Tribe Nation Review

The roguelike genre has experienced plenty of success over the past decade, as indie developers found a new way to tap into the gaming ethos. A number of titles were celebrated for their addictive nature, being punishing but also rewarding. The open-ended nature of the genre allows it to be transported to any setting and time period, and the most recent such entry is Tribe Nation, a historical strategy game that features some decent mechanics and a low asking price.

The campaign is set in the ancient Europe around 50BC, as Caesar begins his ascent to power. The Celtic people who have previously settled on the continent now find themselves in a sweeping conflict and one that they are sure to lose. Players assume the role of a leader from one such Celtic tribe, trying to make its way across Europe and back home to Ireland while Roman forces close in behind them. Tribe Nation offers a roguelike campaign, which means that it is meant to be tackled across multiple attempts. As such, there is not much of a narrative to follow. Before various battles, there are text boxes that loosely describe some adventurous scenarios, but it doesn't really connect with the gameplay in any way.

The campaign map is a rough outline of the European continent, and as you begin the trek, you can choose a path through various regions. There are occasional forks in the road within each region, but your direction is most often determined by whether or not a battle or a non-combat scenario awaits at the next hop. The map and your progress is highly reminiscent of puzzle game campaign maps, as you move between points. With each new step forward, the Roman army units often appear on your tail acting as a deadly force constantly pushing you onwards, and thus preventing you from moving back and forth within the same area much.

At the start of the campaign, you pick a chieftain – only one is available from the start, as another two get unlocked once you get far enough in your campaign attempts. There is a tutorial that explains the basics of battles, but not one that helps understand the flow of the campaign and management of your clan – though there is a tooltip that loosely outlines some of the basics. Through a clan management screen, you can manage your available military units (start with about 3, and can recruit more later), as well as the inventory of goods. But there's not much to do at the outset, so you set out to your first few moves across the map, and immediately arrive at a battle.

Combat is arguably the core gameplay mechanic of Tribe Nation, and you'll be doing a lot of it. The action takes place on small randomly generated hex-grid maps, which are 3D but isometric akin to strategy games of old such as Heroes of Might & Magic. Your camp and the enemy camp get placed on opposite sides of the arena, and units get deployed near it. The goal is to defeat your opponents and destroy their camp, though there is an option to retreat if you don't wish to raze.

Your units consist of individual groups, one per tile, and the action is real-time with the option to pause to issue orders. The armies include typical swordsmen and archers, as well as their mounted variations, and siege machinery later on. Moving them around the map and issuing attack orders is straightforward, though the pathfinding can be quite poor as no units can occupy the same tile, so they awkwardly shuffle around. Even on maps that are entirely flat, units will take strange paths to reach their destination. The maps themselves are random, which can include rivers (passable and not), mud tiles that slow you down, elevated positions, and special Stonehenge monument tiles which give whoever controls them a boost in combat.

Confrontations are typical, as the units stand opposite and trade blows, and their health decreases. You will need to be extra involved in the process by also issuing temporary commands – such as rushing into battle with added speed, changing their formation for defensive bonuses but slower movement, and tasking them to use shield-breaking weapons if equipped. The battle can also be disrupted by random map conditions, such as the enemy camp randomly catching fire, or fog obscuring units that prevents issuing orders. You can also place temporary items, such as a burning effigy, to decrease the enemy unit effectiveness as they approach.

As such, the combat has just enough dynamic elements to keep each battle unique, but this still isn't enough because you'll be doing so much of it. Pretty much almost every move on the campaign map is a battle, and even though they last just a couple of minutes, they become tedious sooner than one would have liked. After using all of your abilities and manoeuvring into the best position, all you can do is wait and hope that the losses are minimal. It also helps to rush a unit to the monument tile, if it appears, for the bonus.

After combat, if you are victorious, you get to make a decision on how much looting to do. The options are straightforward. Do only a little, which yields less materials and currency, but gives you a passive blessing for a few turns, such as increased damage or a better chance for finding items. The normal loot option offers some additional items, and the heavy looting may yield the most materials but also adds a temporary curse, such as giving enemies increased power for the next few battles. This constant decision making does help each campaign feel different and keeps you involved. There are also some narrative-style decision events, such as choosing to investigate an abandoned mine or crossing a collapsed bridge instead of walking around, but these are infrequent.

