Games

The core gameplay is fun as hell. I'm using a crossbow and my flame fox thing to catch or knock out pals while riding my pink sheep-llama thing to explore the world and having a blast. For an early access game it also runs great and so far no game breaking bugs.

I'm currently playing it and I don't really think it's as messy as it appears on the surface. It has a pretty clear progression goals from what I can tell 5 hours in.

throw in meme postable character creator

Mmm. Monster Factory worthy? Always excited for new episodes of that.

Saw that the game was made by the folks that are behind Craftopia, which definitely explains why it looks and plays the way it does, "without a vision". Here's to hoping this one actually gets finished and released.

I agree with most casual reviews that it's a bit unpolished, somewhat buggy, and needs work in some areas, but on the whole is a decent foundation for a game and most importantly is FUN.

Same question.

People rave so hard about any pokemon clone regardless of quality that it's really hard to figure out which ones are actually fun.

Running a dedicated server for my friend group, and it's pretty fun!

I've been hearing really good things. People expecting some shit post of a game but ending up with something that was actually pretty deep.

That's going to be difficult to answer because people are going to look for different things in the game. I don't particularly care for the survival mechanic. I don't like having to keep up with food. And the food appears to spoil rather quickly. Like some of it has a timer of like 15 minutes. Currently there's a bug though where you can make it last indefinitely. If you have food on you drop it and pick it up and it resets the timer. If you have food in the feed bin, move it from the bin to you then back in a resets the timer. Also appears that perhaps if the pals add food in like eggs it resets the timer as well.

For a pokémon game it's all right. It is leagues better than what the pokémon company has been putting out. Closest I can say is it's kind of similar to Arceus.

The AI needs work yet. But it's early access so that's to be expected.

Combat, I really don't know what to say. You have stats as the player that go up based on your choice each time you level. You can increase your damage by 2 each level... You start at 100 damage... And the weapons that you get are basic, poison and fire. You can also get a melee weapon but... If the player is meant to fight alongside the pal it needs a little work yet. Especially with your range attacks you need to constantly craft ammo.

The whole crafting mechanic... I don't really understand the point. It's the exact same mechanic that's just lobbed into every single game. I will say it works quite well in this mechanically. Like when you're trying to put a wall up or floorboards down they snap together. And you don't need to keep the resources on you you can just have them in a container literally anywhere on your base.

There are proper bad guys, which the pokémon company has long since abandoned.

If this game gets the proper support from the developers, I can definitely see a lot of potential from this. But I think they're definitely going to have to sit down and think about what should be in the game and what should not be in the game.

Palworld.

For an early access it's surprisingly polished.

It's not really a pokemon game, the similarity basically ends at: there are weird fighting animals you catch with round objects and take research notes on. There's no evolving, combat is an active battle rather than turn-based, combat participants are unlimited, your character participates in combat directly, you can catch people, you put what you catch to work for you at your camp, plus all the survival elements.

I'd say yes.