Tropico 2: Pirate Cove

aka: Tropico 2: A Baía dos Piratas, Tropico 2: Die Pirateninsel, Tropico 2: Il Covo dei Pirati, Tropico 2: La Bahía de los Piratas, Tropico 2: La Baie des Pirates, Tropico 2: Zatoka Piratów
Moby ID: 8985
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Description official descriptions

Set on a hidden pirate island and starring some of history's scurviest sea dogs, Tropico 2: Pirate Cove casts the player as an all-powerful Pirate King managing a seventeenth century band of buccaneers. The traditional economic model of the Tropico is reversed: the player maintains his/her wealth not through the production of materials, but by plundering merchants on the high seas and bringing the victims back to the island as captive workers.

Spellings

  • Тропико 2: Пиратский Остров - Russian spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

122 People (113 developers, 9 thanks) · View all

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[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 33 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 23 ratings with 1 reviews)

You can never go wrong with pirates

The Good
The city builder is a rather exclusive genre of game that caters to a handful of dedicated fans, all else excluded. But if there's an advantage to not being on the mainstream radar, it's that you avoid all the fallout from blockbuster movie tie-ins and other assorted crap. As a general rule, city building games are made by people who actually want to make games, and that's nothing but a good thing.

The original Tropico was an interesting but flawed game that saw you overseeing a banana dictatorship in the middle of the Cold War. Instead of building up your state the honest way, you could rig elections if you thought it would be easier. The sequel takes the same mindlessly amoral theme but sets it in a small island in the Caribbeans, circa 1677.

Instead of managing a small, developing country, Tropico 2 puts you in charge of a secret pirate hideout. You must kidnap workers to create a basic economy of products and services, and then keep them terrified so they won't try to escape. You must also build a ship and recruit pirates to plunder gold on the high seas. You don't have any direct control over your pirates, and they'll only work for you if you keep them happy (by building taverns and brothels and such). Like most citybuilding games there is no real ending, you can continue playing as long as you want.

The game's main selling point is content. Tropico 2: Pirate Cove is simply one of the most value-packed games you can buy. There's so much stuff to do here it boggles the mind. You can build ships, recruit sailors, raid enemy islands, make shady deals with the government, bribe other pirates, kidnap nobles and hold them to ransom, stash away loot for an early retirement...the list goes on. Anything and everything a pirate can do is found in this game. You can forget about buying another city building game for another three months, that's how much replay value Tropico 2 has.

City building games haven't changed since the days of SimCity and Caesar and no-one's expecting Tropico 2 to revolutionize the genre either. You have to build your island up on a small and large scale, doing everything from building slop kitchens to feed your captives to huge forts to protect your island from invasion. Unlike city building games where you're forced down a single path to victory the player is allowed a free hand in playing the game. You can be a brutal tyrant and scare everyone into line with random hangings and executions, or run your island as a virtual anarchy.

To earn money to run your island you must build ships and send your pirates out on raids. You have no control over these raids (in other words, it's pot luck whether a raid draws $10,000 or $500) and rather than being frustrating this actually goes a long way to making the game less formulaic and predictable. You never know how much money you'll have coming in so you constantly have to watch your expenses in case you hit hard times. The politics of the Caribbean region also plays a part, as you have to avoid discovery and invasion by the three European powers in the area: Spain, France and England. You can ally with any of these powers if you want, but this limits your cash options as you won't be able to attack any ships of your ally's nationality. In short, this is a densely packed game with a lot of options.

The interface is great for a game of this complexity. The original Tropico's answer was to bury you in spreadsheets and statistics, but Tropico 2 dispenses with all that and provides a very abstract and easy-to-learn interface. Simple ideas like a tiny set of scales off to one side of the screen that shows how much wealth and enmity you're incurring (there's money on one side, bones on the other) smack of real inspiration. With a few clicks you can issue global edicts that affect everyone on your island such as an enforced curfew, or just one particular person such as releasing a captive. You can click on any person and view what their thoughts, allowing you to get an opinion on how popular your leadership is. Ideally some common tasks would be automated (in the early game you have to build lots of lumber camps by hand to sustain a stable lumber income) but this is a nit too insignificant to pick.

It seems like part of the appeal of owning a city building game is all the extras the developers throw into their games. Frog City doesn't disappoint, allowing you to play in dozens of real and fictional islands as dozens of real and fictional pirates, all of whom have special bonuses. Other than a few historical liberties this is 100% based on real piracy in the Carribean, as opposed to the usual "developers watched Pirates of the Carribean and made a game about it" feel some pirate-themed games these days. There's a professionally orchestrated soundtrack (also available as a separate disc) and even some FMV sequences that play during the game to highlight stuff that's happening. Cossacks 2 blatantly ripped off that idea some years later, and did a far worse job of it in my opinion.

On a humorous note, do you think someone should tell Jack Thompson about this game? Hey, the racketeering and plundering is fine, but to entertain your pirates on land you have to build establishments such as gambling dens, taverns and whorehouses (I love it how you can select the "level of service" the whores provide). Maybe the whole slavery thing is also questionable. I'm not sure...

The Bad
While there's a lot of stuff to do in Tropico 2, a lot of it feels unnecessary and superfluous. Despite things like randomized raids and multiple tech trees this is still pretty much a formula game, and you can play the same way again and again and win. Which sucks, since it seems to be the opposite of what the developers intended.

And true to genre stereotypes the game is slow and at times unrewarding. Much of what you're doing is not to move the game forward but to patch up mistakes you made earlier in the game (lumber camps are a great example: recommend at least 20 in the early game or you'll feel the bite later on). A single mistake can put on a slippery slope.

Graphically the game is tolerable (which means I can't outright bash it) but a dated affair nonetheless. The islands you play on look nearly identical (a couple of new grass textures here, a few new tree sprites there) and the 2D engine is 2001 vintage. You can zoom in and out, but the distances are so ridiculously huge only two or three of those zoom levels are any use for playing.

The Bottom Line
A great city building game with a lot of replay value, Tropico 2 is easily worth getting despite some nitpicky problems. Frog City has fallen off the radar of late but they've cemented themselves in city building history with the Tropico series.

Windows · by Maw (832) · 2007

Trivia

About 300,000 units of the game were sold.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Exeox.

Macintosh added by Corn Popper.

Additional contributors: Indra was here, JRK, chirinea, Sciere, Xoleras, Trond Berntsen, Danfer.

Game added May 3, 2003. Last modified March 7, 2024.