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Tribal Trouble (TT) is a rare gem of a game which I’ve enjoyed playing too much for a while now. It’s a realtime strategy (RTS) game where you take charge of either a tribe of Vikings or Natives, build a village and fight your way toward taking over a fantasy island world. The story starts “Once upon a time, a gang of Viking raiders got so drunk celebrating their latest pillaging that they got lost on the high sea and stranded on a remote group of tropical islands. Here they chose to stay for a while, much to the annoyance of the local Natives…”
If you’ve seen Age of Empires, Age of Mythology or similar games you know pretty much how TT works. You see a world from above and with the mouse you control a number of characters, where they go to and what they do. You command them to build buildings, collect resources, and fight the enemy. That’s pretty much it, and if it sounds simple and easy, it is in some respects. And this is certainly not as complex a game as Civilization for example where you have to keep track of intricate webs of interconnected factors in order to make the best possible decisions. There are combinations of characters, resources, buildings, etc. that you need to consider in TT as well but it’s much more straightforward than in some other games. And therein lies perhaps the only complaint I have with TT, that there are not more types of tribes, characters, buildings, etc. But that’s a complaint only if TT is directly compared to some of the commercial games I’ve mentioned before, and that’s not really a fair comparison. For the size of the game (it’s only a 24Mb download) and the price ($29.95, around 110 AED), this is a great game.
Your typical game starts with a number of Peons (your basic working character) stranded on an island somewhere. The Peons have to be directed to gather resources (wood, rock, iron, or chicken) and build buildings (Quarters, Armories, and Watch towers). In the Quarters you create more Peons and with the Armory you can turn Peons into Warriors with different weapons and eventually also the most powerful being in TT, the Chieftain. In most games you have to build up your little civilization as quickly as you can in order to fight off an invading enemy and eventually invade and destroy your adversary. If you’re playing a campaign you have to accomplish a mission on an island before you can move on to the next and tackle another mission. Unfortunately there is no way in TT to save a game in progress. It saves automatically but only when you complete a level. Perhaps this is a small thing but it’s inconvenient if nothing else to have to give up a game in progress without any way of saving the progress.
A unique and pretty cool feature of TT is that you can create your own game scenario complete with map and other game characteristics. Your created scenario comes with a unique code that you can distribute to others who would want to try the same scenario. So you can create a scenario with some particular characteristics and email the code to your friends. TT is also an online game where arguably the most enjoyable aspect of this game lies. Often even the most simple games become intensely enjoyable once you play against other human players.
There are many things to like about TT, and some of them concerning the game play I’ve laid out above. Something else that’s impressive about TT is the performance. I’ve played it on a Mac mini 1.42Ghz 1Gb RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.4 at 800×600 as well as 1024×768 and it runs “smooth as butter” to borrow an expression from Steve Jobs. It’s a cross-platform game (Linux, Windows and Mac) which usually doesn’t bode well for performance but I’m happy to report you can run this on relatively unimpressive hardware which is really nice. TT seems to be a fully 3D-realized game. By that I mean it doesn’t look like it’s flat 2D sprites wrapped onto 3D spaces. You can zoom in and out (and a nice feature is that the sound “zooms” along with the view), scroll around, change the viewing angle, and more. Basically you can look around everywhere and anywhere in the game to make sure you get the best possible view.
In conclusion this is a rather remarkable game considering the graphics, game play, performance, and price. It’s simple to get going with but offer plenty of challenges that will keep you glued to your computer for a long time. As a Mac user it’s really nice to see a good-looking game that runs on relatively simple hardware that is also cross-platform. Go download the game, get your Peons building and collecting, and take your Warriors into the next village. I am off to another round of TT, and I know that when I’m finished playing, I will wish there was more and that’s pretty good for a game I think.
