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Palworld - Before You Buy

Palworld - Before You Buy

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Rating: 4.5; Vote: 2
Today, we're talking about "Palworld". This is the game the internet has been calling Pokemon with Guns. It's also the game the internet has kind of crowned king over the course of last weekend as this game launched in early access, it like broke records, it flew to the top of Steam charts. So I've been playing this for a few days now, both solo and a bit of it cooperatively on PC where this footage has been captured and it's also available on Xbox through Game Pass. So now I know the running tagline joke is, like I said, Pokemon with Guns, but it's really Pokemon but a survival game like "Ark". "Pokemon" with some elements that some Poke fans have been wanting for a long time. "Pokemon" with a dash of "Breath of the Wild" and a few more popular games. Look, people don't like these comparisons. They get very defensive. I've seen the arguments online, but it's often pretty blatant here. Now what matters is that it clearly derives a lot from things that a lot of other games do well, sometimes shamelessly, for some, a little too close to comfort. Some character models are alarmingly close to "Pokemon". They've been spoofing. With some users online, pointing out near exact proportion similarities. So there's some potentially questionable stuff here worth acknowledging. Regardless, the game is doing something for some people, clearly it's scratching an itch, it's filling a void. Me personally, I don't love a lot of survival games. I'm pretty picky, but I found myself hooked on this one. This game gives you a lot considering its early access. Yeah, it's a little jacked up. Some animations look weird or unfinished. Menus and some whole mechanics could use some complete tweaking and there's more features I'd love to see. But even with the roughness, the early accessness, it's a really fun time already. There's a lot against it though. It feels a bit cheap, almost like thrown together at times. And it can be devoid of any cohesive feel or personality with the world at times too. Sometimes almost like soulless, but hey, let's just get into it, explain the mechanics and talk about everything. So if you don't like survival games, it's still very much the thing here. It's not the most intensive one, it's actually pretty casual, but like you're chopping down trees, you're cooking and eating to keep your character healthy, and you're building primitive log cabins. But from there, the game very quickly gets you hooked onto its loop. Catching creatures with balls you throw at them. You can run up and whack them, weaken them, and then toss a ball at them to hopefully catch and contain them. From there, you can have the little creatures populate the home base you build, get to work, and also accompany you out in the field. You can throw out a ball and have a little ripoff Pikachu come out and follow you around wherever you want, whenever you want. You can ride some of these things, you can use them as mounts, you can fly on them, you can have them fight with you and adventure with you, and that is just a cool thing. Like to have that fully like uncompromised here, like just having that creature with you doing whatever is cool. Yeah, they can only do so much, but you can teach them different attacks. You can command them to do those attacks. It's simple, it's accessible, and it's casual, but it gives you that good sense of Poke freedom. You're catching these creatures for XP. So catch a bunch of the same one and get a big XP boost. Catch a new one you haven't seen yet, also, you get a big XP boost. As you level up, you can dump points into basic stats like health, stamina, attack. Along with that though, you level up and you earn points that you can spend in a technology skill tree, a skill tree that looks almost exactly like "ARK: Survival Evolved". Here, you unlock new things for you to craft, and work on, and improve everything. So go from cooking food over a campfire to using a real stove. Make more things to store your items, new weapons, fences to defend your homestead, stuff like that. Only in this game you have Pokemon or whatever as your little workers, all of them have their own characteristics and specializations and this is what makes the game feel a bit more interesting. Having a bunch of little creatures graze in a pen so you can harvest them for wool while creatures with hands can plant seeds in your farms to grow food. And then like the water creatures can come over and use their water powers to blast water onto the crops, or maybe power a mill to generate more material for building even better stuff. It's really fun when it all gets going. You need to keep the creatures fed, rested, and happy for all of this to happen. And sometimes your areas will get attacked too and you'll need to kind of rally the troops. So you can go from a little hut with a farm to a fortified house with sandbags, and walls, and towers, and even turrets and weapons the creatures can use. Along with that, you're adventuring out in the world. Your main task seems to be finding these massive boss towers. These contain like a big boss battle that you need to really gear up and kind of prepare and grind for. They seem challenging, but the other thing is that the game world itself is absolutely huge. Getting to these towers might take a while. The map is massive and I feel like I've barely even scratched the surface yet. There are cave dungeons with special creatures and loot to find inside, rare creatures hiding around, big boss creatures out in the open, and I've even found some hidden bosses in some pretty weird unexpected places too. There are even towns with NPCs. This is where the game really feels