Tropico 4: Modern Times

 PC
User Score
7.6

Generally favorable reviews- based on 68 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 49 out of 68
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 68
  3. Negative: 10 out of 68
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  1. Ragegoat
    Jul 11, 2014
    1
    Modern Times is a DLC for Tropico 4, that lets everything get more modern. New buildings and a longer time line in particular.

    The buildings are visually very pretty, but show up way too early. It nags me if a 1960es neighborhood in a carribian dictatorship looks like a 2015 skyline from a financial centre in East Asia. Maybe I'm just strange, but I'd like my 60es slum to at least    Modern Times is a DLC for Tropico 4, that lets everything get more modern. New buildings and a longer time line in particular.

    The buildings are visually very pretty, but show up way too early. It nags me if a 1960es neighborhood in a carribian dictatorship looks like a 2015 skyline from a financial centre in East Asia. Maybe I'm just strange, but I'd like my 60es slum to at least remind me of City of God. In stead, from 1966 and forward, all apartment buildings will me bade mostly out of glass and have a helicopter landing pad on top of them. Not the third-world country in the cold war feel that Tropico is otherwise managing to cultivate very well.

    Other changes to the buildings are game play breaking and have obviously not been thought through. Just to mention a few thing: The farms have made it impossible to play on the hardest difficulty levels because of the terrain on these maps (and I'm talking about hardest difficulty for randomized maps - the predefined maps carrying the label "hard" are actually fairly easy). You NEED a certain area of level land with good crops to place a modern farm. The old farms you could place near a hillside, and the peasants would do their best to put up a few fields here and there to get some crops out of the meager land. So can you not just build some old-timey farms you ask? No! Once the new farms have been invented, there is NO building regular farms. This turns the start of the game into a rush to build as many farms as possible before the useless farms are invented. After this, there is no re-building farms that get destroyed, basically ruining your chance to produce farming goods.

    Furthermore, there is now "superior" housing buildings. Better in all ways. Who wants to play a stategy game where you have to be an idiot to use five out of six options? Without "Modern Times" you have a hard choice between the different home types offering different advantages - which is what strategy games shoudl do: face players with hard choices.

    I guess the increased time line is an advantage, but you'll enjoy the extra time city building only one type of housing building (that is, if you're not an idiot) and as many huge, circular farms you can fit in (which is probably not very many if you're going for a challenge).

    In short, Tropico 4 (which is quite amazing on its own) is simply better without Modern Times. The game design mistakes are so very basic that no game company should make them. Avoid it like you would a t-rex with acne. I wouldn't recommend that anyone buy this DLC. Don't get it if it's really cheap. Don't get it if it's free. If you have it, don't enable it - in stead put it in a coffin with garlic-covered lead spikes on the inside, and dump it on 30m of holy-water.    … Expand
  2. gracjanski
    Aug 23, 2018
    3
    This DLC is really bad and I am so dissapointed. Tropico 4 was so great,the campaign so funny and the atmosphere perfect. I was looking forward to see many new buildings and to the metro station to solve the traffic problem. But you get new buildings, that are so overpowered that makes the old building useless, it makes the game so easy, you dont need to think anymore. And even more youThis DLC is really bad and I am so dissapointed. Tropico 4 was so great,the campaign so funny and the atmosphere perfect. I was looking forward to see many new buildings and to the metro station to solve the traffic problem. But you get new buildings, that are so overpowered that makes the old building useless, it makes the game so easy, you dont need to think anymore. And even more you get them so quickly, it doesnt fit to the timeline: You get modern buildings already in the 60s ->lol. And there is no turning back to build old buildings -.- Why didnt I get the new buildings in the late time like 2000? Why cant I decide between old and new buildings?
    You can modernize your palace, that looks very unsharp in the far and I cant see any mod to change that, because all the links to the calipso forum are dead, there are no topics about Tropico 4 in the forum...This is so ridiculous.

    The timeline is a good idea, it changes the game slightly, based on historical events.    … Expand

Awards & Rankings

67
#67 Best PC Game of 2012

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
78

Generally favorable reviews - based on 11 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 11
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 11
  3. Negative: 0 out of 11
  1. Absolute Games
    May 24, 2012
    68
    Modern Times is a good excuse to return to the familiar world of Tropico, but, frankly, the game has almost outstayed its welcome.
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  2. PC Gamer UK
    May 11, 2012
    78
    The new scenarios are enlivened by the fantastic timeline system. [June 2012, p.97]
  3. Game Over Online
    May 8, 2012
    82
    Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with Tropico 4: Modern Times. The add-on is lighthearted and breezy, and with all of the new buildings and edicts, you now have even more ways to build and run your perfect Caribbean island. Plus, since the campaign takes about 35 hours to complete (with sandbox mode adding more time to this), and since the add-on only costs $20, Modern Times is even a good deal, and so it's an easy game for me to recommend.
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