THERE'S A MAN WITH ARTISTIC VISION
HE'S SHOWING UP NINTENDO WITH EACH DECISION
HE MAKES IT IN A FLASH
AND ALL THE ASSETS CLASH
DO HIS ARTISTIC SKILLS KNOW NO BOUNDARIES?

NINTENDO, HIRE THIS MAN
NINTENDO, HIRE THIS MAN
HE'S USING UNREAL ENGINGE IN ANY WAY HE CAN

It's always really funny to me how games with a ton of vitriol and discourse surrounding them on this website still tend to average out to a reasonable average rating due to both sides overcompensating their ratings out of spite, and I'd generally agree with that final rating as a score. Apologies if I burst the bubble that rating a game you haven't played but "just don't like existing in your space" a .5/5 isn't going to change the gaming landscape, nor is your ironic 5/5 making the sides of the masses burst from your widely known highly prestigious humor. Fanning the flames only serves to put more eyes on a game like this, so the best you can do is ignore it and hope it passes if it really bothers you so much that a game that amounts to nothing more than slop is fun enough to make a ton of people enjoy it in complacence. Ultimately it really shouldn't bother some of you nearly as much as it does, especially when the devs definitely just don't care about any of this and definitely didn't care before they even made the damn thing.

Anywho, as someone indifferent to allegations that just "seem" true (and possibly could be, as I'm unable to fully dismiss them out of hand and will be happy if they reach some point of resolution) and having the basic ability to competently evaluate a game by the sum of its whole and not by the parts that stitch it together, I'll try to give it an honest review of the actual game and my first draft speedrun through my thoughts instead of just shitposting or slinging shit.

The game is where I'd say it's currently fine if not well made for an early access title. It has a strong number of pals at 111 exactly and they're pretty well spaced; anywhere you go you can frequently find new pals even as you near the completion of your "Paldeck" and the addition of eggs having Pals randomly assigned by size/type and the Black Market traders having daily refreshing random shops means you should make constant progress towards filling out your deck to completion. Palworld succeeds where many monster collectors fail and manages to make finding new Pals exciting; though in this case its less because of combat purposes and more for general base utility and the optimization of automation. Never been more stoked than finding out that my newest Pal has 4 in kindling and can breeze through ingot smelting.

The current amount of content is worth the asking price and your time, and the world is shockingly huge, offering a pretty enjoyable time exploring for a good number of hours (assuming you actually enjoy the slow burn of a survival crafting game - some complaints I see boil down to "I was promised Pokemon with Guns but guns are late game wtf do you mean I have to craft"). There are a ton of bosses in the game if you don't mind the fact that most can be found in the overworld normally, albeit smaller with weaker movesets, but the core 5 "story" bosses (used loosely) offer a legitimate challenge and some strategy due to being HP sponges with attacks that require careful dodging and little room for error. Thankfully they're also totally optional if this isn't your cup of tea, as they don't really provide rewards other than completionism.

A feature I don't see talked about much that I greatly appreciate is that you can adjust the difficulty and the amount of time the game requires in the world settings through scaling EXP and drop rates and those settings definitely solve otherwise balancing issues I'd have with the game played on its default "Normal" settings. This is a great accessibility feature and eases the current imbalance of the game's awful Iron requirements and how inaccessible it is to farm via Pals (as badly as I was hoping) as well as my impatience for EXP, which is a good system in its own right (catching 10 of all Pals, likely requiring borderline the full Paldeck filled out just to reach level cap) but too steep of an investment for my own liking as someone with other games I'd like to get around to this month yet.

Beyond that, it's really just a survival crafting game with the spin of also being a creature collector. It works surprisingly well and is very engaging.

The game has balancing issues otherwise, as expected of a dev team who allegedly made the game from 10 grand with a small team of game devs who were apparently borderline coding-illiterate working in an engine they hadn't ever touched before, and the final result is pleasantly playable through to the very end. I have encountered a few bugs likely due to my CPU being on the weak side but have enjoyed my time more than enough to praise the game's stability.

It's not a groundbreaking game by any means, which again I can't stress enough that it's honestly kind of just slop; but it's fun slop regardless and feels to be higher effort than a majority of slop on the market.

I think rating it any higher is mostly disingenuous and conflating having fun with quality of the end product. It's okay to have fun with mediocre games just as it's okay to not enjoy games that are highly praised, which is a point I think many people forget and overlook when reviewing a title like this. Debated giving this 2.5 stars instead of 3 but I'd still consider it an overall well made game in spite of flaws that become apparent the longer you play. It definitely brings enough unique to the table in its mash-up of game ideas that's incredibly addicting and doesn't feel like anything else I've ever played despite experience with all titles it's directly imitating, which makes it somewhat hard to rate, but still.

If anything it's probably too early to give this game a rating at all as it could just as easily become one of the greatest games of all time through years of updates just the same as it could become abandonware before its first update. We could see Nintendo Ninjas nuke this game from orbit any day now - but until then I'm enjoying my time and will choose to abstain from the discourse surrounding a game with no concrete evidence of any wrong-doing (so far, will be happy to retract my statement if more information comes out).

To conclude my rambling and as a final note, it probably doesn't deserve this explosive popularity. If anything this is just a booming outcry by long-since abandoned Pokemon fans who grew out of Gamefreak's target demographic and were left to cling onto games with very little complexity despite coming into their late twenties and early thirties (myself included). Thankfully all discussion around this game will die in a few weeks and we can stop seeing head-ass takes by people engaging in outrage culture to no real success.

Beyond that I'm tentatively hoping to see if the devs provide any more content of substance.

Congrats to the devs for reaching such a massive milestone of like 5 million sales (at the time of writing this) in a couple days without even counting gamepass. Whether you hate the game or not, thats a feat. That being said, If I hear about this "pokemon killer" one more time I'm going to explode. I played for about 4 hours before couldn't continue playing. I do not tend to like survival games, theres too much babysitting and base building is never something I care about. If it wasn't for gamepass I wouldn't have even bothered. I hope for everyone who is actually enjoying it, they don't abandon the game like what happened to plenty of Early Access survival games of old.

Outside of them getting the pokemon style down (plagiarism allegations, ai art or whatever the fuck else I don't really care) for the pals and the fact they can be captured and used for battle, thats where the pokemon ends.
Battles are in real time, you're fighting with them and they tend to spam the same attack in my experience. There is no story that I ran into, so if you don't suffer from wanderlust syndrome you're gonna be trying to find fun with the genre staple of punching trees to get started. Its Ark but without dinosaurs. You WILL be building and you will be interacting with survival mechanics or you will have a bad time. You can then put your pals to work in the fields while others roll up with you to ice some guy, then catch that person you rolled up on and sell them too. You also gotta babysit your own character as well as your pals cuz you both got your survival meters to keep an eye on like hot and cold.

I really don't see this game posing any sort of "threat" to pokemon like the redditors want it to. These aren't even the same genre. If things that are actually close to pokemon in more ways then just "catch monster" like Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Yo Kai watch, Dragon Quest Monsters and even SMTsona (who did the catching thing long before pokemon) didn't light a fire under their ass then I can't see this doing it. I hope thats the case too cuz if pokemon goes a survival crafting route, I'm gone.