Monster Tribe

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. [h1] Monster Collecting and Combat [/h1] 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. [h1] Open World [/h1] 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. [h1] Resource Gathering [/h1] 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. [h1] Miscellaneous Issues [/h1] I have a bunch of other gripes that I'll just run through quickly now. [list] [*] 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. [/list] 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.

Neutral opinion on recommendation, but since Steam is a Y/N review system, I have to say no as it's more where I'm leaning towards. I played through the beta of this game as one of the kickstarters. It was an interesting game, and kinda fun. But in the full game, I started playing through it and the font in the dialogue boxes was literally giving me a headache. It's so hard to read. I really hope the dev adds an option of some sort to change the font to something else. The battle font isn't too bad, but any dialogue between characters became incredibly difficult to focus on when it's hard to read and headache inducing. A lot of the opening story stuff also feels really rushed, like...I didn't really get into any of what was going on, between the hard to read text and the fact you're rushed through the intro so quickly. From what I remember of the gameplay, it was interesting, and I'll come back to this review later when I've tried more of it to remember, but I genuinely can't recommend the game when reading the text is nearly impossible and hurts both my eyes and my head. I play games primarily for the story, and not being able to really interact with it at all makes me have little desire to interact with the game. You also can't rebind keys at all, there's only three options for key layouts, and I honestly don't like them. At least to me, they're not instinctive keybindings, and the game itself only says "Use the Confirm/Cancel button" for the tutorials, which means if you don't know what those buttons are mapped to, you're going to have to look it up to understand what the game wants you to do. Later edit: I've played some more now and remember how the combat works. It's still...kind of fun? But it's also kind of hard to tell what's going on. With all the health bars stuck on the side, everything in the centre becomes pointless to watch after you've launched your attacks. Monster types can only be seen when you're hovering over them, making the decision for which moves to use basically "pick one, check if the monster goes green for good or red for bad (or doesn't change for neutral), repeat until you work out what you're doing" because there's no way to know what types a monster is just by looking at its sprite. There's also no way to undo your move plans in the event you accidentally attack an empty square, because the cursor for which square you're attacking doesn't auto-focus on enemies like you'd expect it to. The map is massive and with no mini-map, it's so easy to get lost...it's also kind of hard to work out what level things are on. Is that ground above or below me? The stairs that point upwards to lower areas really don't indicate that well at all, they just look plastered on top of the background. There's the echo of a good game in here, but it needs so many tweaks. Keybinding is my major desire, as the keyboard bindings just feel bad. I've resorted to playing with a controller, which isn't too bad except that the buttons the keybind menu says to press for things aren't at all what they are on a PS5 controller.

One of the few times I wish my addiction to monster catching games didn't exist. This game feels like a prototype and given the last update was in May and there is still a game breaking bug where you literally can not quit and save, I don't want to scream abandonware but, the dev is currently working on at least one other game and the discord is very inactive. Monster Tribe is at its core what the dev says it is. An open world monster catching RPG. That said the game feels like its having an identity crisis. In order to get monsters, you have to farm resources from the world. Sadly the game doesn't do a good job of telling you where certain things are. Obviously wood comes from trees, fish come from water, rocks from...well rocks, but you'll be running around the map trying to figure out where the items that you need spawn. Not to mention you need to get these same things to build your tools. The tools suck, they just, they suck. you have three main ones, Fishing rod, Axe, and Pickaxe. Each one of them have four separate types. Four. I don't know why the dev decided on that, its weird and it would be so bad if the controls didn't suck. You have three control presets, wasd, arrows, and controller. You have to cycle through your tools to pick the one you want and then cycle through the 4 of those to pick the one you need to interact with the current resources you are farming. Its needlessly convoluted and I question why. Maybe you get a multi tool later on in the game? Maybe the dev didn't know how to program upgrading one tool? I don't know, but as it is at the start, its unfun and clunky to do on a keyboard. Also, your mouse does nothing, its clear this game was made with the though of using a controller first, and everything else second. Maybe it feels better that way I couldn't tell you, I don't have one to test it. The music is alright. The graphics are unique I guess? The battles are okay...just okay...they suffer too. The feed back for what is going on in a fight isn't very good. For example, I'm in the fire area, in certain places there's two terrain effects going on, fire and something else, can't see what it is so you have to guess, but what I do know it does, is it makes your monsters moves miss more. If the battle AI had a few tweaks, it would be so much better. Quests feel a bit convoluted at times, I got so sick of trying to get passed rocks and trees to get an item I needed that I wandered into other areas to find the stuff I needed to craft all my axes and pickaxes, only to find out I really didn't need to do that...but the game is open world right? Seem logical yeah? It just didn't feel logical, you start out with what looks to be a clearly defined path of progression that feels mixed at best because again, this is an "open world RPG" pick a direction and run. The game has potential and I don't want to say I'm not having fun. There is something here, but the glaring issues it has are going to make people not want to play. I sincerely hope the dev takes the feedback people have left and look into fixing some things. As it stands, skip this one, there's quite a few other monster tamer games on steam that are much better than this one.

