Two Tribes; 2008
Initial impression: this game is cute. I love the music and the graphics. They’re very cute and appropriate… lush but not distracting. I’ve only been playing on and off, which suits this game amazingly well, and I just made it to the Creepy Castle (the second game world) last night.
Game play is very easy to get the hang of. I’ve been playing with the Wii remote, and sometimes precision directions are a bit sketchy (I haven’t tried the other control schemes yet to see how well they work), but I know that’s just because I’m sitting at a weird angle and being lazy about my aim. The controls are actually amazingly easy and intuitive. Point, click, occasional shake. After a level or two, you don’t have to think about the controls anymore, which allows you to focus on thinking about the puzzles.
The level design is interesting, and I could definitely see how a second player drawing on the screen would be helpful. I’ve had to redo a couple of levels a few times just to make the mistakes and see where I’m supposed to go. I also did the first “hard” level (unlocked when I made it to the Creepy Castle), and it was indeed a little bit trickier. As the game progresses, I can see the level design becoming very sneaky. If a particular stage is too tricky for you, you can use your “wild card” and skip to the next level. You can only use this wild card once, though, and if you want to get it back you have to beat your skipped level legitimately. It’s a good system that allows a little flexibility for gamers who just can’t get their heads around a particular puzzle, but I can definitely still see people getting stuck.
Apparently it has 70 levels (the regular set and the unlockable hard levels), and I think I’ve cleared 17 of them. It’s perfect as a pick-up-and-play kind of game, because it keeps track of your progress through every level, so you can stop and then start where you left off at will. I’m really enjoying it, and I suspect it’ll last me quite a long time at this pace.
