Tribez HD: iPad Game Review

Tired of all those RTS or FPS games? Are you looking for a resource management/city building simulation game for the iPad without having to pay a penny? Do you fancy strapping on a loincloth and getting all tribal? Well I know just the game, The Tribez HD.

The game starts with you being thrown back in time with a crazy scientific genius and ending up in a prehistoric settlement with dinosaurs and cavemen (dinosaurs and cavemen? Living together? Hmmm.) You have to help them advance their tribe and um, fulfill their tribal duties, and… ummm… look! Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t play this game for the storyline, fine though it may be. I play it because in my opinion it’s a well done resource simulation that’s fun to play. It’s certainly better than many of the other resource management games out on the iPad at the moment and you don’t have to pay a thing, well not if you don’t want to.

So what is it that makes Tribes so good? Well sit yourself down and I’ll tell you.

Tribez is all about gathering the necessary resources you will need to grow the tribe. That’s about the size of it, It’s the sort of game you may have seen many times before but it’s pretty rare to get something that deals with resource management in such detail on the iPad. Tribez is not as detailed as the Settlers games but it still has a lot more scope than most other iPad resource management sims.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4oT9D7_06Y

Resources are gathered by building the various buildings and assigning a villager to work at them. Your Tribe is not just restricted to accumulating gold, but also food, wood, stone, lumber, cut stone, dinosaur eggs, villagers and more. All of those things are needed to build the wide variety of buildings and decorations, and with only a limited amount of villagers you can’t build everything at once, so you have to prioritise your needs. The amount of any resource made and the amount of time it takes to make it depends on the level of the building. For example a level 1 farm takes 3 minutes to make 15 food while a level 4 farm takes an hour to make 120 food. There’s variation of course but you get the idea.

The story of The Tribez is pushed along by way of a series of quests or missions. Some are as simple as building a type of building, or planting a certain amount of crops while others rely on you finding special items from certain buildings.

Your village will occasionally get attacked by invaders which look like large cavemen. Though I don’t think they’re a terrifying race as they just seem to stamp around and scare the tribe. They haven’t caused any damage to my buildings yet. The enemies don’t really turn up as often as I would like. Maybe my play sessions aren’t long enough, maybe one or two are set to come out every half hour or so, I don’t know, but unless they turn up in greater numbers as your village progresses, they’re too weak and too few to make any difference at all.

The invaders are easily gotten rid of, just tap them several times and they’ll die. If you have explored the cave, built a Dino Lair and have found at least one dinosaur egg, then you can give your dinosaur 60 food and he will patrol your village with a villager on his back and attack any enemies in your village for a while. Although the enemies are killed pretty easily, certainly at the start of the game, so it doesn’t really seem worth it but I guess they do look kinda cool.

The Tribez HD could have easily fallen into the same bad habits as a lot of other sim games, namely having to buy in-game items with real money or having to wait hours or maybe even days for something to be built or upgraded but this game has worked on both of these issues to such an extent that they are scarcely an issue.

Crystals are a second level of currency that can be bought for real money but these same blue crystals are also given to you for free for completing certain quests, or logging in five days in a row, or just gaining a level. Plus what you can buy with these crystals are not essential to the game, they are mainly for ornaments or to speed up building.

The second issue in regards to waiting times is non-existent. Most of the resource buildings have a waiting time of an hour at the most, but if you did want to be play for longer all you would need to do is order the 3 minute build times which work out being more cost-effective anyway.

So, summing up. Here are the pros and cons of Tribez HD

Pros

• It’s Free
• Minimal waiting times.
• Multi-levelled resource management
• Swish and stylised graphics

Cons

• The sound is a bit annoying
• The ace of the game is slow
• Weak storyline, but it’s not important to the game anyway
• Infrequent, easily defeated enemies.

Summary
For a free iPad game this is surprisingly deep and addictive. The graphics are well done and cute and the gameplay is simple to get hold of. With the few restrictions it has, you can play for as long as you want to without running out of things to do. Though, the gameplay does have a tendency to get rather samey.

So, there you go. That’s my review on The Tribez HD game, hope it’s been of some help to you. If you fancy having a go at Tribez then what’s stopping you? You can download it for free from the Apple store here, or view The Tribez official site here.