Last week I as on my winter break, and mostly spent the week just gaming and relaxing. On Thursday a friend took the da off work so that we could sit down and game together from the early morning hours. We decided that we wanted to try something new. We decided that we wanted to try Palworld.
What is Palworld?
Palworld is Pokemon, but fused with modern open world survival games like Ark and Rust, and with slavery. In Palworld you don't catch these creatures to be friends with them and have them do battle for you. You catch them so they can work at your base and also do battle for you. You can even butcher them and equip them with guns to become slave soldiers. It really is something else.
All in all it takes so much from Pokemon, both in terms of creature design and general mechanics. There's a elemental weakness system basically just like Pokemon and several of the Pals look very much like Pokemon we've known for years. They even ended up getting sued by Nintendo and the lawsuit is still ongoing as far as I know. It's ironic seeing as there's games out there with more similarity to Pokemon games than this. I guess they didn't like that this game became more popular than Pokemon in such short time.
Decent Early Access jank
It's hard to say I didn't enjoy a game I put 9 hours in over the span of two days. Still, I doubt I'm going to be playing Palworld much more than that for now. While the game is fun and has a good and working concept it's also very obvious that it's still in early access. The game is currently in version 0.4, and it's taken a year to get there from 0.1 in January of last year, meaning it still has a long way to go before it's released into 1.0.
For me the game is missing a lot of quality of life features and polish before it's worth jumping back into the game for real. Things like being able to adjust my UI so that the game isn't 50% UI and 50% game. Things like exploring and not having to find unfinished low resolution terrain. things like my Pals not getting stuck in the roof of a cave.
While Palworld is enjoyable at the base it's mostly just reminded me of why I need to stop playing early access games. Why spend my time playing an unfinished and unpolished game when there's so many complete games out there?
This isn't critique against Palworld. I very well understand the concept of early access. Early access just isn't something for me. I will be returning to the game when it's fully released and finished.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.