Recent reviews by The Combat Medic

A very fun Metroidvania style game. It's quite short and it's not terribly difficult, but I think this game is perfect for anyone to get into, even if they never played the original NES game.

The following review was rewritten to reflect changes made to the game:

Tribal Hunter is a Metroidvania game where you play as a guardian of an island summoned to help out a tribe who are in need of help. You'll beat the crap of enemies like a beat em' up and explore everywhere to find upgrades and treasures. While the game does appeal to furries thare into fat, inflation, and vore, these elements are woven into the game as a gameplay mechanic rather than a cheap gimmicky side attraction.


The story is pretty simple; your main character is Munch, a spirit inhabiting a doll who was summoned by a group of villagers that need help from the evils plaguing their island. As you fight each boss, you gain a bit more info on who is behind all of the pillaging and chaos. Of course, not everything is at it seems and certain NPCs can give some lore on the history of the island. The overall story does the job just fine, but I feel like there could have been more to both the island's history and the backstories of the characters to flesh them out a bit more. Most of the characters are pretty one note and don't have much to write home about except for Munch and a few others. It also feels a bit strange that only specific NPCs will comment on Munch's girth if you get him really large while everyone else has their generic lines.


The gameplay itself is quite smooth overall. Munch moves pretty quickly and his attacks can hit quite fast. You start off with your basic punch combos and magic, but you'll also gain other abilities like body slamming and double jumps. Munch's power revolves around his fullness meter, which fills up as you eat enemies and food. The more you eat, the fatter Munch gets. By keeping Munch slim, your punches are very quick. A big Munch hits harder and can use magic more often, but his punches become slow and his huge size makes him a bigger target. Being big makes Munch's punches hit harder and the way they sound when they connect is just very satisfying to hear. Popper Mushrooms can increase Munch's size capacity, which lets him use magic more often and be able to eat more before popping. Eating enemies and food is the only way to build up fat for magic use, but you'll also encounter enemies and traps that will fill Munch with air or slime, forcing him to grow larger while lacking the actual fat to use magic. Get too fat and Munch will pop! Luckily, dying doesn't do anything except send you back to the last checkpoint used. Munch's magic is limited to fireballs and eggs, the former firing in a straight line and the latter firing at an arc. You are given white dots to guide your aim, but bright backgrounds and snow can make it hard to see your aiming arc and its position does not reset when you aim again. Physically, Munch can only punch and kick (or belly bump if he's large), but you'll soon unlock the belly flop attack, which is incredibly fun to use when huge since you can bounce off enemies with it over and over (it becomes a stomp attack if Munch is small). Unfortunately, Munch's magic is incredibly lacking since he has only two magical attacks (three if you unlock the shadow fireball) and no magic for utility or defense. Munch also can use items bought from a shop, but they are defensive focused (regain health, lose fat, etc) and nothing for the offensive aside from permanent upgrades.


Beating enemies gives you EXP to spend on unlocking new abilities and upgrades like more damage or reduced damage from sharp attacks when large. There are a ton of abilities to unlock and upgrade, so you'll be incentivized to beat every enemy you see to get as much EXP as possible. Naturally, there is some grinding to be done, but I feel that enemies simply give too little EXP overall and the lack of an item or ability to boost EXP gains makes this more painful. It is possible to just play the game normally and beat it without forcing yourself to grind, but it takes a ton of EXP to start unlocking end game abilities as well as trying to upgrade your older skills. There's also a difficulty selection you can adjust, which doesn't do much other than change how much damage enemies inflict and how much health they have. There's no incentive to make the game harder, but at the same time, everyone can set the game to how they prefer thus it's a win-win for every player.


The art style is simply fantastic. Everything pops out with their exotic designs, vivid colors, and animations that show off every character's personality. Even subtle things like Munch's belly jiggling as he walks makes the game stand out even more. Each character also has their own "blips" when they talk to give a sense of how their voice sounds and it's quite cute without being irritating. Every region has a unique feel to them and the levels themselves, while mostly small, are fun to explore as you discover hidden rooms. Between the lush landscape of the Piglands to the gritty underground of the Crystal Caverns, nothing looks dull or lifeless. Everyone and everything just stands out in a fantastic way with the art style and the work put into them pays off.


Of course, don't let the pretty landscape lull you into a false sense of security since you will encounter enemies that aim to make Munch fatter against his will and environmental hazards will also do the job, both which are easily manageable if you're careful. One complaint I have about the dangers of being force fed comes from narrow hallways that are filled with food crates and enemies that throw food at you. If you get too fat in a tight space, you get stuck until you button mash to lose weight. These types of hallways bring the flow of the game to a crawl since you have to deal with eating the food, sitting down to burn the fat, rinse and repeat. This gimmick is everywhere in the final level and won't make you have a good time. The mountain zone is also very rough to go through, even though it was made easier in a recent patch; a lot of the enemies have piercing attacks, which makes it hard to stay large enough without the threat of being popped. The ice golems spam their projectiles in rapid succession, making it hard to approach them for melee strikes and also makes it just as tricky to stand still when aiming your magic attacks at them. Because of the danger of piercing attacks, you have to keep your fullness a bit low, but keeping it too low means you won't have enough magic to attack enemies with. Despite the above grievances, the problematic elements aren't too frequent.


For the music itself, it's quite nice and definitely fits with each area; from the jazzy upbeat tune in Kitroa's mini-game to the foreboding music that plays in the ruined Shadowlands, the music will have you tapping your foot to the beats. The boss themes are an intense remix of the area theme and It's quite fitting given the intensity of the fights. I'm quite a fan of the Piglands theme, the final battle theme, and the ending credits theme.


