The positives: Persona 5 is definitely one of the best looking games on not only the PS4, but on Atlus’ entire gallery. After several years of chasing the heels of the sheer iconic status of Kaneko’s demon illustrations and the surreal aesthetic of Nocturne, Persona 5 was able to, somehow, adapt Soviet-inspired aesthetics to a wide audience without turning it into a punchline about polyamory.

The negatives: did you know that there’s a theory that, in the book of Acts, chapter 17 and verse 23, the unknown god referred in that altar is the gnostic Monad? And that the christian God (NOT YHWH, the jewish God) is referred by gnostics to be the Demiurge, the lesser, tangible reflection of the Monad, which makes It an incredibly interesting parallel to the Qaballistic sephira? And that, with this syncretic reading, Paul and Timothy effectively doomed the people of Athens to live in ignorance of the true essence of the Divine by trying to confine the beautiful magnificence of existence, this true, wonderful shining light of Life experiencing itself captured so poetically by a phrase as simple as “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD”, by giving it a name and an ethnicity and a fleshy, now-dead form, not at all unlike what future medieval priests would consider to be the correct way of binding a demon to your will?

Congratulations, you now have thought more about any of the subject matters in Persona 5 than its entire development team did – collectively.

I'm aware that I already sold all my credibility down the river by going to bat (hehe) for Honkai Star Rail, and if you somehow still trust me, I'm here to write a cheque for the rest of my credibility.

I enjoyed Palworld. I’m not crazy about it, it doesn’t consume my every thought like Honkai Star Rail still does a month later and it’s not got me ruminating on the merits of nostalgia and the pitfalls of longrunning franchises the way Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has, but it’s kept my interest and I don’t hate it.

Unfortunately this means I’m now honorbound to write a fair review of it. Tsk.

I like Open World Survival Craft games. You might know OWSCs by their biggest examples: Ark Survival Devolved, The Forest, Rust, DayZ, Subnautica, Lego Fortnite, and Breath of the Wild. I like them so much that I am just a pernicky miserable cunt about the entire genre. Oh god. I am so miserable about these games. I love them so much, but they are so painfully derivative. They are so painfully samey. They all want to be one of the games I listed up above.

And Palworld is no exception. It is perhaps the worst offender. Breath of the Elden Fort is horrifically derivative. It yoinks from, in order of noticing: Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, ARK: Survival Devolved, Elden Ring, Jump Force, Fortnite, Factorio, Xenoblade, and probably a ton of other games I missed due to simple human error.
It is a game where the first NPC you meet wears copyright-safe Monster Hunter armour while holding an M1014 shotgun, while a tower from ARK lights up the skyline alongside the tree Yggdrasil.
The opening moments are set in an environment I can only describe as "Nintendo hired that man", and the first boss looks like a Vtuber concept that was left stillborn on the marketing floor.
On the way to this boss, you will almost assuredly run into a Xenoblade World Boss that's 30 levels higher than you, and be greeted by numerous Xenoblade area prompts that’re then accompanied by DMCA-dodging versions of the BOTW discovery jingle.

It is, in nearly every sense of the phrase, a 'fake game'. Something one would see for 15-20 seconds during a Law & Order episode, an animation kitbashed by underpaid new-hires whose only animation credit will be that episode. By all rights, under every star and every law and every creed and every culture, this game should be terrible.

And it's not. It should be, but the matrix glitched and instead it's... I try not to make snap judgments about early access games, but I'm gonna make an exception here:

Assuming the development doesn't fuck up massively like what happened to Starbound or MASS Builder, this will probably be the greatest OWSC game ever made.

Much like with Honkai Star Rail, I need to gripe about other OWSC games to really illustrate what Palworld does well, though fortunately it's easier here.

The opening hours of most OWSC games are what I call the "copper phase". Whether it's copper or some other resource, the overarching goal of the copper phase in each OWSC is to, after starting with literally nothing, build up a base and acquire the resource which allows you to progress on the technology tree - often while acquiring millions of wood and stone in the process.
This is a remarkably simple part of the OWSC, and the vast majority of them fuck it up. Seriously, my Steam library is a wasteland of games I binned for fucking up the copper phase.
This might seem harsh, but there's a good reason for this: The copper phase is essentially the game's cover letter. It's fine to not play the entire hand here, but in those opening hours an OWSC NEEDS to show off what it's all about here. It's why I left Valheim to die, but V Rising gets a pass. There might be a conversation to be had about intentionally slowing the pacing, yes, but we’re so long into this genre’s history that fumbling this part is unforgivable.

Palworld’s copper phase is obscenely difficult to quantify, and… I don’t think it even has one.

