izigame.me

Overall a great survival sandbox with a lot of content and progression. No doubt, it really can sink its teeth into your free time and not let go. I have some issues with it, I think there's a lot of missed potential, things they could fix, but at least for now, on the surface - it's fun. I enjoyed a lot of aspects of this game and got a lot of satisfying playtime out of it.



I love the Pal designs - call it ripoff or whatever you will, but it's distinct enough that I never get them confused with critters from Other Series. They borrow most of the design language and some bits are definitely noticeably hacked together in a design sense, but as far as I'm concerned, it's all come together to make a game that's immensely more fast-paced, beautiful, and mechanically satisfying than those Other Series games ever have managed to achieve.

Where it falls short is its level of polish. I think they have good bones here; nothing's particularly poorly designed or broken. I can hardly ask for much more when it comes to the gameplay loop, traversal and combat. But the weak link is the sense that this world is paper-thin. That's the one thing that Other Series does REALLY well, to the point where they force you through arduous cutscenes and unskippable dialogue just because they NEED that world to feel alive, fleshed-out and believable, to sell you on an epic journey you're about to take. While on the surface this game looks better than those ever did, and the journey you go on genuinely pulls off "epic" so much better, it comes with this sense that everything is just skin-deep. It lets what you do speak for itself, but there's so little context outside of what you're doing in a mechanical sense, that even the narratively-interesting engagements you get into don't end up feeling interesting in the moment. Bosses have names and presumably lore (who's reading those text logs, anyway?) but there's no attempt made to stage any kind of 'scripted' content and that is absolutely to the game's detriment, IMO. The scope and scale of the experience is massive, but it feels more like reaching the end of a long, grinding treadmill rather than achieving recognition as a strong Pal tamer in this world they've made. Not having proper cities or overarching story (or even putting together 'story' content in the form of effectively sidequests so they can be skipped/ignored) is doing the game no favors.

While running around the open world and building up your bases and teams is satisfying, the game's entire payoff is in the journey, not the destination. At the end there's nothing to do, nothing to seek out, aside from finding harder and harder fights and finally getting to make them ragdoll around. It's anticlimactic, in a sense, from the beginning to the end. There's no sense of buildup outside of some intro cutscenes for tower bosses. You don't fight through their towers to reach them, you just teleport into a copy-pasted combat arena to kill each other. You aren't building up toward some end goal, like getting all of the "badges" or competing in a grand tournament. You don't speak to the major "story" battles before or after their fights. There doesn't seem to be a reason you can respawn and teleport. People in the game world don't feel like they're filling out a believable place; they're either shopkeepers, enemies or scared sitting at a campfire.



I don't know if any of this is intended to be fleshed out in the future, but I hope it is. If anything, I feel like the gameplay loop and even the long-term "chase" content toward the end plus all the ways you can enjoy multiplayer and the laundry list of customizations you can make to the gameplay (Pals being able to die in combat really should be a default, although I'd prefer it to be fleshed out more - ie, needing to rush them to treatment after a KO, that sort of thing) make for plenty of content to fill out a really satisfying long-term experience, here.

Really, if what you're after is some light survival, base-building and crafting, and absolutely disrupting the environment as you capture everything that moves, this game is a hell of a drug. I just wish that, looking back on the ~80 or so hours it took me to hit endgame, it had more of a fleshed-out world and characters to engage with along the way.

I don't need a story, and I wouldn't say this game is incomplete without more dialogue and scripted sequences. But I think they really should take a look at some of the better content from Other Series and think of ways to incorporate more memorable and unique setpiece content into gameplay - bring the world to life as something I WANT to dig into text logs and talk to random guards to learn more about. And honestly, really re-think the default world options. Palworld has always intrigued me for its willingness to look like a cute critter catcher game while crossing those taboo "kids' game" lines - it has a golden opportunity for players to live out some truly memorable and interesting emergent experiences, but it feels like the devs didn't bother to flesh out any decent ways for failure to be a real threat/fear for players and the default settings basically make the worst punishment boil down to "go back to base, use other critters for a while".



It feels like there's tons of potential here, especially with this game's massive viral success. Right now, it's a fun game, but not a fulfilling world that makes you want to be a part of it. A good survival game, good monster collecting game, good exploration and base building game, zero reason to stick in your mind once it's over except to think about how much you want to curl up with a Chillet. It could be so much more, but if future updates just push "this but more of it" then it'll always be just "good".