Totem Tribe Gold HD is an interesting blend of strategy, adventure and hidden object, although not the standard hidden object style. Your view is a top-down isometric view where you control the different facets of your society and it works well. Each island that you will visit in your travels has little details like turtles and crabs walking along the beach or rhinos and alligators frolicking among the foliage. Even the yetis, although troublesome, are adorably cute in this game. Despite the fact that the members of your tribe are tiny, you can still tell the difference between the chieftains and the worker bees, the hunters and fighters, and the shamans. Each has little details that allow you to distinguish them, which comes in handy should you want to move them around to a different area, to speed things up or to protect them from danger. The various buildings you construct are also distinguishable due to design and have their own charm.

Various pleasant island tunes will play in the background as you explore the many islands that make up Totem Tribe Gold HD, as well as more ominous tones when you enter a dangerous area. You’ll also hear the tinkering sounds of building when you construct new buildings, tiny clashing swords during conflicts and ambient sounds such as frogs croaking, water gurgling and so on. There’s no dialogue, but the sound effects and background music are enjoyable.

In Totem Tribe Gold HD, you’ll play as the leader of a tribe who is trying to bring peace back to her region. Something sinister has caused different tribes to begin warring with one another and she must travel from island to island to unwrap the mystery. Your main goal when arriving at a new island is to set up a camp and you accomplish this by building structures like a Barracks to produce fighters, a Scout Lodge to produce scouts to explore the region, a Workshop and Smithy for weaponry and even a Shaman Tent and Hall of Mysteries to produce shamans with powerful magic to fight for you.

Initially, everything is cloaked in a black fog of war, but as you and your tribesmen meander around different parts of the island, the island reveals itself. Eventually you will open up things like the aqualung, that will allow your scouts to swim and access areas that were previously unreachable, and various treasures that you unlock from chests that will make your fighters stronger and your builders quicker. The hidden object aspect comes into play with the multitude of gems scattered across the islands that you can collect. You’ll also be tasked with collecting items along your journey that will open up other treasure chests or give you access to idols that are essentially power-ups. These are necessary to complete the island and progress the story, but obtaining them will often make your journey easier. You can also return to the map in between islands and revisit earlier islands to get the things you couldn’t access previously.

I found Totem Tribe Gold HD to be fairly easy to play, but there were a couple of boss fights that were really tough. As you progress, you’ll encounter a character called the Shade King and he and his minions will put up a big fight towards the end of the game. Honestly, I felt ill-prepared for this battle and it took some clever strategy and building of towers on Shade King’s land to eventually defeat him. If you run straight through the game to see the storyline, as I did for review purposes, you will miss out on those power-ups I mentioned earlier and I think this is what caused the battle to be so difficult for me. Don’t even get me started on the final boss battle because it is tough, tough, tough. Aside from this, if you use good strategy and planning, Totem Tribe Gold HD is a blast and will always provide you with the tools you require to get the job done.

Totem Tribe Gold HD is primarily about building up your camp and exploring the islands and you’ll do this using the selection tools on the HUD. An eye represents your scouts, which will become available as soon as you build a Scout Lodge. There’s also a red sword which indicates your fighting icon and you can place this where you want your fighters to attack. You place either of these icons by tapping them once, then tapping where you want your tribesmen to go. The green hammer icon indicates when you can build and tapping it opens up a menu of possible structures you can build. As you unlock new structures, the question marks in the menu will be replaced with icons of the potential buildings you can create. Some buildings require that you first have another construct built, such as the Cave of Trials, which produces strong warriors and requires the Hall of Mysteries. You can create towers that can be upgraded to fire, arrow, mud and ice towers for more effective defense. When you obtain Idols while on an island, you can tap the Idol to power it up and then it becomes available to use. These can do various things like create a fire or ice storm, allow you to see much further in the distance, or even make your fighters temporarily more powerful.

You’ll use the tapping gesture to do just about everything from creating buildings to directing your troops where to go. When you are in the midst of a battle, you can tap and drag a tribe member to a different location away from the fray in order to protect them, such as the witch doctors that heal your troops. They aren’t as tough, but they are very helpful so you can protect them this way. I wish that you could direct two different groups of troops to attack in different locations, since this would come in handy during later levels when you are getting bombarded from all sides, but I didn’t see a way to do this.

Overall, I had lots of fun with Totem Tribe Gold HD. It was a slightly different game than I typically play, but I had a great time with it and plan to go back to each island to collect any gems I missed. Even if you don’t typically play strategy games, you should give the free 1 hour download a try just to check it out. You might find yourself hooked.