Info about Monster Tribe:

Official game description:
Akama. A lone island, sitting in the middle of an endless ocean, and the site of a magical phenomenon known only as the Rift. It was once a source of limitless power for humanity through magical creatures called the Ateyan. Capable of incredible and wonderful feats of magic, they lived alongside humanity for centuries - until something destroyed this harmony.
The Ateyan disappeared, becoming motes of light on an almost deserted island. Human civilizations crumbled, its formerly great cities and industry reclaimed by nature. Generations passed in the shadow of ancient splendor. Then, something happened: The Rift began consuming the island, threatening the survival of humanity's remnants.
Monster Tribe puts you in the shoes of humanity's last hope, a sage born with a natural connection to the Ateyan, capable of calling them forth from the void between the real world and the Rift. Set out across Akama, collect an army of Ateyan, train them, and unearth long-forgotten secrets. Why did Akama fall? What caused the Ateyan to disappear into the void? Can the rift be stopped?
Can a single human make a difference?
The vast island has a long and terrible history. The disappearance of the Ateyan destroyed human civilization, leaving behind precious few survivors - and an endless array of secrets waiting to be discovered.
Awaken the Ateyan! Living within the void between the real and the Rift, they can be seen as motes of light floating across the island. Use your connection to awaken them and harness their power once more!
Explore ancient ruins and foreboding wilds. Gather resources to upgrade your equipment and help the awakened Ateyan grow and train - you'll need it.
Uncover lost lore and terrible secrets of those who came before. Can you survive long enough to reveal the frightening truth of what happened on Akama?
Nature has reclaimed Akama's great cities from humanity and it will not relinquish its conquests easily. Neither will the Ateyan simply surrender after centuries of peace from mankind.
Command teams of monsters in turn-based combat: Battles take place on a grid, where teams of up to four Ateyan square off against one another. Think, strategize, and prevail!
Develop a mighty team capable of facing the Rift. As your Ateyan gather experience, manage their development using a flexible RPG-style character system.
Overcome the ultimate challenges, entering the ancient Towers that dot the landscape of Akama. Face vicious monsters and solve complex puzzles to unlock the island's mysteries!
*   Vast island to explore where nature reclaimed the ruins of a once-mighty civilization.
*   Complex tactical battles between teams of monsters, using a turn-based system - brains over brawn!
*   72 Ateyan to gather, command, and develop into mighty fighters, using a flexible RPG system.
*   Special mutation forms, unlocked by harnessing the island's special resources and salvaging the ruins of a lost civilization.
*   Thought-provoking story, full of secrets to discover and questions to answer in mankind's desperate last attempt at survival.

Release date: 1 May, 2023

Categories: Monster Collecting, Turn-based Combat, Tactical RPG, Resource Management, Open-World Exploration, Single-player Story, Puzzle Solving, Character Progression


