Regardless of the mission, figuring out how to best spend your initial allowance of cash is what will ultimately set you on the road to either victory or miserable failure. Sure, your people might cry out for lavish things like 'education' and 'qualified medical care', but if you invest in these right away you may not have enough leftover cash to get the necessary farms and facilities in place to start turning a profit. On the other hand, blowing everything on production means your citizens might start dropping like flies or just emigrate off of your island at the first chance.

Considering the huge range of possible wares you can export, as well as how severe of an impact the state of your workforce can have on your ability to shift this produce around, it's a blessing the game includes an "Almanac" interface to let you summarize all of this information at a glance. This lets you easily get access to key details like current export prices, your standing with the major superpowers (USA and Russia), and the status of all of the citizens on your island, categorized across stats such as happiness, education, skill level, and so on. You can then click on the individual citizens presented here to select them in the game-world and get a detailed rundown of their personal thoughts and feelings, needs, and skill sets.

So while managing your citizens’ needs is crucial in keeping your island running smoothly, you can help make things easier by customizing your dictator to match your play style. As I hinted at earlier, the game offers a pretty cool number of ways to customize your in-game avatar, both visually and in underlying stats. Want a pro-religion Fidel Castro-lookalike who was raised by the CIA, or a scurvy pirate with a British top-hat and curly moustache who suffers from flatulence problems? The game's ability to let you pick and choose exactly what kind of dictator you'll be provides you with opportunities like none other. Plus, when election time rolls around, you can create your own custom speech from a few selectable options (such as choosing to address the issues of religion or housing, and praising certain parties or even yourself to raise public favor) which will then be verbally played over the game's regular news segments from your faithful radio personality and staunch supporter.

The game's customization options and amount of detail really work to its favor, since much of the focus is on laying down the framework for your island's infrastructure, and then sitting back and hoping the dollars roll in. That means you'll spend a lot of time just watching your citizens wander around your island, which can lead to concerns about how slow-paced the game is. Sure, it comes with requisite time-acceleration options to pass the time quicker, but it gets a little annoying when you notice it takes your citizens the better part of a year to get just a couple of buildings together. Granted, it's realistic, but it's also annoying when a construction project is delayed for another few months when it hits 99% because the work crew's shift was over and they decided to shuffle off and get drunk. Problems such as poverty and homelessness (resulting in shacks randomly appearing all over your island) also can be pretty annoying to deal with at first until you've landed some time with the game and have a better understanding of what's needed to prevent these situations from occurring.

The only other real complaint I have that these kinds of games are always missing some form of real-time multiplayer mode; Tropico 3 to its credit does offer some online options for sharing scores and favored island layouts, but nothing near the kind of thrill you'd get from setting up your island in tandem with a friend, watching how they deal with challenges, and perhaps setting up trade routes or forms of sabotage using a few additional options.

Beyond that, Tropico 3 is a fantastically addictive single player game that will have you up until the wee hours of the morning — who knew a Castro sim could be so much fun?