Tropico 2: Pirate Cove Critic Reviews

It's like the developers read my review and fixed everything I complained about in the first game.

Graphics whores will inevitably be put off by the old school look and feel of the title, but if you can get past that, this is one of the best god games the PC has seen in quite a while.

The kind of great sequel that should be encouraged - it builds on the solid base of the original, cleans up most of the problems and manages to stake out its own territory in the process.

Tropico 2 is a wonderful game worth its weight in buried golden treasure.

Despite its flaws, Pirate Cove is a very engaging game, made all the better by being the first title that doesn’t just make gambling, drinking, wenching and plundering in the Caribbean a recommendation, but a requirement.

It also possesses those characteristics you'd want from just about any game, including a strong interface, good game balance, a bit of whimsy, attractively animated graphics and pleasantly anachronistic, modern Caribbean music.

It looks good and sounds good and is fun and breezy to play, but it also gets repetitive after several missions, and it doesn’t offer the kind of variety other tycoon games do.

Argh, it's good to be the pirate king! But it'd be even better if you could do some of the plundering yourself.

As an intellectual toy, Tropico 2 is fascinating and detailed; as a game, it's enormously addictive.

The gameplay will keep everyone busy for awhile, but after some time spent building the pirate island, things become more of a waiting game than anything else.

The first Tropico offering was a bit wittier, and a touch more engrossing, but the Pirate theme is done as well as possible in this title.

There's plenty of depth to the gameplay, and there's tons of scenarios to play, plus the sandbox mode, so it ought to keep you going for ages.

More user-friendly than the original. It's much more free despite what appears to be an overwhelming amount of decisions and option. This is a good thing however and thanks to the handy interface it couldn't be made easier.

Surprisingly, there is no option for random generation of islands, nor is there any scope for multiplayer frolics, making it feel rather limited.

At some point, the game is bound to become tedious and there's not much in it that would increase its replayability... The game lacks the hugeness of "Sim City" and the exciting twists of, say, "Caesar 3."

Fans of "Tropico" may wish that Frog City had developed a more direct descendant of the original--the mechanics are basically the same, but Tropico 2 is a very different game.

In spite of its new content and subtle tweaks, Pirate Cove will not feel like a new game to anyone who played the original. It will feel like a mod. A clever, polished mod -- a mod that would have made a fine retail expansion pack -- but a mod nonetheless, and not worthy of its status as a full-fledged sequel.

I have played many city-building games over the years, but this one almost suffers because of its pirate theme, showing you by glaring contrast all the raucous fun that you're missing.

The pirate decor is barely a skin-deep covering on a sim that could just as easily have been made about the ACME Widget Factory.

A competently done city building game with nothing to set it apart from the crowd.