It's bad...just...very very bad... Controls are clunky,you cannot skip the long Intro,you cannot create your character,you cannot choose a starter monster. It's more a game of dig for 100 hours to get materials to make a new monster than a true Creature Collector game. You have few freedom,everything is on rail. I cannot refund because I backed this abomination and so didn't buy it on Steam. I love game with a lot of monsters...this game is not one of them...

I really don't know how the reviews are mostly positive. This game is extreme jank; I was having a mediocre time giving it a shot and then the game abruptly crashed and wiped the little progress I had made. The initial encounters were extremely dull one-shots. No monster battlers start out very difficult or engaging, but combat is generally more visually interesting and not over in a single attack until you've accrued a few levels. The opening story seems like a formality, something the dev felt obligated to include without having the conviction to make anything compelling. I'm absolutely fine with games that just drop you into the world and let you go as well as stories that take their time to contextualize the setting, but this is the worst of both world. I saw that someone compared this to Stardew Valley and that seems like an insult to a much more solid game. I would compare the resource gathering in this more to an uninspired MMORPG that banks on hooking players through shallow behavioral conditioning than to a game like Stardew. A lot of creature collectors have come out recently here on Steam. There are a bunch of great games from the genre on console that are mostly forgotten by the Pokemon-loving crowd. Go with literally anything else; there are plenty of options.

Sadly can't recommend the game. In no particular order: 1. The map doesn't make sense. Hope you're good at remembering your path. 2. The combat is easy because my monster 1 shots all the enemies. Hopefully it gets harder later. 3. Resource collection is busywork and feels unrewarding. You're forced to do it to upgrade your 3 tools to gather higher tier resources. These resources are needed for your monsters and other things. But it feels like a waste of time. Improving your tools doesn't seem to make harvesting of lower tier resources any easier. So why is this here? To waste your time and pad out the game. 4. When harvesting resources you have to repeatedly press the button. Why can't you simply hold it? When you will be harvesting thousands of resources throughout the game, this tedium will add up. 5. Harvesting a resource is often ring-around-the-rosie as you spam the harvest button trying to find just the right pixel that will let you harvest. 6. The game, at least as far as I got, tells you nothing about monster stats and what they do. 7. Although the Steam overlay works, pressing F12 to take a screenshot did nothing. 8. The music restarts from the beginning every time you enter and leave a building; very jarring. 9. The dev is completely MIA from the Steam forums never having made a single comment there for the few years this game has had a Steam page. Not a good sign, as it is imperative and required for an indie dev to communicate directly with his customers. Discord does not count. 10. No Steam achievements. 11. Despite being a pc release the controls cannot be rebound. You only have 3 selections that change a few of the keys. Cannot recommend except on a good discount and if you don't mind busywork.

I watch Reece Geofroy on Youtube and was excited for this game. When I started playing I was disappointed. The game is unfinished. This is an early prototype. The balancing is out rages. You can go from winning battles in one move to loosing in one move in a single tower. The effects are the worst part of the game. Sometimes in battle random things happen, like you hitting your team or you missing, but I don't know if there bugs or not because there is no animation. When ever I try to save and quite it crashes and gives me a gamemaker report and the quest lines are hard to follow. The game sometimes gives you instructions on how to do something, but it will disappear right after. I would not buy this until more updates come out. I like the concept and will love to play it again when it is better.

