Shiver me timbers! MS Bob has invaded my game, argh!

Playing like a cross between Sim City and a real-time strategy game, Tropico 2: Pirate Cove is an interesting amalgam of planning, strategy, luck, and patience.

Unfortunately, there's not a single tactical element to the game. You can't direct anyone to day anything. You pass edicts and pursuade your peons to do things by manipulating the wages for certain activities. You can give your ship general orders such as Cruising a sea or raiding a farm for peasants, but you play no role in the outcome of any of the orders you give.

This is a relatively new phenomenon in games. Master of Orion 3 is the most egregious offender, but after playing several hours of Tropico 2, I'm ready to rate it next to MOO 3. Sim City plays the same way but at least in that game you have more tools for shaping the world around you.

Tropico 2's biggest deficiency is not the lack of tactics in the game play, but the lack of user in the interface. There's tons of buttons to click and screens to look at, but significantly little help in figuring any of it out. The manual is nigh-on worthless. I still haven't figured out what criteria determines how you can make a new captain available for recruitment. This seems to be a trait common to the new breed of strategy-only games as MOO 3 has probably the worst interface to ever exist and Tropico 2 is once again giving it a run for it's money.

This is not to say that Tropico 2 is a bad game. It's actually pretty fun once you DO learn the ins-and-outs of the UI. Unfortunately, that fun comes to a screeching halt when a new twist of the game is thrown at you and you have to figure out how to accomplish what the pirate in the top left corner is telling you.

And let's spend a minute talking about that pirate in the corner. He's got lots of advice about what you're doing wrong in the game, and he shares it frequently, to the point of distraction from the game. And when you need to know something from him, you have to click, click, click, click, click, click, click to get it out of him. Unless you remembered to pause the game you have also lost enough time that your settlement is in full mutiny.

The game itself is divided into three activities: city building, piracy, and civil management. Like Sim City you have to build roads and buildings and set prices for services (the equivalent of taxes). Like any Real-Time-Strategy game, you have to collect resources to build composite products and make sure there's enough labor around to keep your stores open. Finally, you have to send your pirate ships out of safe haven into the seas for loot, more peasants, trained laborers, and even wealthy captives. If you could actually COMMAND these missions that game would seem much more complete.

The city-building is rather dull as there aren't many building that you'll need more than one of, and some of the buildings are just more productive versions of other buildings.

Population management consists of feeding and sheltering your peasants, providing vices for your pirates and striking a balance between order (good for peasants) and chaos (good for pirates). Make the peasants too happy and you'll probably have a mutiny on your hands. Make the pirates too happy and you'll probably starve all of your peasants.

The graphics are standard-fare city builder. You can rotate the terrain 90 degrees at a time in either direction, you can zoom in and out, and you can select a specific person and watch him or her go about their business. The detail of the buildings and people is pretty good. The art is stylistically very much like Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Probably the best part of the game is it's soundtrack. There's some really nice Caribbean music that is very easy to listen to for hours on end. It's very happy music, and probably helps you keep an even keel when you're fighting with the UI. I usually mute the music in games, but I never feel compelled to with Tropico 2.

The final negative for the game is the lack of a multi-player mode. Why not allow two people to be running their own islands simultaneously and allow them to send their pirates to other players for both trade and mayhem? This would make the game much more fun than it currently is.

I can't really recommend this game as a long term favorite. Because of it's wonderful soundtrack and interesting premise, it is fun to play after you've learned where to look for things. If you need a break from Civ 3 or Warcraft 3, this might be your ticket for a few hours at a time.