Tropico 4
BANGER · Strategy · 2011
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $14.99.
- Length
- 40.4h
- Value
- $0.37/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 5 GB of storage. Windows only.
The world is changing and Tropico is moving with the times - geographical powers rise and fall and the world market is dominated by new players with new demands and offers - and you, as El Presidente, face a whole new set of challenges.
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
April 2014 is where it bottomed out, at $2.99. Its cuts run 70 percent off as a rule. There have been 85 in the 14 years tracked, about 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 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 84 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Two Point Museum ($29.99, scores 90) beats it on value, while it beats Tropico 3 ($9.99, scores 79).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $34.41. It costs $14.99.
The press gave it 78; the people who bought it give it 92 percent. A 14-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 15 percent of players ever finish it. On a 40.4-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 3 of the 432 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 60 percent of the 569 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
40.4 hours to finish it, 108 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.7 times the campaign.
The drop-off
46% start to 15% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
87 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
yeah it's the best one in the series I LOVE that there's no yank drivel like "ZONING" and I can just plop my buildings wherever
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
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Tropico 4 scores 87/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/57690/tropico-4The 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 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.