The loot is used to keep your army units in good condition. In a bit of RPG-style design, you have to manually manage the inventory of each unit. You can give them a sword or a bow to change their unit type, as well as craft armor and helmets to equip into their slot. Thankfully, iron is the only material used for crafting; horses are needed to create mounted units. Each unit can also be assigned a commander, which can be either a warlord or a druid. In combat, the warlords typically allow their unit to change formations, while druid-led units can construct the effigies and control the monument tile when near it. You may meet new commanders over the course of the adventure, and swap them out if preferred.

The commanders also bring with them Wisdom, which is the second main menu screen. Here, you can get an overview of all the various passive perks that have been unlocked during this campaign run. These can range from passively healing your soldiers between battle to increasing your chances of getting better loot, to unlocking new equipment crafting possibilities. It's entirely random which Wisdom you get during a campaign, and it can impact your progress quite profoundly.

Other than equipment, it's also important to keep your armies alive and replenished with new recruits. Doing so not only keeps them effective, but allows them to grow in rank and proficiency with their equipped weapon. However, this is where Tribe Nation runs into its first difficulty hurdle. New people are quite tough to come by (and also randomized), and reinforcing your army unit makes them lose their veterancy. If you have a unit that is almost depleted, you can give them full reinforcements, but that resets all their combat experience. You can only reinforce a certain very small amount without losing battle experience, which leads to experienced but very weakened units heading into battle. Or, as the campaign goes on, you are faced with having a healthy but constantly inexperienced army. There is a Wisdom perk that reduces the limit on how little you can reinforce without losing experience, but it's random and often still not enough. This proves to be a constant source of frustration and needed more balancing.

This brings us to the issue of difficulty as a whole in a roguelike game. While there are three settings available, we played on Normal as usual. Here, the challenge level quickly skews towards being defeated by attrition. Your main goals in the endless repetitive battle maps is to keep as much health as possible across all your units, which definitely leads to a turtling strategy as the enemy is more than happy to charge across the map towards you. Minimizing losses is often still not enough to avoid the randomly generated resources from your victories, and so you often find yourself without any men to replenish the ranks, or enough material to craft anything. It's very easy for issues to snowball, and there is no mechanism for recovery other than sheer luck. You could get fortunate and your next move across the campaign map brings you to a town, where you can trade some currency for reinforcements and materials, but it often just seems like delaying the inevitable.

Roguelikes typically promote experimentation and a variety of approaches, but not so in Tribe Nation. If you want to have any chance of success, it comes down to having good loot for your victory spoils and discovering Wisdoms that are actually useful – such as the passive bonuses for healing troops and reduced reinforcement penalties, and not the less useful ones such as being able to craft temporary energy boosts or being able to have multiple walls around your camp on the battle maps. If you get very fortunate with numerous factors, you could probably take your armies on the offensive during combat; but for the most part this game is strongly focused on defense and just surviving by letting the opposition come at you and weathering the storm with minimal losses.

And generally speaking – unlike most roguelike games, there are no rewards or sense of progress here. You don't unlock anything and nothing carries over between campaigns, which means only the most adamant fans of the genre would enjoy their time across a multitude of attempts.

The presentation is also of varying quality, but is fitting for the low $10 asking price. While the battle maps look decent and are randomized, the backgrounds on their perimeter remain the same. Most of the effects are rather basic and look a bit silly, like your units being in fog that envelops exactly one tile. The music doesn't really feel setting appropriate, and there are really just one or two tracks that play every battle. The menus are quite rudimentary, and while they function OK, they remind of games like Civilization from the 90s.

Tribe Nation is a decently deep but somewhat underdeveloped roguelike strategy experience. There is some satisfaction to be had with the management of resources, and the random nature of battles. Getting the wisdom benefits that are useful can be a critical part of surviving the journey, but because it is truly random, it can be a bit frustrating. Equally so is the lack of progress between campaign attempts, and the general feel of resource attrition gameplay design. The numerous battles and repetitive music also begin to wear you down sooner rather than later. It's not a great looking game, but for just $10, this and the rest of Tribe Nation's shortcomings may be overlooked by some passionate fans of the roguelike genre.