the early access. It's pretty lifeless with a couple of vendors and boring NPCs who barely have anything to say with some weird writing and dialogue. Still there's potential here for a lot. You can just buy new pals or visit a shop and buy items, but that really seems to be it for now. There are also kind of bandit camps out in the world with enemy bad guys to fight against too. This feels pretty weak with not a ton of excitement to them and really not a lot of reward. It's nowhere near as good as the boss stuff. It seems like this is still very much an early access work in progress thing, so be warned. It's that depth though that I've really found the most fun, getting better and better, leveling up and fighting with my creatures, finally unlocking like a grappling hook, or a gun, or building a harness to ride my creature. That stuff is really satisfying and it's pretty briskly paste for a while with you satisfyingly grinding just enough to progress at a pretty even rate. I don't know how long that'll last, like how far down the tree that will feel. This is only first impressions of course, but I've actually been impressed here. Once you start really getting a production line going with creatures making you ammo or crafting you new Poke balls and everybody has a job and things are moving and everybody's fed, it's fun to see. You can throw your creatures around, you can pet them, you can feed them and it's cool to see them help you out. Like a little fire type volpex looking guy will breathe his fire breath into the ironsmith as you forge ingots or blast your fire as you're cooking. Little things like that made "Palworld" feel like a creative spin on the many genres it's combining. Now, there's a lot of freedom here and a lot of complexity. It seems like you can find shinies out in the world and there's a breeding system too, so the game throws a lot at you. It's a full meal, even if it's a real unfinished one. But I think it comes down to that amount of stuff that people are really enjoying, that kitchen sink approach. It's a casual survival game with monster hunting, collecting elements, and a massive amount of exploration. Now my only other complaint is that because some of these elements feel so just thrown together and some gameplay concepts so close to other games, that it really leaves open this glaring hole where the games, I don't know the word, like it with soul should be, it feels pretty lifeless, like devoid of character. Other than some of the creatures being totally awesome like Depresso, besides that, hanging out with them on the farm, it doesn't really feel like it has any sense of cohesive lore, or story, or world building, or even visual style to it. It's all just kind of like I said, tossed together. You can find little collectibles to read out in the world, and they attempt to describe some of the bosses or faction or what's going on. And I've seen some people think this is enough, but to me everything here feels like an afterthought. It just kind of feels like this random game. You're like a little "Fortnite" guy with a furry outfit fighting against weird Pokemon and bad guys that sometimes look like the hell gas from "Kill Zone". I don't know. One boss encounter feels completely unlike anything else in the entire game. It's bizarre sometimes. It's like a bunch of puzzle pieces next to each other, just not actually connecting. Nothing is really very interesting here because there just isn't anything yet. This is definitely like a matter of preference. You might not care about that. You just wanna have fun in this world. I can only speak to how I feel, so I hope "Palworld" can take the millions of dollars that's clearly making already and build out a more interesting world and characters and everything that you can really fall in love with 'cause that will be the layup in my opinion. Maybe carve out even better takes and just newer stuff that isn't just evaluating on other games. That's just me. Now the developers do claim that this game is 60% done and PVP and new content is in the works. And I'm curious to see where that goes. So again, I've had some harsh words for it, but like I said at the start, I was hooked. I've been having fun. It's accessible. It's easy to get into with some nice satisfying progression and a bunch of early access mess. If you're the type of player who can tolerate that, buying into something unfinished and even a bit buggy and you like a dash of survival game stuff in their games, then yeah, maybe keep an eye on it. And while I did play a lot of it solo, I did have a surprisingly good time. I did have even more fun when I brought a friend in. We hopped in a little server and just started doing our thing, battling, and catching, and doing everything. I would say it's fine on your own, but the experience definitely improves with others. All this being said and done, like with games like this, we tend to revisit them in a year or so. We've done it with "No Man Sky". We've done it with a lot of games that release either early access or in a rough state. So I'm looking forward to talking about "Palworld" in a year, see where it is, and see if Nintendo sued them into the dirt. We'll see where this goes, but of course, this is a before you buy, you know how this works by now. We give you some pros, some cons, and some personal opinion. And now I wanna hear yours down in the comments. What do you think about "Palworld"? It seems like everybody's made their mind up already on this thing. It's either something you're into or you're not. Do you feel like the stuff is just blatantly ripping off unfairly? Are you not really fazed by that? What do you think the future of this game is? Are you surprised by its success? Are you a "Pokemon" fan that felt like you've been abused for years and now you're coming to this?
