Tribal Trouble isn't a bad real-time strategy game, per say, but the overall game concept could have used a bit more fleshing out. At its heart the game is a minimalist approach to unit building and resource management - the idea being that players create massive amounts of peon units in a fairly short amount of time, convert them to a number of warrior classes (or don't if you're lazy), and go head-to-head against the enemy for extreme carnage. While this is one of the more compelling aspects of the game, it is also the game's Achilles' heel. It feels like the developers should have offered a few more unit and building choices to make the game more interesting.

The Story:

The story behind Tribal Troubles is simple and fun – some pesky Viking raiders have gotten drunk and find themselves ship[wrecked on the southern most island. This island is part of a string of Islands inhabited by wild and bizarre Natives. From the Viking's way of thinking it's not all bad news: at least they can go about plundering these islands and killing a bunch of savages.; to the Natives, these unwanted visitors are infidels who need to hit the bricks – even if it means planting their highly decorative helmets over hundreds of cute little graves. And thus is the story and the struggle in this light-hearted and action focused real-time strategy game created by indie developer Oddlabs and published by GarageGames .

The Basics:

In a nutshell, players can choose between either the Vikings or the Natives, with each side having a peon class, a Rock warrior class, an Iron Warrior Class, a Tropical Chicken Warrior Class and a Chieftain class of units. All of the warrior classes are based on the minimal amount of resources you can gather from the map - Rocks, Iron, and Tropical Chickens. The Chieftain class has a regular attack, and two specialty attacks that can be used against large numbers of units and an attack that does damage to structures. The pecking order for units is as follows: Rock Warriors are stronger than Peons, Iron Warriors are tougher than Rock Warriors, Tropical Chicken Warriors are tougher than everyone except the Chieftain unit and Chieftains are the toughest of the lot.

There are also a minimal amount of structures that you can create: there's the quarters, which allows you to create a whopping 150 peons per building in a relatively short amount of time, Watch towers to protect structures (when placing a warrior unit in it), and the Armory, which allow you to gather and transfer resources, create weapons, and deploy troops by converting peons. The Barracks is really the headquarters for all your group's major activities like resource gathering and unit building. In this building you assign a select number of Peons that occupy the building (which can be deployed directly into it from your quarters) to gather resources, create weapons (from those collected resources) and deploy peons with these new weapons to create the warrior classes we mentioned.

So basically you build an army, rush the enemy, kill all of their units and trash their buildings to win. That's the gameplay in a nutshell and doing so doesn't take all that long - especially on the maps where the enemy isn't very aggressive. If you're playing the single player (or skirmish) mode you can spice things up by adding enemies (or allies) into the mix for a serious challenge, adjusting the AI of your units (make them more passive or aggressive) and creating teams for you or your opponent.

Less is More..

There aren't any game modes to speak of in single player skirmish or multiplayer, but you can adjust things like map size, amount of resources and game speed. There's also a cool feature where you can input a map code to go to your favorite previously played map. Maps are randomly generated on the fly based on the criteria you set up before it begins and the game does this very effectively and in a timely manner.

One thing online players in this community don't like is a "peon rush." Because you can create peons in massive amounts fairly quickly, it is very easy to overcome someone that's not paying attention - and because peons can take down a structure faster than a warrior, this can be a very frustrating thing to have happen as you are building your army in the early parts of the game. It's considered bad form to do this while playing online, so the developers added a one minute rule: if you quit a match in the first minute of a game then it doesn't count. And why would it matter? Because the game also supports online ranking and an online leader board that players take seriously. Overall multiplayer is pretty fun, despite the simplistic and limited responsibilities the game offers players. If you're one of those kinds of people that is heavily competitive there's certainly something to work for online in this game..

Muppets, Muppets, Everywhere: The most interesting aspect of the game is its unique presentation. The art style is bright and colorful and the characters look like violent little Muppets (I think that the Vikings look like early descendants of Floyd or Beeker). I don't think I've seen an RTS this cute since KnightShift on the PC – which for the record is one of my all time favorite RTS games.

The islands and Northern themed lands are simple, and only feature elements that can be used as some sort of resource. There are rolling hills and beaches, crisp blue water and plenty of tropical chickens mucking around at every turn. You pretty much will clear a good portion of the terrain anyway, so for better or worse you'll decide on your own if the environments hold up even when they've been harvested to nothingness. There's no denying that this game looks pretty good considering that it was built using Java.

Another element that struck me as unique were the maps in the campaign mode. Not only do they look good, but the developers used it as a means to give player a choice on where they wanted to go next. This was a nice feature that allowed players to skip ahead to tougher areas and have multiple paths to do so. The only drawback is those optional areas often housed serious advancements like the ability to finally create Tropical Chicken Warriors. Overall a great presentation all around in Tribal Trouble.