Recent reviews by Andrew

Game isn't even finished and its changed my life

One of, if not the best indie roguelite to come out in recent years

game of tha year

Oh my god man

peak

Actually one of the best games ever made

Unfortunately I cannot recommend Monster Tribe, as in its current state it's a mess.

First of all, it feels as if this game has an identity crisis. It wants to be an open world monster tamer with sandbox/resource gathering elements. None of these elements actually tie into each other beyond surface level connections though. Materials you harvest are only ever used to gate your progress, whether that be in the overarching plot of the game or gating you from getting new monsters. I only ever found myself harvesting resources when I absolutely needed to for the story. Even disregarding the fact that these elements of the game are disjointed though, these gameplay aspects just aren't compelling to play. Even if these game loops fed into each other I don't think I would make for a fun game, since the foundation itself is completely flawed. I want to break down my experience with each system the game presented, starting with the monster collecting and combat itself.

Collecting new monsters in Monster Tribe is done by cloning them at these pause statues. At these statues you are presented a list of materials that are required to clone a new monster to add to your party. Like I said before, this just feels like a surface level solution to linking the resource gathering and monster collecting elements together. It aids neither system in any meaningful way, and actively hurts the monster gathering side of things. Doing things this way ends up completely mitigating any sense of discovery in finding new creatures. Sure, you don't know which creature you're cloning before you make it but by the time you have gathered everything you need you are already anticipating something new. There is no sense of surprise in finding any of the monsters while exploring, which would have really aided the open world aspect.

That being said, I only interacted with this system when I played the demo. Nothing mechanically regarding it has changed since then, but the balance of battles is so completely in your favor that I realized I simply did not need any more monsters than my starter. I reached near the end of the fire area when I played, and only died once or twice. Even in group battles when it was 1 against 3 I would completely dominate. I didn't use any strategy either, I just attacked until either all the opponents fainted or I couldn't attack anymore, at which time I would rest so I could get enough attack points to finish the opponent off. It gets stale very fast and overall is very bare-bones. Something that honestly would have worked well would have been allowing items you collected to be used in battles, it would have been a pretty natural way to tie the gathering system in with the core game loop more while also allowing for more strategy on the player's side.

Another thing to note is that battles are extremely cluttered and hard to read, despite how stripped down they are gameplay-wise. Health bars, MP bars, and status effects are all extremely small and inconspicuous, taking a lot of active effort to read. It's just not very user friendly.

There is potential in the battle system, I think the positioning aspect of battles is interesting, especially how some status effects are locked to the tile its used on rather than the monster the attack hits, but its also sadly completely underutilized and I never found it actually mattering in context.

The open world aspect, much like the battle system, is very dry. It's very hard to do an open world well and Monster Tribe sadly falls flat in that department. It's only an open world to the extent that there are big open spaces to walk around in. There are these huge gaps of nothing but battle orbs floating around aimlessly that you have to walk between to get anywhere that actually progresses the story. That combined with the fact that the battles themselves just are not fun makes traversing more of a game of dodging as many battles as you can, then destroying the monsters you do end up having to encounter. To make an open world worth exploring you really need to include a wide variety of things to do in that space, and Monster Tribe provides the player with little to do besides walk from point A to point B.

The only time I found something to do was when I encountered some Miners who gave me a quest to fix the minecart tracks by lighting some lanterns. Each rail required materials to fix. The loop boiled down to going to a rail, lighting the lantern, fixing the rail, doing it again until I didn't have enough resources to fix it, running around to try to find the resources I needed, then returning and doing it all over again. It was extremely boring.

This is the decision I think not only drags the game down the most but I also genuinely don't understand the reasoning for its inclusion. There is so much in this game that is needlessly locked behind an arbitrary amount of resources. Want a new monster? Chop down 12 trees. Want to progress the story? Mine 15 rocks and catch 13 fish. It's such mindless busywork that I don't even understand adding it. Collecting resources itself is also a chore, you cannot hold down the input to break whatever you're harvesting, so you end up just sitting at a tree for 30 seconds mashing your keyboard until it falls down and then you can go do it all over.

There are also so many items you need to find and keep track of. Each of your tools (Axe, Pickaxe and Fishing Rod) have their own skill trees that require materials to upgrade. Each upgrade allows you to collect more materials. It is such a self contained system. These upgrades only serve to collect more resources and aren't present in any other aspects of the game from what I could see. The only time I ever found myself actively engaging in upgrades was when they game arbitrarily decided that to progress I needed some specific stone that required a better pickaxe to harvest. It's needlessly complicated as the upgrades effect very little besides this self contained system.

This is easily the most tedious aspect of the gameplay loop. I have nothing positive to say about it.

I have a bunch of other gripes that I'll just run through quickly now.

• The game is just not good looking. I know graphics don't necessarily mean everything but without the gameplay to support it, the whole thing just falls flat. The Monster designs aren't compelling at all and all feel like first drafts, the player is generic, environments are bland, etc.
  
• The control schemes are genuinely baffling. You have three presets you can choose from. There are no rebindable controls. There are times where the game tells you to press the X button, which is actually the F key, which is just so confusing to the player. Controller inputs are also always shown along side keyboard inputs, even when not playing with a controller or even having one plugged in, which just ends up cluttering the already hard to read text even more.
  
• The start of the game is 10 minutes of solid reading. There is no attempt at diegetic tutorialization or storytelling, it throws mountains of hard to read text at you assuming you'd get it.
  
• Menu's are completely incomprehensible most of the time, there's not nearly enough player feedback or clarity when navigating them and it ends up being overwhelming and frustrating.
  
• This game is 20 dollars?? I bought it for 15 and still feel kind of ripped off. I anticipate I'll be refunding it. 20 dollars for an indie game of this low quality is honestly unacceptable.

So no, unfortunately I cannot recommend this game. It ends up feeling like a concept built solely off of buzzwords like "Open World Resource Harvesting Monster Catcher". There is no foundation of a solid game present, all the systems are for the most part self contained and super tedious, and the overall experience is extremely unpleasant.

incredigame

Hands down my favorite game as of now. There has never been a game I can so easily pick up and play through and still find as much enjoyment in as I had in my first play through. The lategame bosses still give me chills.

Cannot recommend it enough.

This game is about as repetitive as you get and has no diversity throughout its runs. It's the most mind-numbingly boring roguelite I have ever played. Every enemy feels the same. Every character feels the same. Every floor feels like a carbon copy of the last.

Not to mention the items feel like they're automatically generated from an excel spreadsheet. Its like a random selection of causes and effects. Random stuff like "killing enemies with a bomb will yield more crystals". Upgrades like this don't feel impactful at all as the game almost never gives you bombs and you'd sooner be caught dead wasting one on an enemy.

The progression in the game is nonexistant. All unlocks are gated behind a currency, this is fine when its an option like in Enter the Gungeon, where you can still get unlocks elsewhere, but in this game it makes it just feel like grinding out run after run for progress. Not to mention the god awful floor unlock system. After you beat the first of several final bosses, 2 new floors are added to your game map. This is not fun, as they just feel like the same floors as mentioned earlier. It just makes the run drag on for longer.

If you're looking for a roguelite to sink your time into, this is not it. Play Nuclear Throne or Risk of Rain or something.