4 stars (Argh - A good time indeed) - After playing Civilization III at an almost addictive rate, Tropico II - Pirate's Cove is a breath of fresh air. And maybe a bit more challenging. There's a tricky balance to keeping your captives resigned and your pirates happy. The graphics are fun and so is a Pirate's life. The learning curve is higher than Civ III (it was for me) - there are so many varibles with Tropico II - a reason why I like the game. The ships a player gets to build are cool. I have had the game unexpectedly quit on me a couple of times and the auto save feature can get annoying. But overall it's a purchase I'm happy with.
5 stars (A great new edition to the wonderful original Tropico) - If you liked Tropico, you should find this fun and entertaining as well. I think both Tropico/Tropico 2 are the best sim games on the market, much more fun that the usual city building games. At first it's a little difficult to grasp some of the concepts, and game play is a little different than the original. In this version you're concerned a lot more with events that actually happen off the island, where as in the original you didn't have any control over what happened when boats/planes left the island. Of course, you also didn't have to worry about ships sinking...
The types of games are similar to the original Tropico, where you have scenarios or ones you design yourself. The map editor is a great thing that was not included with the original. You can play single games or there is also a "campaign" that starts you off easy and increases in difficulty (like the Warcraft campaign idea).
Pirate Cove provides hours and hours of swashbuckling fun and has many new features. As far as gameplay goes, performance has improved since the original Tropico, it works great in OS X. If you like this game, I'd HIGHLY recommend the original Tropico also. |
