Tribe: Primitive Builder Review

Tribe: Primitive Builder is a survival game, seeing you take the place of an Exile, set to rebuild the Tribe. This sounds pretty typical for the survival genre, but does it manage to stand out among a sea of similar titles? (sadly, the answer is mostly no).

Tribe: Primitive Builder begins similarly to many other survival games of its likeness, with you waking up ashore on a mysterious island. Rescued by a member of a strange tribe, you are recruited, helping them grow and survive. It’s a very typical setup to the plot, which does develop a little, but not much through my time with the game. After some back and forth building up the basics, you need to perform a ritual to appease the gods, which gives you a vision. Returning to the village elder, he tells you that you are their saviour and seems to just give you full rein over the whole tribe from then on. It was abrupt and a little bizarre, to say the least. I didn’t experience much more of the story beyond this point, as it slows down exponentially and begins to lean into the survival aspect much more than the narrative side of things. I didn’t hate this setup, but it definitely didn’t feel like anything more than that, simply a vessel to explain the state of the world.

As should be expected, the gameplay is just as cookie-cutter as the story, even managing to do some things a fair bit worse than others, sadly. I really started to get frustrated with the rampant tutorials and incredibly sluggish progression. Tribe locks you out of practically every kind of building until you unlock it through the ritual system, which essentially forces you to progress through the world at the exact pace that the game expects, which really ruins the fantasy of a game like this. There’s still an inherent satisfaction to building up a village from essentially nothing, and I do enjoy the visuals of most of the buildings and their designs in this. This ties in well with the world which was undoubtedly the shining star, feeling much more unique in its design and layout compared to many other survival games. I found the prime progression systems to feel a little dull, too, as much of it feels like an arbitrary way to lengthen the playtime. There are also some pseudo-RPG mechanics, which feel a little pointless. Performing any action will level up its related skill, such as woodcutting and gathering, but the actual changes made to gameplay felt essentially pointless. The survival mechanics, which are a pretty forefront thing in the survival genre (the clue is really in the name), also felt lacking. I never noticed much of an effect from any of them, and it’s far too easy to be able to deal with them, even right from the beginning of the game, for them to feel like anything other than a minor nuisance. One of the biggest departures from the survival formula is the management systems involving the automation of materials and production. These were very lightweight and didn’t feel particularly complex, yet I didn’t have any issues with them outright.

Tribe: Primitive Builder had practically flawless performance on my end; while there were occasional stutters here and there, it wasn’t anything that outright harmed the experience. There is a lot of visual charm, and I was especially enamoured by the music and the atmosphere, which was incredibly relaxing and immersive. As a full package, I don’t hate Tribe, yet I feel it blends in far too much with other similar titles to be able to fully recommend.