Totem Tribe was sort of a cross between MyTribe and Age Of Empires. You start out as a young chief with a small tribe, and you complete building, combat and searching missions to improve their fate.

Totem Tribe uses building and unit training without the usual resource management side of things. There’s no real harvesting involved and no resource requirements to build new items, which takes some of the challenge away, and lets you focus on building an aesthetically pleasing settlement. Or maybe that’s just me. Your buildings each create specialized units, which you can then use to explore, build, fight, and so forth.

It’s no Momo, but this game is cute. Your villagers fight mushroom people and funny animals, and they live peacefully with giant ladybugs and lazy turtles.

Each island has gems, seashells and other clickable collectibles. It took me a little while to realize that what I’d thought were some funny-looking flowers are actually the gems you are meant to collect. Oops. Because there are surprise activitable items, I found myself clicking on everything, old-fashioned hand-activate style, to see what might happen.

Totem Tribe blends a civ game, a strategy game and the good kind of hidden objects game, all things I like, into an addicting casual game. My only real problem is that the story falls flat.  While I actually liked the gameplay of repeatedly finding a new object of Epic Supreme Destiny on each unlocked island, I found  the chief’s requests for and the general quest text about each Super-Duper Supreme Epic item to be stilted and annoying.

Overall, a solid casual game, even if the story arc leaves a bit to be desired.

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