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Engaging & Strategic Combat (weight 0.99): Players consistently praise the game's combat system, highlighting its strategic depth, unique mechanics, and overall fun factor. The blend of tactical RPG elements and monster-specific abilities makes battles engaging and addictive.
- Charming Art & Music (weight 0.55): The game's art style, visuals, and music receive strong positive feedback. Players find the graphics charming, the art beautiful, and the soundtrack excellent, contributing significantly to the game's overall atmosphere and appeal.
- Diverse Monster Collection (weight 0.51): The variety and design of monsters are highly appreciated, with players enjoying the collection aspect and the ability to customize their monster parties through elemental variants. This adds significant depth to team building.
- Innovative Genre Blend (weight 0.41): The game's innovative blend of genres, combining adventure, monster collecting, tactical RPG elements, and resource gathering, is a major draw. Players appreciate its unique spin on the monster catcher genre and its ability to evoke nostalgia while introducing fresh mechanics.
- Engaging Story & Lore (weight 0.28): The storyline is frequently mentioned as engaging and well-crafted, keeping players invested in the world and its characters. The narrative's depth and the charming dialogue contribute to a compelling experience.
- High Development Effort (weight 0.19): Players recognize the significant effort and love put into the game's development, noting its potential for future growth and content. This indicates a strong appreciation for the developers' dedication.
- Addictive Resource Gathering (weight 0.16): The resource gathering and crafting systems are noted as addictive and provide a pleasant change of pace from combat. The seamless integration of these elements with monster collection enhances the overall gameplay loop.
- Expansive Open World (weight 0.16): The open world design is praised for its expansiveness and the freedom it offers players to explore at their own pace. The world is rich with lore and details, encouraging discovery.
- Intuitive Controls (weight 0.09): The game's controls are intuitive and easy to learn, making the gameplay experience smooth and accessible for players, even when using a controller.
- Helpful Tutorial (weight 0.09): The tutorial is effective, providing necessary information concisely and allowing players to quickly grasp the game's mechanics without feeling overwhelmed.
- Affordable Price (weight 0.05): The game's price point is considered affordable, adding to its overall value proposition for players.
- Enjoyable Grind (weight 0.05): Some players view the grinding aspect of the game as a positive, indicating that it contributes to their enjoyment and progression.
- Consistent Progression (weight 0.05): The game offers consistent progression, which helps maintain player engagement and encourages continuous play.
- Smooth Character Movement (weight 0.04): The character movements are well-received, contributing to the overall smooth and responsive feel of the gameplay.
- Smooth Performance (weight 0.04): The game performs well, running smoothly without significant technical issues, which enhances the player experience.
- Responsive Developer Support (weight 0.04): The developer's responsiveness to feedback and quick patching of issues is noted, indicating good post-launch support.

Common complaints:
- Unfinished & Abandoned Game (weight 0.75): Many players felt the game was released in an unfinished state, resembling a prototype or alpha version. This sentiment is reinforced by a lack of developer communication post-release, suggesting the game has been abandoned. The world feels empty and bland, with little to do beyond walking, and the narrative introduction is unengaging.
- Tedious Resource Gathering (weight 0.56): Players found resource gathering to be a tedious and unrewarding chore. The game fails to provide clear guidance on where to find necessary materials, forcing players into aimless searching and repetitive button mashing for harvesting. This system feels like an artificial gate to progression rather than an engaging mechanic.
- Frequent Game Crashes (weight 0.49): Frequent and critical game crashes are a major issue, often leading to lost progress. Players reported crashes during gameplay, combat, menu navigation (especially the journal and DNA menu), and consistently when attempting to save and quit, making the game frustrating and unreliable.
- Boring & Unclear Combat (weight 0.41): Combat encounters are widely criticized for being boring, repetitive, and lacking strategic depth. Battles often result in one-shot kills or prolonged, tedious fights. Furthermore, the visual feedback in combat is poor, making it difficult for players to understand what is happening.
- Unrebindable & Bad Controls (weight 0.41): A significant complaint is the inability to rebind controls, forcing players to use unintuitive and uncomfortable default keybindings. The limited preset options do not alleviate this issue, leading to a frustrating user experience.
- Poor Map & Navigation (weight 0.28): The game's map is too large and lacks essential features like a mini-map or player position indicator, making navigation difficult. This contributes to players frequently getting lost in the expansive, often empty, world.
- Frustrating Difficulty & Grind (weight 0.22): Players experienced significant frustration due to unaddressed difficulty spikes and a perceived grind. The game's level cap was also cited as a source of frustration, contributing to an overall unenjoyable experience.
- Unreadable Text & UI (weight 0.2): The game's text and UI elements are difficult to read. Small font sizes, poor spacing, and inconspicuous health/MP bars make it challenging to follow dialogue and monitor in-game information, leading to headaches and frustration.
- Lack of Polish & Annoying Sounds (weight 0.18): Players found various gameplay aspects uncompelling and lacking polish. Specific complaints include annoying sound effects, which led some to turn off audio, and a general lack of a help menu for understanding game mechanics like status effects.
- Clunky Tool Management (weight 0.16): The tool management system is clunky and convoluted. Players found it annoying to cycle through multiple tools and their various types, making simple actions unnecessarily complicated.
- Confusing Progression & Quests (weight 0.16): The game's progression and quest lines are often convoluted and difficult to follow. This leads to a slow-paced experience where players feel they spend more time waiting or figuring out what to do than actively playing.
- Poor Graphics & Performance (weight 0.12): Despite being a pixel art game, the visuals are considered unappealing, with chunky animations. Performance issues were also noted, with the game running poorly despite its graphical style.
- Inconsistent Skill Targeting (weight 0.12): Skill targeting in combat is problematic, as skills do not auto-target valid enemies and often default to the top-left-most space. Support skills also have inconsistent hit chances, adding to combat frustration.
- Confused Game Identity & Menus (weight 0.12): The game suffers from an identity crisis, struggling to balance monster catching with resource gathering. Menus are often incomprehensible, lacking clear feedback and contributing to player confusion.
- Inconsistent Button Prompts (weight 0.11): On-screen button prompts are inconsistent with actual keyboard or controller inputs, leading to confusion. For example, the game might display 'Press X' when the correct key is 'F'.