Rather uniquely for the genre, Palworld acknowledges that automation games are just OWSC titles but for autistic people (me), and cribs a few elements from them. As a result, you’ll get access to wood/stone/ingots/not-Pokemon materials relatively early. You can get acceptable weapons within about an hour or two of play depending on how much you explore, and there’s not much in the way of shortages.

The roadblock, then, is not the resources. It’s processing the resources. In other automation games, you use machines and conveyor belts. In Palworld, you use not-Pokemon. And there are not-Pokemon everywhere. Capturing them is almost always a net plus, because it gives the same resources as a kill and is one more cog for your machine.

Immediately, within an hour of play, it’s obvious this solves an incredible amount of OWSC issues. Other players aren’t explicitly needed to facilitate a smooth gameplay experience because not-Pokemon fill a lot of the boring downtime that comes from creating a ton of resources.
You’ll have to cook some berries manually very early on, but once you get a not-Pokemon capable of cooking it’s fire and forget. Pun not intended.
I mentioned wood and stone in passing here and it’s clear the developers are experienced in OWSC games, because two of the earliest facility unlocks are an endless supply of each resource that’re best harvested by - you guessed it - not-Pokemon.
Some things, primarily player-centric upgrades, are best made by the player, but even on this front most of the not-Pokemon capable of work will come over to speed it up.
And hey, for some not-Pokemon there’s not even any need to hunt them - they can be ranched, and will be handled by not-Pokemon capable of farming.

A lot of other OWSC games, even the good ones, often can’t decide whether they’re meant to be a base maintenance simulator or an exploration game. I’d go out on a limb and say that this is one of the few OWSC games where the Open World, the Survival and the Crafting feel congruous.

Now, you may be thinking that these observations based on an hour’s play may fall apart later, and so did I. Even other OWSC games that nail the first hour drop off later.

Palworld doesn’t.

It’s… almost scary in how much the devs have done their homework.

Not-Pokemon drops aside, there aren’t actually that many overworld resources, and they’re leveraged in such a way that there’s always a need for more. The facilities and craftables soon scale up, meaning you’ll always need something. You’ll always need not-Pokemon to process things. Frequently, you’ll unlock a facility and think “Why would I ever need this?” only to stumble on something in the overworld that benefits from it. Trust me, you’ll need heaters and coolers.

I’ve mentioned the not-Pokemon a lot, and if it isn’t obvious yet: They’re scarily well integrated into the gameplay loop. Like in actual Pokemon you have a limit to how many can fit in your team, and each base you construct has an ever-growing limit of workers, but owing to what I said above there’s an eternal need to keep some not-Pokemon around, even if they’re seemingly awful.
Even when my level was reaching the 30s, I still made it a point to catch the low level deer not-Pokemon because my orbiter bases absolutely needed woodcutters. My boxes are full of the generic sheep, cat and chicken not-Pokemon because there is an omnipresent need for wool, versatile labour and eggs to cook food. When my friends and I make expeditions across the map, we frequently take detours just to catch a few not-Pokemon we could use back at base.

More importantly, though, the not-Pokemon solve a lot of issues endemic to the OWSC genre.

Like crafting.

Oh my goodness, I don’t think I can play this genre anymore. Palworld ruined me with crafting alone.

Perhaps my biggest grievance about this genre is how even many of the greatest titles will see you sitting at a bench holding E or Space for about an hour while listening to an endless series of TING-TING as metal bars/tools/torches/whatever are crafted.
Palworld has this too… For about 20 minutes? After that, the not-Pokemon can take over for you. The option is there to do it yourself, if you’re insane, but the game clearly wants you to just queue up the 500 arrows/berries/whatever you need and then go play the fucking game, and it’s mercifully not as indepth as automation games. Again, the game is pushing you to play it.

I find it telling that later unlocks on the tech tree do indeed turn the game into a lite version of the automation genre, though how far you lean into it depends on how cruel you’re willing to be.

That said, there is a pretty prominent issue with regards to not-Pokemon distribution. The default starting point has everything one could ever want within trebuchet-firing distance, but many of the alternate start points are lacking. Which sucks, because many of those alternate starts are absolutely phenomenal for base construction thanks to flat planes and open spaces. They’re useful for satellite bases I guess.

That said, while I do admire Palworld pushing you to play the game, there is a part of the game that I just view with utter scorn:

Boss battles.

For most of Palworld’s runtime, the combat is sufficient. Incredibly basic third person shooter shit with a pet summon on hand, but nothing more. It doesn’t have to be, because overworld encounters are fairly brief kill-or-be-killed affairs that end as quickly as they began.
Boss battles, however, are long. They have beefy health pools, deadly attacks and weak spots that only marginally increase the damage taken.
They’re unfortunately required for progression, and while in most games I often put off boss battles for the sake of enjoying what’s in front of me, in this game I only beelined for them to get them out of the way. Now, the game is EA, that could change, but I think it betrays how little I expect it to change that I’m even griping about it in the first place.

