It’s hard to know what the gods want, seeing as they’re rarely all that clear with the messaging. A builder thought he was making the gods happy by creating a tower to reach the heavens, possibly as tall as a hundred feet in height, only to see everything destroyed in a violent storm. With the message of the gods' wrath made clear, the builder was exiled from his home, all his hard work to make the tribe’s lives more comfortable undone in a case of divine mixed signals. Tossed in the ocean near a new island the builder swam to shore and found a welcoming home made up of other exiles, and the gods ruling over this land seem much more direct with their visions. The volcano is going to blow and a giant ship is needed to escape, but with different tribes scattered about the island, it’s going to take more effort than chopping down a few trees and lashing them together to get everyone to safety.
Tribes: Primitive Builder is a first-person survival/management adventure where you play as the one person with the construction know-how to save everyone. While the volcano is going to erupt and destroy everything on the island, Tribe is a laid-back game with everything running at whatever pace you decide to play. Moving towards one goal after another is certainly a viable method of play, but the eruption is cued to the story rather than any kind of internal clock ticking away as one day runs into the next. There’s time to explore the island and do everything that needs to be done, which is rather a lot as it turns out.
Initially, though, the builder’s got the mask on his face and the knowledge of construction, and that’s about it for resources. The tribe elder is more than willing to take the builder in so long as he gets to work, gathering resources and crafting new tools and structures to strengthen the tribe. It doesn’t take too long to build the first workshop, and with a crafting table comes the ability to create sacrificial totems to use at an altar found in the nearby caves. Each sacrifice brings with it new knowledge of tools, buildings, and other assorted items, until it’s far too much for a single builder to do on his own.
While Tribe: Primitive Builder has the look of a survival/crafting game its secret is that underneath it all it’s about automation. The fisher’s hut catches fish while the cook’s hut turns it into edible food. Tool shops make spears, knives, hammers, and other useful items, while the shaman’s hut manufactures the sacrificial items. Gatherer huts collect miscellaneous resources like stone, herbs, grass, and leaves, and everything from all the huts is gathered and distributed from storage. The huts need to be crewed by members of the tribe, though, and while the handful of people available initially can get things started it’s nowhere near enough to do everything that needs to be done. The tribe is going to have to grow, once you’ve built some sleeping huts to put everyone in.
Finding new people is unfortunately the weakest part of Tribe. Getting new villagers involves talking to a scout or hunter, who will mark on the map where he’s seen a fire which will reliably turn up three new people to add to the growing crew. The map is divided up into multiple regions, each one hand-crafted with trails, resources, and lovely scenery, and it’s nice to explore until you realize there’s hardly anything there. The bonfire with new people is generally on a far point of the map and it can take a couple of minutes to run there, and while in the early part of the game this is a good excuse to collect a few things along the way, later on the automation of the tribe means they’re producing more than you’ll need. By the time you get to the second area there’s no real need to explore the map beyond noting a few places to set up new huts for resource-gathering, and instead just run in as straight a line as possible to collect the new members before quick-traveling back to the altar. There was obviously real care put into the design of the landscape so it’s a shame there’s not much more to do there than enjoy the scenery while wishing the builder could run faster.
Oddly enough, Tribe: Primitive Builder’s other weakness is the actual building. When starting a new building you’ll need a set amount of resources to lay down the foundation, then fish around a bit to find a spot that’s both flat enough to build on while not encroaching on a tree or other building. Once down the foundation pops into place with a blue outline of where wood, bamboo, clay or other materials will go, and the “building” part of the process is just holding down the E key while sweeping the cursor over the indicated space. In the earliest part of the first area it’s best to pin a list of required materials to the HUD, but once the tribe is big enough, it’s easier to pack the inventory full and not worry about the supply. It isn’t unpleasant to see everything snap into place while assembling the building, but after a while it starts to feel like busywork.
Closing Comments:
Oddly enough, though, that’s kind of the charm. While nothing is hard or even particularly challenging, it’s still a nice, low-stress way to enjoyably kill a surprising number of hours. While writing this review I jumped into the game to do some fact-checking and accidentally spent ninety minutes going from one settlement to the next, shoring up supply chains, making sure my trading posts between different areas were sending the necessary items back and forth, and even running around the map to get a few more tribe members to increase productivity. I could spend a huge amount of time picking holes in Tribe: Primitive Builder, like the way you’re able to only link one supply hut to one trading outpost, making it difficult to be efficient with resource distribution and requiring yet another trek across a pretty but otherwise-empty landscape to find the people necessary to operate what should have been a redundant workshop, but somehow it works anyway. The core of setting up a village’s worth of buildings, getting them staffed and directing the supply chain makes up for the janky bits, and it’s nicely satisfying to see the tribes in different areas walking about and getting their work done. Tribe: Primitive Builder is a relaxing adventure of construction and automation, and while the map could stand to be cut down to at least half its size, it’s surprisingly easy to get lost in the flow of completing goals one after the other as the hours drift away.
