Tropico 5 - The Big Cheese (DLC)

Tropico 5 - The Big Cheese is a small DLC add-on for the island city-builder and political satire sim Tropico 5, developed by Haemimont Games. The base game tasks you with ruling a Caribbean island nation across several historical eras, balancing factions, trade, research, and the ever-present threat of your own population revolting. This DLC slots into that structure as a content drop rather than a systemic expansion, adding thematic missions and assets tied to, predictably, cheese production and the economic chains that come with it. From a strategy standpoint, the core appeal of Tropico 5 is its layered decision-making: you juggle colonial-era edicts, cold-war superpower relations, technology research, and multiplayer modes where a second El Presidente can either co-operate or sabotage your plans. The Big Cheese does not meaningfully extend any of those systems. What you get is largely cosmetic and mission-flavored content built around the dairy production chain. If you have already mapped out your island's trade routes and know exactly which export goods maximise your treasury, the cheese economy angle offers a thin but tangible new throughline to optimise. For anyone else, it registers as background noise. The honest numbers here matter. The base game carries a Mixed Steam review score sitting at 79% positive across a large sample, and a Metacritic score of 75. Those figures reflect a game that is competent and entertaining but uneven, particularly in its AI behavior during the later campaign missions and in some multiplayer balance issues. This DLC inherits all of those baseline problems without fixing any of them. The tutorial situation in Tropico 5 is already a weak point for newcomers, and The Big Cheese does nothing to address the learning curve for players still figuring out how faction approval ratings interact with election cycles. For dedicated Tropico 5 players who have exhausted the base content and want a low-friction reason to reload a save, this delivers exactly what a small DLC should: a focused scenario, a few new buildings or edicts, and a light narrative wrapper. That is the ceiling. It is not a content overhaul, it does not add new eras or multiplayer scenarios, and it will not convert anyone sitting on the fence about whether Tropico 5 is worth their time. Buy the base game first, put in a solid chunk of hours, and only then consider whether the DLC catalog adds meaningful replay value. Diego, Scout Team