, so you have to kind of intuit the answer. I think the developers could have done better on this point.
• I was constantly struggling to provide housing for the people. There were always homeless people no matter how much housing I built, and this felt a bit unsatisfying.
• The scenarios are pretty zany, you may or may not like the sense of humour.

THE UGLY:

• You might find the graphics and especially textures a bit low-resolution by modern standards. It can be hard to identify buildings sometimes due to poor texture quality (even when zoomed in).
• I'm sure that there are many minor bugs hidden in this very complex simulation. However, I've occasionally triggered mission-ruining bugs. In particular, avoid creating very long roads. This seems to cause characters to waste massive amounts of time walking along the super long roads instead of taking a shortcut. You can very quickly see your economy tank!