Gameplay feedback:
- Resource Gathering is Core (weight 0.42): Resource gathering is central to progression, including obtaining new monsters, upgrading them, and advancing quests. Players collect resources through various activities like fighting, mining, fishing, and woodcutting.
- Tool Upgrades and Skills (weight 0.23): Players utilize three main tools: a fishing rod, an axe, and a pickaxe. Each tool has four upgrade tiers and its own skill tree, which requires materials to improve, enabling more efficient resource collection.
- Grid-Based Combat System (weight 0.1): The combat system is described as interesting and is based on a grid, suggesting tactical positioning plays a role in battles.
- Quest Structure and Towers (weight 0.1): The game features a quest structure centered around five main quests, which involve reaching specific towers or choosing between legendary boss-level monster challenges.
- Multiple Control Presets (weight 0.09): The game offers flexible control options, allowing players to choose between WASD, arrow keys, or a controller for movement and actions.
- HP/MP Regeneration Options (weight 0.09): Players can restore their health and mana points by using the 'Rest' option or by sleeping on beds found in houses.
- Early Game Balance Improved (weight 0.06): A recent patch (1.10) has made the early game more accessible by reducing the resource and currency requirements for reviving monsters.
- Front Row Combat Benefits (weight 0.06): Positioning monsters in the front row during combat provides increased damage output and a significant boost to MP regeneration, highlighting a tactical element.
- Dual Type Affinity Charts (weight 0.06): The game incorporates two distinct type affinity charts, suggesting a complex system of elemental or monster type interactions in combat.
- Minimal Quest Guidance (weight 0.06): Quest guidance is minimal; an initial arrow points to a location but then disappears, requiring players to independently figure out the next steps.
- Four Monster Party Limit (weight 0.05): Players are limited to a maximum of four monsters in their active party, influencing team composition and strategy.
- Automatic Save System (weight 0.05): The game features an automatic save system that triggers every 15 minutes, ensuring regular progress is recorded.
- In-Game Shops Available (weight 0.05): The game includes shops where players can buy and sell various items, facilitating resource management and progression.

Performance notes:
- Clunky UI/UX (weight 0): The game's user interface is clunky and difficult to navigate, particularly in inventory management and quest logs. Players find it unintuitive and time-consuming to perform basic actions.
- Slow progression system (weight 0): Many players feel the game's progression system is too slow, requiring excessive grinding for minimal rewards. This makes the overall experience feel unrewarding and tedious.
- Minor visual bugs (weight 0): There are numerous reports of minor bugs and glitches, such as character models clipping through objects or quest markers disappearing. While not game-breaking, these issues detract from immersion.
- Aggressive monetization (weight 0): Some players are expressing strong negative opinions about the game's monetization strategy, perceiving it as overly aggressive and pay-to-win. This appears to be part of a coordinated review-bombing effort.

