Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?

Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.

Nothing positive will result from the baffling success of this soulless cash grab. Those on the side of artistic integrity are undercut, and the ones sticking it to big bad Game Freak are swinging at ghosts.

Good for those that are able to have fun with this kind of stuff. For me, survival games like this are a stone's throw from any idler, bullet heaven, or MMO slop. Infinitely digestible as long as it got a different paint job and lets you watch numbers go up. Sweet candy for the depressed gamer.

I can only hope by the end of the year we will have to be reminded that this shit even happened.

Lobotomy-core.
A frankenstein's parody has been birthed from excessive market research. Pure and utter slob, the gunk is thrown wayside to the masses and the public seem to love it! Sure, I can see shimmers of gusto and vibes past it's mechanically stapled together body, but is it really worth to sit next to the soulless stank just to breathe in those few and far-between moments of joy?
I feel for the paranoid hostility players have shown of the maybe or maybe-not generative AI, but it just seems like the devs just ripped them off by hand and lol.
7 million copies sold in just 5 days... and in the end, the general masses really do only care about a feature-checklist stapled on a clipboard that reads the following: It shall have combat, survival mechanics, resources, base-building mechanics, crafting mechanics, catching mechanics, climbing mechanics, stamina, an open world, co-op multiplayer, skill trees, leveling and progression. Does it work well together? Absolutely not. In the end, it feels like you are just playing 5 ripped-off games melted together into one hotpot of mechanics and rules and nothing more. No identity, no message, nothing. A silent shell that just spits out the steam chart trends back at you.
How is anyone supposed to feel but indifferent to a game that says nothing and dares nothing?

A frankenstein-ed mishmash of a game where unity assets and stolen designs are married with Ark's gameplay made by a company known to produce low quality early access survival games until something sticks. Every single thing is either stolen, from the pals designs to the sound effects or added to the game with zero effort for cohesion.
It's fascinating that the "paragon of game development against the evil corporations" is the laziest example of a game made by a studio that will rip off even if indie games like Hollow Knight just for a quick cash.
But as long as your favourite streamer plays this edgy pokemon with guns and as long as you tweet how much you hate Pokemon you can enjoy it all you want.
"Show them Pocket Pair! Show them how real games with passion are actually made!"

This is the gaming equavilent to a pig trouph. A bunch of leftovers and scraps from better, more successful games mindlessly mashed into a bin and fed to gamers who'll gobble up any AI generated, plagarised piece of slop as long as they're "sticking it to Game Freak". I promise you, Game Freak doesn't care about this game now and they especially won't care about it in a month when the hype has died down and it dissapears off the face of the internet. As an aspiring game designer, who starts study this year it's incredibly disheartening to see such a low effort game get so popular and be met with so much success. What's the point in even trying if this passionless and creatively bankrupt game is all it takes for great success. Go support indie devs that actually put passion and effort into their games, go play Nexomon, or Monster Sanctuary, or Monster Crown, or Coromon, or Cassette Beasts, or any of the other hundreds of indie games that actually deserve your money.

It's cool that the pals can be used for many different things, but that's the only reason I gave it a star.
The game is creatively bankrupt. Everything it has, from the gameplay to the creature design, is ripped off. I think if you're gonna rip off Pokemon, you should lean in to it more and give me SOMETHING of substance. It just felt like the parody could have been a lot stronger.
The biggest sin this game commits is it's just boring as hell. These kind of games generally aren't for me anyway, and I was hoping for this to be an exception, but it just wasn't.
It's only January but if I play anything I like less this year, I'm gonna be sad. This is without question one of the laziest and comically bad games I've ever played. I can see why it might work for some people, but this is not my thing at all