Tribal Trouble

2006 IGF Finalist

Given the tens of millions of dollars that major publishers pour into huge RTS titles like Age of Empires and Rise & Fall, can a small team of Danes possibly hope to compete in the same genre?

Well... yeah!

Okay, so you're not going to see hundreds of units rendered in minute detail clashing on the screen, and you're not going to have dozens and dozens of levels and all that jazz. What you will find, however, is a quick-playing, goofy little RTS that satisfies your jones for a little zerg-rush action--and offers cleverly designed levels that, unlike so many in the genre, do not automatically make you think of three other games with essentially the same level and the same objectives.

Historically, Tribal Trouble is set during the era when the Vikings conquered the South Pacific (you remember that, right?) In other words, you play either a bunch of goofy-looking guys in horned helmets, or Polynesian islanders. There's your usual tech tree, if you can call it that--during the game, you progress from bronze weapons to iron weapons to the fearsome chicken weapons. You need to harvest chickens to make those, naturally.

In other words, you got your basic resource extraction/building construction/tech tree/real time combat that you expect in an RTS game in a cheerfully goofy setting with decent (albeit not cutting edge) 3D graphics.

And in addition to the usual campaigns, you get randomly generated maps (with user-set parameters), providing almost infinite replayability; and free online play with up to six people (on Oddlab's servers). Plus it runs on Mac and Linux as well as PC.