Tribe: Primitive Builder Review (Dragonraizar)
Tribe knows what it wants to be and doesn't pretend to be something more. It's a building game with management mechanics, it's that simple.
The building aspect is the game's bread and butter. It's fun watching the buildings come together piece by piece, and I always enjoyed unlocking a new building to see how it would come together. It's management aspect is clean and concise. You won't deal with any event based challenges to your supply line, the only trouble that may come is making sure you have enough coming in from the start of the supply chain. You can speed up their progress with different tiers of totems, but I personally never found that I needed to focus too much on that.
The village storage system has been updated from launch, so both storages and marketplaces share a universal storage that is taken from for each region, though you have to attach buildings to individual storages, which require their own workers to expand how many buildings can be connected to it.
The main gripe I have with this game is how you get new villagers. You have to speak to the region's scout, who will spawn a camp you have to go to. I don't have a problem with this process as a concept, but you only find three per camp through the whole game. I can see the function of it, giving you something to do while your growing villages keeps producing more resources while you're off. But the same could be said for gathering more resources yourself. It's nice to have a reason to walk through the rest of the map, but the appreciation fades after a few times. You'll only ever discover things the first few times as well, and there's even less to find in every area past the first. It becomes a tedious slog, and I felt discouraged to keep expanding beyond what I needed because that would mean having to run after more workers. And like I said, I don't have an issue with the process, it's the implementation that I feel could be tweaked. I found that the average village I made took around 60~ villagers. So, finding 3 each time, that's at least twenty runs. From which, even if you fast travel back, you have to then run to where the scout is as well. If the number of workers was raised, then I could see this becoming a much more smooth process as you collect villagers during the process of building up the village. Even something like 5 would be an improvement, taking that twenty trips down to twelve. I didn't even build a village in the last area because I was just so tired of it.
Despite that one big gripe, I really do recommend this game if you enjoy the idea of construction a tribal village. There's no factions or approval ratings. No anything outside the plain and simple building and assigning workers to create a functioning, self sustaining village, with a basic network of resource sharing through marketplaces to make up for what a region may lack. And the devs are listening to feedback and still updating the game, so that point may be rendered moot before long.