I had a ton of fun playing Tropico 6 on PC back when I reviewed the game. Now Kalypso Media is looking to expand El Presidente’s kingdom by bringing the game out on Consoles! Both an Xbox One and PS4 version of the game were announced just prior to E3 2019 and is set to launch later this year. For Xbox One players though, you can begin your rule of Tropico now as Tropico 6 is already available as part of the Xbox Game Preview program.
During E3 2019 I got to go hands on with this early access build and I was impressed by what I saw. While the game is meant to be played on PC, with numerous menus and tabs needing to be accessed, I was surprised at how easy it was playing Tropico 6 on a controller. A circular menu replaces the PC versions bottom row of icons allowing for full functionality of all the games menu mechanics. Building was also assigned its own hotkey to further speed up access. Time controls have been assigned to the D-pad which makes accessing them very convenient! After a few minutes learning the UI I was off building gold mines and completing quests for the different factions vying for my favor!
There were the occasional hitches while I would scroll across the games beautiful terrain but overall I was impressed by the performance on hand. I do plan to try out a late era game with tons of buildings sometime soon with the Game Preview version to really get a feel for total performance on all models of Xbox One hardware. Being an early access title I am sure there might be other features missing I might not have had time to notice. Even still I am impressed that a game of this depth handles so well with a controller. For any console player hoping to grab a great city building sim Tropico 6 would be my recommendation!