As for the game world… On a mechanical level it’s fine enough, the distribution of not-Pokemon means exploration rarely feels wasted and there’s enough chests/statues/whatever dotted around that I don’t think I ever felt like I was just walking through dead air.
On a geographical and visual level though, it’s utterly banal. I’m very much an “exploration is its own reward” type person, I don’t think an open world needs to have tons of trinkets and loot for it to be meaningful. It’s why, despite hating the game to its core, I liked Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule.

Palworld, for as much as it wants to be Hyrule, is nowhere near it. It’s a series of bog standard environments with the occasional eyebrow raising piece of geometry lying around. The snowy regions look nice, sure, but that’s my inherent bias towards arctic/winter regions coming out in full force. It’s a visually sterile game that meets a bare minimum of beauty but never goes above it.
Even the not-Pokemon abide by this, being decently okay designs that at least have the benefit of having distinct silhouettes, but aren’t really inspiring. I don’t think a machine made these designs, but if they did there’d probably be more creative sauce on display.

Now, I told myself I wouldn’t gripe about anything that’s likely to get changed later on, and until now I’ve held to that fairly well. This once, though, I’m going to let myself kvetch:

Base building in Palworld is predicated upon Palboxes, placeable constructions that erect a large circular AoE around them which facilitates the management of not-Pokemon and their labour.

This is fine conceptually, but the AoEs are too small even on flatter areas with no obstructions and likewise many of the structures are too large. Ostensibly this is to facilitate satellite bases, but limit increases on base count aren’t given out freely and they’re best used for things like mineral processing or batch cooking. There’s a strange gap between smaller things like furnaces, cooking stations and egg incubators and absolutely monolithic facilities like ranches and uh… ‘daycares’.

All in all, Palworld is… Fine.

That might seem anticlimactic after the mostly glowing praise it just got, but it’s still an OWSC. ‘Fine’ within that genre makes it one of the best, but genres don’t exist in a vacuum compared to other games. This isn’t going to make anyone’s GOTY list and to be entirely honest I’ll be surprised if it even meets the honourable mentions for my 2024 top 10.

Food metaphors in reviews are old hat, overdone like crazy, but considering the nature of this game, I consider the next lines to be acceptable:

Palworld is fast food gaming.

And sometimes, I don’t really want a home cooked meal with meat from my local premium butcher, I just want a Big Mac.

I'll admit to not being very enthused by this game when it initially landed in Early Access, both because my older self is uncomfortable with any game that's inherently sympathetic to law enforcement and because the initial serving of Ready Or Not was... Sour. Uncomfortable racial caricatures, eyebrow-raising dialogue, potential right-wing dogwhistles and an odd eagerness to let you go full police brutality on people were what awaited me, which is a far cry from SWAT 4. This isn't getting into the massive technical or balance issues.

101 people before me have said it, but SWAT 4's legacy is less of a cop game and more of a horror game. It knew just how much literally everyone hated cops and weaponized it, creating alienating and hostile environments where everything could be a threat yet told you outright that you weren't supposed to react as you would in other FPS games. The core difference between SWAT 4 and its contemporaries is that perfect play in SWAT 4 meant taking as few actions as possible and ideally walking out with 0 kills.

So you can imagine why RoN's first public version made me grit my teeth and back away. I was content to file it away in the vast wastes of my Steam library and up until now I'd succeeded, but I was bored in the evening and my IRLs insisted it was "quite good no" [sic], so with fuck all else to do and an alarmingly low amount of alcohol in the fridge for a Scottish household, I decided to join them and binge the entire thing in one massive session.

What immediately stands out in the 1.0 version is how a lot of the more obvious copaganda elements are gone, as are the problematic stuff which is most noticeable in the dialogue. It's a relief that I can play the game without worrying I'm going to run into an ulcer bustingly racist comment/accent. The developers also evidently busted out their old copies of SWAT 4, played it to completion and now the game is hellbent on keeping you from firing your weapon at a living person.
Lower caliber weapons offer you the mercy of allowing you to hit someone in the extremities for a non-lethal takedown, but bringing 7.62 Assault Rifle or a Shotgun to a gas station holdup will almost always end in severed limbs and penalties for unauthorized use of deadly force. Call me old, but the first time I accidentally decapitated someone with a stray 12 gauge shot actually made me feel a bit ill, and from then on I've exclusively used an MP5 and a Glock 19.

