Tropico is similar to most any simulation game.You get land and the buildings to place on it. You try to make people happy and bring in an income for your fledgling land at the same time. Problems arise that you must find ways to deal with and how to avoid them in the future. Tropico puts you in the role of the newly installed dictator of an obscure Caribbean island and you must develop and rule to the best of your abilities. While building structures is such a big part of the game, dealing with the social, economic, and political tensions among the people of your island is even more important. It's only your choice, if you want to be SOB or Mr. Nice Tropico features very addictive building-oriented gameplay of hits such as SimCity 3000 and Railroad Tycoon 2, combined with a healthy dose of Latin American political intrigue, and bundles it up in an easy-to-learn, hard to master, utterly addictive package. Tropico is first and foremost a builder which includes over 85 structures types to build, including : Residential (tenement, apartment complex, bunkhouses, etc), Industrial (cannery, jewelry factory, rum distillery, etc), Agricultural (corn farms, ranches, mines, etc), Mining, Tourism (hotels, bungalows, souvenir shops, etc), Governmental (newspaper shops, armoury's, police stations, etc) and Trade (ports, airports and roadways), Entertainment (casinos, restaurants, night clubs, etc) and human services (schools, marketplaces, clinics, etc). How you can see, there are many different types of buildings to choose from, and the way you chose things will have a different result. Certainly there aren't only buildings, but also characters. Tropico includes about 46 different characters (farmers, soldiers, workers, etc) each having their own political views, physical desires, homes, jobs, and moral attitudes. In addition, each of these individual characteristics can really affect the way things run on your island so you have to be careful. Powered by the S3D (Railroad Tycoon II) graphic engine, you will notice that Tropico's graphics are truly great with some superb detail. The game uses the options of software or hardware rendering with 8 or16-bit colors using resolutions from 640x480 all the way up to 1600x1200 which looked very good. To benefit from the hardware 3D option, you will need at least a video card equipped with 16MB of video RAM. The game Interface is primarily a point and click with a few added keyboard controls (though I would appreciate more keyboard hotkeys...). Tropico is both very funny and highly addictive game which is easy to play but difficult to master :)