Unfortunately, the game is currently in a state (Version 1.10) that I wouldn't consider fun, yet. The game has some technical issues, with crashes happening in menus every so often (which almost always results in lost progress due to the way saving works), and it seems like any time you swap your current squad enough that it shifts the enemy levels, the entire game starts lagging massively (guessing ~15fps or so) until you relocate to another screen. I'm sure those issues will get worked out eventually though. The bigger issue for me was the drawn-out and stagnant feel of the game, lack of information on battle options, and lack of strategic depth to combat. To address the first point, I spent my ~4 hour playtime trying to expand my ability to harvest resources (via upgrading tools), fighting battles to grow my team and the strength of my monsters, and progress one of the initial 5 main quest points. Despite the 1.10 patch making early game monsters easier on the resources/currency required to revive (recruit) them, it was incredibly slow paced and always felt like I was waiting just as much as I was actively playing. I was hoping the sluggish sense of progression would be offset by the battle system, which looked like it had some tactical elements going on, but it could really use some revision in its current state. First big quality of life necessity that would make things better is to include information on what all of the character and space status effects actually do. Most of the skills say nothing about what the conditions do at all, and even when you are afflicted with a condition, I couldn't tell how to see in plain text what effect it was having. There wasn't even a help menu option to go over them. When some skills do absolutely no damage at all, and you're spending 7 MP for a status effect that has no explanation or standard gaming precedent, that really doesn't feel worth wasting the ONE AND ONLY skill slot you have unlocked at that point. Second, being limited to a single skill slot really limits strategic depth at the start, and makes battles so absolutely routine that it's not engaging. Having two type affinity charts is nice and all, but when you have only one skill and no ability to change it outside of infrequent save points, that potential depth is squandered. Also, I would like to suggest that giving a quick visual indicator when selecting targets with a skill to see instantly whether something will be effective or ineffective is something we need in the modern day of game design. Encouraging people to memorize two separate type charts is really archaic when you can just have the highlighted space with the relevant monster just be highlighted a different color based on effectiveness. Lastly on these quality of life suggestions, please make skills auto-target a space that will hit a valid target instead of always targeting the top-left-most space. You're requiring more button presses than is necessary, and it's a trivial thing to put into the game. If not that, then at least allow for the player to undo commands, so that any potential mis-input can be corrected. Finally, the value of strategic options seems wildly unbalanced. Not even the skills that you can attack with, but the actual tactical value of positioning itself. Front row gives you increased damage and pretty notable sustainability boost via MP regen. The back row weakens you considerably and gives a completely worthless amount of HP regen. It feels like it must be 5% or less of your max HP that you heal. My average monster HP at that point was 300-700 and I was still regenerating single digits most of the time. The Rest option also regenerates HP and MP, except only the MP seemed like it was at all impactful. I tried once to heal up someone from half health to their full value by putting them in the back row and having them exclusively select the Rest action for 10 battles straight. They managed to get to a grand total of 3/4 of their health, sustaining only the occasional hit. They would have sustained less hits by just staying on the offensive instead. Then you get to support skills that only have seemingly a 50% chance of hitting the tiles you're targeting, and it's just kind of like "Why are there even any options besides offense at all?" All of these issues keep the game from being fun, but they very well may be fixed one day. Hopefully the game will reach a state where progression feels good and combat has the tactical value that they pitched in their video and home page.

I realy want to love it, combat is somewhat fun, monster design is okish but... this feels more like an alpha. it needs so much more polish. Controlls are not intuitive and cant be remapped, even tho it is a pixel art game it runs badly and i just cant get over this font... maybe it feels this way because Cassette Beasts just released an i played the ♥♥♥♥ out of it. if so, monster tribes release was just not well timed. i wont refund it - im hoping it gets some qol and polish pateches

I hate leaving negative reviews, but please don't waste your money. The developer appears to have abandoned this game shortly after release to work on other projects, and I've given it time. I bought it shortly after it's release date and have waited for update news that just hasn't come. The difficulty spike is abysmal and has never been addressed, with a pointless level cap that just breeds frustration - and I like difficult, grindy games. The world feels very empty, especially in the starting town, and it is awfully easy to get lost. It feels like a prototype rather than a full game release. A great idea that has sadly been done a disservice. I won't be supporting this developer again.