Recommendations:
- Game not recommended; issues persist (weight 0.59): Many players expressed strong negative sentiment, citing game crashes, unreadable text, and a general lack of polish as reasons for not recommending the game. Several players also mentioned refunding the game or advising others to avoid purchasing it until significant updates are released.
- Highly recommended for genre fans (weight 0.42): Conversely, a significant number of players highly recommend the game, especially to fans of strategy battles, monster collecting, and open-world RPGs. They praise its originality and consider it a great experience for both new and experienced players, with one reviewer giving it an 8/10 rating.
- Consider alternative games (weight 0.04): One specific piece of feedback suggested that players should consider purchasing 'Stardew Valley' instead of this game. This implies a preference for a different, possibly more established, gaming experience.

Other player notes:
- Game needs bug fixes and polish (weight 0.1): Players are requesting bug fixes and general quality of life improvements to enhance the game's stability and user experience. This indicates a need for further development attention to polish the current state of the game.
- Anticipation for deep story and world (weight 0.06): Players are expressing anticipation for a rich narrative experience, hoping for a story with significant depth and well-developed world-building. This suggests a desire for strong lore and engaging plotlines.
- Player support for developer (weight 0.05): Some players are expressing their willingness to support the developer, indicating a positive sentiment towards the creator despite any current issues. This suggests a belief in the developer's potential or past work.

Emotions:
- Frustration (weight 0.24): Players experienced frustration due to a combination of technical issues like frequent game crashes and numerous bugs, alongside poor design choices such as unchangeable controls, unclear mechanics, tedious grind, and unbalanced difficulty spikes. These issues collectively hindered the gameplay experience and made progression difficult.
- Disappointment (weight 0.19): Disappointment stemmed primarily from the game's unpolished and unfinished state, leading to a perception of poor quality and unfulfilled potential. Players also expressed concern over the lack of developer engagement and future support, which contributed to a sense of abandonment and regret over their investment.
- Satisfaction (weight 0.19): Satisfaction was derived from the game's overall quality, engaging content, and well-designed mechanics, including the combat system and material gathering. Players appreciated the game's aesthetics, performance, and depth, which contributed to a positive and rewarding experience.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.14): Players found enjoyment in the general gameplay, particularly the unique monsters, fun battle system, and open-world exploration. The freedom to explore, build parties, and engage in battles, combined with the game's unique take on its genre, provided a consistently positive experience.
- Excitement (weight 0.09): Excitement was generated by the game's unique blend of genres, compelling aesthetics, and the anticipation of future playtime. The thrill of battling, collecting creatures, and discovering the story's depth contributed to a strong sense of enthusiasm for the game.
- Joy (weight 0.08): Joy was experienced through the game's overall fun factor, appealing aesthetics, and engaging gameplay mechanics. Specific elements like the collection aspect, village dialogue, and art style contributed to a delightful and positive emotional response.
- Nostalgia (weight 0.02): Nostalgia was evoked by the game's genre and overall gameplay feel, reminding players of past gaming experiences. This connection to previous games created a comforting and familiar sentiment.
- Admiration (weight 0.02): Admiration was directed towards the developers for their perceived effort in creating the game. This indicates an appreciation for the hard work and dedication put into the project.
- Anger (weight 0.01): Anger arose from the perceived high price of the game in relation to its low quality. This suggests a feeling of being overcharged for an underdeveloped product.
- Annoyance (weight 0.01): Annoyance was caused by specific sound effects within the game. This indicates a minor but noticeable irritation with the audio design.
- Hope (weight 0.01): Hope was expressed regarding future updates for the game. This suggests players are looking forward to improvements and new content being added.
- Minor annoyance (weight 0.01): Minor annoyance was attributed to scene transitions and the tutorial. These elements, while not game-breaking, caused slight irritation during gameplay.}