Congratulations my fellow El Presidentes! Kalypso announced this week that the recently teased Tropico 6 is coming to PC, Xbox One and PS4 in 2018. The announcement came by way of this teaser trailer, shown during the Sony E3 2017 Pre-Show.
Based on the trailer, it seems like Tropico 6 will deliver more of the same Banana Repub-sim fans have come to expect from Kalypso. While there wasn't much by way of gameplay features in the trailer above, the sight of El Presidente’s engineers airlifting the Statue of Liberty seemed to hint at a feature where players will be able to acquire landmarks from around the world. Here are the official gameplay details from the press release, courtesy of GameSpot.
Play on large archipelagos for the first time in the series. Manage multiple islands at the same time and adapt to various new challenges.
Send your agents on raids to foreign lands to steal world wonders and monuments, to add them to your collection.
Build bridges, construct tunnels and transport your citizens and tourists in taxis, buses and aerial cable cars. Tropico 6 offers completely new transportation and infrastructure possibilities.
Customize the looks of your palace at will and choose from various extras.
Tropico 6 features a revised research system focusing on the political aspects of being the world's greatest dictator.
Election speeches are back! Address the people and make promises that you can’t possibly keep.
Cooperative and competitive multiplayer for up to four players.
It sounds like we're getting much larger maps to play with, which is something I've been hoping to see since Tropico 3, my first entry in the series. Multiple islands means a lot more resources and a lot more stability. It will be harder for those pesky natural disasters to decimate your country when you have some geographic separation between places.
The increased focus on transportation makes me think Kalypso/Limbic Entertainment spent some time in Cities: Skylines and liked what they saw. Traffic management was my least favorite part of that game though, so here's hoping Tropico 6 has a simplified system. Unlike Cities, Tropic 6 has a lot of other features at play to worry about during a game.
The foreign wonders thefts and increased customization makes me think this will be the most aesthetically active Tropico game yet. I've never felt the game was lacking for eye candy, but more is almost always better in this regard. I look forward to the no d of international crises this system adds to the game, and hearing Penultimo prattle on about diplomacy never gets old.
Revised research is a catch all term that doesn't let us know much, outside of a tweak that will make the system more political. The return of election speeches also hints at a Tropico 6 release that will highlight the very thing that makes it just a little different than most sim games. Sloppy strongarm politics are handled with a light touch, so nothing should get too serious. Hopefully the tweeting dictator in the trailer was a simple gimmick and not a sign that the game is going to take an overt political stance. Forced politics are only fun when you're the dictator in charge.