Overall, this game is well polished with smooth gameplay, great art style, and quirky characters that fit the setting. Aside from the few design flaws and level design frustrations in some areas, Tribal Hunter is game that proves you can make a game about being large without making it feel cheap or sexualized.

The game as of now is not worth playing. Combat relies heavily on gear since there's no EXP system and you can be quite unlucky if you can't get stronger gear. Most enemies in the overworld are strong and it's actually quite rare to actually find enemies that are weak, which is a huge hurdle for new characters. Towns are pretty much the same no matter which one you go to and they never offer anything interesting. While you can buy gear in towns, you'll usually can find better stuff in the wild and the gear in shops can get expensive.

On the subject of gear, you'll encounter a problem known as "region lock", where all of your gear is reduced to garbage when you cross into a new zone unless you were lucky enough to find gear that has a "+" in it. The idea is your power gets reset when crossing into a new zone so that you don't steamroll it, but for most people, they don't like seeing their power progression getting erased for no reason. Going to a new zone means stopping to grind for gear again, Going to a new zone also removes your mobility items like the hang glider and boat, which means you have to search for new ones again.

Combat isn't too interesting and mage enemies are the worst since they basically aimbot you. Combat itself is mostly just about whacking enemies to death with the occasional dodge roll. You only have two skills, an ultimate skills, and two alternate skills with the Shift key. You cannot learn new moves at all.

Artifacts are the game's way of giving you incentive to tackle dungeons, but all they do is give you a permanent boost to a mobility stat like faster climbing and swimming, which carries over in each region. While this is not a bad idea in itself, making this the only reward from dungeons makes dungeons less appealing to go to. After all, why bother risking death multiple times just to boost your lamp's radius? Why bother getting the gear found in dungeons when they won't work in the next region?

The world itself is boring. Sure, there's many kinds of biomes, but other than the dungeons, the only other things to find are towns and the occasional battle arena. There's no cities or kingdoms, no interesting NPCs to interact with, the lore is just random elementary school stories that start to repeat themselves, no districts, nothing. Everything feels lifeless

Until the game actually gets more content, don't buy it.

This game is pretty much the way you remembered it back in the year 2000. If you haven't played the game before, then mostly everything is left untouched (story, game mechanics, etc) and you should read a review elsewhere for how the game is in regards to that. I'm going to talk about the port itself and what changes it brought to the table.


Off the bat, the character models had their textures bumped up to higher quality. No longer are faces blurred out because now you can see them with great clarity. Even NPCs had their textures bumped up too! However, the backgrounds are still in their old Playstation low resolution versions and rumors state that the developers lost the assets for the backgrounds. It's very distracting and clashes heavily with the new high res character models. While it doesn't bother me too much, it may be a deal breaker for others. The FMVs also had a bump up in quality and are not fuzzy or blurry anymore, which is another nice touch.


The port also has several game boosters that you can turn on and off at will, such as making the game go faster in turbo speed, always do max damage, disable random encounters, and always have full ATB and Trance bars. The other boosters such as max level and magic stones, instant learn abilities, and max gil can't be disabled once turned on. The boosters are nice to have if you want to screw around or just want to get to certain parts of the game with little hassle and you can easily enjoy the game without them. However, it is quite easy to accidentally turn a booster on by mistake if you're aren't careful.


There are a few bugs, but they're mostly minor. There's the infamous "character moves to the right" bug when it comes to using controllers, but so far I have managed to get around it by only enabling the controller after the game has loaded. In certain battles or battle screens, the dynamic camera can get screwed up such as zooming in too closely on a character or the camera focusing on the wrong character when an enemy readies an ability. While distracting, they're just minor annoyances.


Overall, the port is pretty solid and the extra features are a welcomed addition. Minor bugs are present, but nothing too deal breaking.

The game may be an RPG, but it heavily deconstructs the RPG genre and you'll, at most, be mocked at for trying to treat the game like a typical RPG. Battles use "bullet hell"-esque segments to help you avoid attacks from enemies, but this sort of thing may not be for everyone and I wasn't a fan of it at first. Using certain acts in battle can give you all sorts of effects on enemies and some can help you even win a fight without needing to kill anyone! There is no "wrong" or "right" way to play this game, so you can easily play how you want to.


The story and characters are simple, yet deep at the same time and you get to learn so much about them whether you want to play nice or play nasty and the results go far beyond a simple dialogue change. Even repeated playthroughs can be a bit different based on what you did last time and the game WILL know of your shenanigans if you try to beat the system. The music, which has a good variety and blends, helps bring the story and characters to life and is something I think is worth listening to once you're done with the game.

Give the game a try. You won't regret it. The bullet hell mechanics may not be everyone's cup of tea and the simple story and characters is also left up to individual taste, so wait for a sale if those things are making you iffy on wanting to try the game.

This game was made to be played over and over again with your friends, so pick this up if you like co-op, shooting swarms of cops, and stealing loot. Need more convincing? Lots of guns to pick and modify, lots of skills to mix and match to your play style, and speaking of style, go on and customize your mask to your liking.


Music is also fantastic and you can choose which music pieces play on which level you want them to. OPTIONS CAN YOU HAVE TOO MUCH OF THEM?

If you like a mix of action, platforming, and puzzles, go get this game. It's a tough but fair game and there's not many cheap deaths as long as you don't blindly rush into things. Finding the in game secrets can be fun too!