Review by: Dave VanDyk

If you thought you were about to recover from your megalomania addiction, think again; Kalypso is back with a new expansion for its wacky dictatorship sim. Weighing in at a solid twenty bucks, Tropico 3: Absolute Power promises ten new campaign missions, new potential for disasters and mayhem, a range of new buildings and edicts to enact, and even an all-new "Loyalist" faction to spice things up for El Presidente.

The new campaign missions enable the expansion pack to hit the ground running by demonstrating much of the new content right away. The objective-based missions in Absolute Power are handled a bit differently than the original game, with much more focus on giving you tangible goals to achieve (with very real consequences) as opposed to the somewhat vague and indirect objectives the original game offered. Of course, they also now have more of a slant towards the abstract and silly; the first mission for example has you working to properly govern an island of self-proclaimed street-hippies, interested only in creating the happiest place in the Caribbean. They quickly lay down some conditions, however, stating you shouldn't set up more than one pollution-generating factory while doing so (or start rolling in mass tourists, army bases, and the like) - ignoring this suggestion will quickly lead to a mass exodus of citizens who run off to become rebels in protest.

Another mission has you trying to save your city from a rupture in the space-time continuum which causes the entire town to 'reset' every 20 years - this challenges you with trying to survive using an incredibly limited array of building options which are only expanded over time through pop-up research choices you select, and eventually by satisfying a set of pre-requisites to close the rupture and end the loop. I have to admit that I found the "you lose - play the scenario to see how you lost!" opening to this mission in particular pretty funny, along with all the other little touches which had been scripted in.

In fact, this is where the expansion really plays on what I felt was one of Tropico 3's stronger suits: the mission scripting. You're never just given a static set of objectives and cut loose on the island to go stir-crazy - instead, you're treated to any number of constant events as time goes on, most of which will perpetually tie into one another and culminate into either something fantastic or a horrible disaster depending on the choices you make.

The original did this through little tricks like your island economy tanking because of a deal you had signed five years prior with a company that's now gone out of business, and the expansion spruces things up even more with things like time-travelling "Psilons" that might randomly kill your citizens until they're found, or other events which threaten military invasion or rebellion unless properly dealt with. The developers really went into overdrive in trying to come up with as many creative implementations for these scripted mission events as possible, and it shows.