Whelp, finished the demo and here are my thoughts:
At first glance it's disappointingly like Tropico 3. Most of the buildings are carried over for heaven's sake, with nary a face-lift. The mechanics work pretty much exactly the same, but the controls have been streamlined a bit. Protect yourself against rebels, fulfil the people's needs, build up a healthy economy and skim as much money as you can. Same as usual.
However!
There's quite a lot new here that's pretty fun. My favourite addition are the new personalities in game. There's lots of characters who pop up, most of them thinly veiled satirical swipes at Richard Nixon, Yasser Arafat and the like. Some of the humour's amusingly cynical, as the American's order you to pay a 'freedom tax' so they'll add you to their 'least likely to invade' list. The voice acting is pretty good, I especially like the English toff character representing the EU. "Riff-raff on ma back again, don'tcha know." Then there's your advisors. They swing between Sim City style advice and setting you challenges and there's about eight of these council advisors and generals in all. They help keep the flow of the game dynamic and make it seem more like you're in charge of a living entity. Interestingly, you can't unlock most edicts now until you've hired the respective ministers. For instance I couldn't turn my cabaret club into a sercret police agency ready to kill the faction leaders until I hired the Minister of Interior. Seemed amusingly rum to send a Playboy Bunny to kill an old Communist woman with a zimmer frame.
There's new resources to exploit, though that's not much of a game changer. There are also criminal Tropicans too. The islands seem bigger and there's some nice new features. You can 'Quick Complete' buildings by paying extra brass. There's more building upgrades. Your avatar has traits they can build from mission to mission. There's a lot more dialogue and yes, new music alongside the old. One natural disaster showed itself - as if knowing I was playing it, a tornado appeared. It was a curious beast, able to lift up trucks but still failing to demolish some flimsy structures and instead pummelling others. I expect they were trying to replicate the tornado's unpredictable damage spread regarding its multiple vortices and downdraft potential, but the trucks indicated an F4 to F5 whilst the structure damage and toll of ten said more of a very strong urban centre F2 to middle F3 for me. So 3/5 for the admittedly well animated tornado there. (Neatly, ruined buildings can be rebuilt easily with a click for a fee, saving on tedious demolishing and then trying to remember what was once there.) In the full game you get tornadoes, earthquakes, locusts and somewhat controversially tidal waves too.
The graphics are slightly improved over Tropico 3 with more detailed models and a few more effects. Only a little though. It looks very nice, not jaw-dropping though. But then again, it is a strategy game. You can zoom out further too, which is nice.
Quibbles:
Sometimes new event dialogues or pop up boxes would nonsensically appear over existing ones. For example my minister of interior started asking about a newspaper building in the middle of the tornado disaster, and I got a lecture on schools whilst putting down a rebellion.
There don't seem to be much in the way of additional avatar clothing customisation above Tropico 3. Maybe it's just the demo and there's more in game. Once again there's far fewer options for the female avatar than the male, sort it out guys. Also some of the written notes indicate a male El Presidente when the female is selected.
The Environmental minister keeps blithering about trees. They're a pain to place - practically individually planted and you have to rotate them constantly to make it all look natural. A Sim City style paint-brush planting style would be better.
It could do with explaining export storage and over-employment a bit better, never got the hang of that.
The Golden Hour doesn't seem quite as nice or as long as in Tropico 3, funnily enough.
Other than that it looks like an ace game. If you've played Tropico 3 recently then I hesitate to recommend this, but if it's been a while and especially if you missed Absolute Power, it looks like a very tempting buy. If you haven't played a Tropico game from 3 onwards, I say go get!
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