Where this game deviates from SWAT 4 is that it's very clearly trying to dig into the player's sense of morality to make the need for restraint sting, for lack of a better word. I'm still undecided as to how copaganda this game is on a scale from 3-10 (it will never be below 3, because cops are still sympathetic as the protagonists), but there's something to be admired in how the game will bring you face-to-face with pedophiles, human traffickers, school shooters and libertarians and still demand you keep your team on a short leash, follow the ROE, and try to minimize casualties. In typing that out, I realize that regardless of this game's status (or not) as copaganda, it's very clearly in love with an almost romantic idea of ~equal justice~ that's at odds with the fact you're playing as a cop, a breed of 'person' that in real life views justice as an obstacle to killing people. If you view all fiction as a fantasy of some kind, RoN is a fantasy land where cops actually behave like the image they try to put forward.

I've seen a surprise amount of (admittedly lowkey) debate about whether or not the game handles its subject matter with any grace, and for once I'm not 100% on where my own stance lies. I'd say that the game doesn't actually handle the subject matter... at all. The horrors I mentioned up above are grotesque, yes, but they're portrayed very manner-of-factly. There are no dramatic, heartbreaking violins or horrifying cutscenes in the buildup to the school shooting mission, it's just another mission. The horror comes from carrying out those routine behaviours - skulking around, identifying corpses, trying to subdue suspects nonlethally, praying the person on the floor is just hiding and not dead - in a school. They're depicted, sure, but it feels to me that the game is more about letting you take away your own feelings from the more emotionally challenging missions rather than going out of its way to make you feel a specific way.

I will say that the one exception to this is the swatting level which is, for lack of any better phrases, extremely over the top. It's the second level and comes after you besieging a gas station that's being held up, so I assume the developers wanted to keep the stakes high. The end result is that a 'simple' swapping also features gangsters, a crypto-mining operation, and the implication that the swatting victim partakes in a child trafficking ring. The use of unfortunate streamer stereotypes just makes it feel even more out of place, as if the game is trying to console new players who might fuck up and start firing like crazy. "It's okay, you just hit crypto miners and pedophiles!" or something like that. It's all so garishly out of place with the rest of the game.

Praise must be hoisted upon the visuals and level design, by the way. Brightly lit areas are fucking terrifying because armed gunmen can be literally anywhere, and even the most open levels feel dense and claustrophobic. Darker levels and smaller levels are so much worse, with a flashlight or nightvision goggles only offering token reprieve from the shadows. They really leaned into the 'horror game' thing.

There is, unfortunately, one massive problem hanging over this game like a pendulum, arguably more damaging to it than any potential discussions of its subject matter:

The enemy AI.

If you've ever played Rainbow 6 Siege during peak hours, it's a lot like getting matched against a team of Siege addicts from the Midwest. They possess hyper-awareness, x-ray vision, a total lack of recoil, reaction times measured in nanoseconds, and accuracy that most actual drones would kill to have. Many a time have I lost a mission because someone sensed my tainted chakra and decided to become a bodhisattva for the sake of purifying me.

Through a wall.

With a glock.

Despite me wearing full plate armor and being behind a cabinet as well.

This game lacks a 'downed' state which really compounds my frustrations. My friends and I, despite our years of tactical shooter experience and general FPS capabilities, never finished a mission with the full team alive because the AI is capable of inhuman feats. This applies to all suspect types, too, so you can meet your end at the hands of a panicked D&D player with a Beretta within about a half-second of making eye contact, and then experience the same thing facing down trained security personnel at a millionaire's mansion.

I wouldn't mind this were it the endgame state, or only applied to special enemies (former military, perhaps?) but as it stands it's omnipresent behaviour and results in the game easily becoming an exercise in frustration. The AI roams a lot, too, which can make a lot of tactical gear feel useless. C2 gas is very good when it works, but good luck getting to use it. In general, while the experience is fine enough, the AI hasn't actually evolved from early access and still feels like it's meant to counter players in a game where doors don't exist.

All in all, I'd be lying if I told you I didn't enjoy my time with this game, but even in its much nicer release state there is a small pit in my stomach that turns sour when thinking about it. Despite everything this is a game where you play as cops out to stop a crime wave, and while it's dispensed with the EA version's 'degenerate America' stuff, it still sometimes toes the line in a way that reminds me of a child looking at their parent to see how much of their brattiness is within acceptable parameters, or a cat about to knock something off the shelf.

There are posters dotted around the police station that encourage officers to take the shot, featuring despondent cops who're lamenting that they hesitated. I think these illustrate the cognitive dissonance the game experiences, because you're likely to see one after a tutorial in which a narrator with a cheap microphone repeatedly tells you to shoot last, ask questions later.