Tropico 5
Fair · RPG · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 22.6h
- Value
- $0.88/hr
- Reviews
- 79% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 4 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, Linux.
Return to the remote island nation of Tropico and expand your Dynasty’s reign from the early colonial period to beyond the 21st Century, facing new challenges including advanced trading mechanics, technology and scientific research, as well as cooperative and competitive MULTIPLAYER.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $3.99. That was September 2018. 48 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 65 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 13 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 71 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Anno 1800 ($14.99, scores 60) beats it on value, while it beats Grand Ages: Medieval ($19.99, scores 0).
This site sampled 683 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 3 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 47 percent of the 713 reviews written there were positive, against 79 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
22.6 hours to finish it, 85 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 3.8 times the campaign.
The drop-off
74% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
97 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I love Tropico 3, and 4 and I wanted to love Tropico 5, but I just can't. Tropico 5 feels like a city builder that forgot it was supposed to be fun. Tropico 3 and 4 let you build your island your way. Tropico 5 constantly interrupts you with forced tasks that drag you through a rigid checklist instead of letting you play. Every mission pushes you into a sequence of mandatory objectives that you cannot ignore. You...
The game's mechanics are very vague and unfriendly to new players. Miniscule things like the game's AI breaking, causing a traffic jam or delay in resources can be catastrophic to your economy. You've built the structures, you've set the trade routes, you've set a budget, hired workers...and you lose money. And you have no idea why. Whatever that reason could be, you'll never know. The game won't tell you. It...
simcity 4 of the franchise, it's fine, it's starting to get soulless, it's still worth 100%ing
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Tropico 5 scores 54/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/245620/tropico-5The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.