Gamezebo Rating:

Demon Tribe is an ambitious attempt to combine collectible card battle games with MOBA-style action, and it works quite well - as long as you have the patience to figure out what's going on. I've played a lot of CCGs in my time - one of the hazards of the job - and I expected more of the same with Demon Tribe. It's not exactly a genre known for innovation and original gameplay, after all, and a quick, cursory glance offered little to suggest that this game would be any different. So it was a surprise to find that it boasts a far greater degree of complexity than I'd anticipated, and that my CCG autopilot would be of limited use.

You begin Demon Tribe under rather hazy circumstances as the newly-chosen director of Omega Surveillance, a sort of secret, supernatural agency charged with monitoring the fragile border between the Waking and Dream worlds (or something like that - the introductory tutorial is pretty heavily loaded and blows by quickly); and long story short, the job of keeping our world from being overrun by demons is now in your hands.

You don't defend the border directly, however. Instead, you direct a squad of agents into battle, controlling their actions in single-player "assault battles" as well as multiplayer co-operative battles and PvP brawls of up to six players. Each agent is a unique character and carries a "deck" of demon forms that they can assume during fights. This is where the CCG angle manifests: demons are "summoned" with gems that are acquired as you play and then added to your agents' repertoire. In a way, it's a bit like having multiple custom decks that can be used to handle different situations and combined for bigger battles.