What artwork there is in the book is evocative and sometimes downright eerie. Some of it is evocative of the tribal background of the player characters, some of it is not. It all adds to the feel of the game rather than detracting from it. Tribe 8 is run with the Silhouette system, also used in DP9's Jovian Chronicles , which I have not had the pleasure of playing. It's a good system, fairly easy to learn, but not inherently better than many other systems on the market.
Character creation is point-based, and requires a bit of time.
Characters tend to be fairly complete when they're finished, and while min-maxing isn't impossible, anyone trying to jack up one statistic or skill will suffer a lot in other areas. Not that this will stop the truly dedicated, of course. Well, I think it might be the only game in its specific genre, but even if the market were flooded with them, Tribe 8 would be a stand-out game because of its background. At some point in the future, civilization falls. This is only the start of humanity's woes.