Date: 2024-01-24

Comments and reviews: 20


I was so eagerly awaiting your guys thoughs on this and I'm dissapointed.
This is probably and mostly because you don't have a lot of experience with survival server based titles. Which I wish Palworld wasn't trying to be. If you play them they aren't very story driven. Ark being a big example as if the game didn't have the only way to get the experience of taming dinosaurs the game would be dead. Survival servers based games need heavy gimmicks to make them work. As palworld does, but they still made a very strong non-server based experience. I have not once felt like things were randomly thrown together. The map feels very cohesive and has a good slip in and slip out vibe similar to valheim just not randomly generated. Which I experience with the environment in real life sometimes. I have only fought Zoe so far as to bosses so I have no idea what you are talking about there. I wish the game went in more of a Sons of the forest route with overall design. Rather then server based survival. I think it would improve the game a lot.
I also hate how this video starts by playing into the trolls onllne. Especially the embarrassing stuff about model proportions and how that is impossible. I looked around and only found one area on twitter talking about all following the same thread. It's apparent that the original poster has no idea what they talking about. Scaling things down to match while making other things unmatched and not understanding modeling things by metrics. As a lot of Vtuber models have similar proportions that are completely made on blender as they use the built in sizing system to make their characters. Lets say pokemon and palworld both looked up wolf to get dimensions. It make since that they would look similar. It's frustrating to see you guys the first review that I have seen play into this nonsense.
All in all for saying you had fun with the game you made it pretty apparent you had a hard time talking about the game and it was frustrating to say the least. For how long you guys have been at this I would hope you put more effort into understanding the material you are working with or hire someone who has experience with these kinds of games. Also hire someone who understands copyright. Not a media lawyer. They are taught to be extra careful about things. I have my experience with them and oh my gosh they think things are lot more restrictive then they are. As too why no man sky got sued over it's name.
I really like hearing what you guys have to say about things most of the time. Sadly it just seems you guys aren't experienced enough to handle something like palworld. As this video doesn't really talk about it's strengths or weaknesses. Just feels like it's asking a lot of questions with no answers. Especially with this being called a before you buy. As this gave me nothing definitive and would make me seek out other reviews for something more definitive.
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This game more like a combination of ark survival, pokemon legend arceus, and digimon and the game combine all of the mechanic Pretty well. Not gonna lie when i first see it i just thinking this game as another fan made pokemon and just another assets flip garbage game that not worth the money.
But after im trying it, how im so wrong about it, it is much more fun than any recent pokemon games that i play, the idea of fighting alongside your cute pet with guns was a really cool and unique idea, the base management system was pretty fun too where you can assign your pet to do work for you while you explore and capture more pets make it worth your time to spend some time to build some base and actually getting resources from it.
Still not perfect it still not feel like finished product yet, there are a lot of improvement to be made for sure like friendly npc, story, different dungeon, more pals variety, more guns but so far the game was already fun the way it is now (at least there was no game breaking bug, and im really excited to see the future of this game.
Really like the grim side of this game too tough like when you get meat cleaver you can slaughter your pets for resources which is dark but cool too. Still stuck playing this games and im loving it.
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I feel like anyone pretending like many of the Pal designs DIDN'T blatantly rip-off many pokemon designs is acting like an irrational fanboy. Like, it's so extremely damn obvious just how insanely similar many of these designs are to existing Pokemon, to the point where it genuinely feels like the devs used AI prompts with pokemon as base to edit.
And yet I still want to try out the game just to see what the hype's about. But that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend like Depresso isn't obviously built from an Espurr base, Dinossom doesn't have the body of a Goodra with Meganium mixed into there, Fenglope isn't Cobalion, Paladius & Necromus don't have the exact same stance and vibe going on as Ceruledge, and Shadowbeak not being a Silvally with Arceus's middle section rings and bird thrown into there.
Hell, if anything the fact that these designs remind me so much of Pokemon is a contributing factor as to why I want to give it a shot lmao
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I think I'm having trouble trying to understand your complaint about the soullessness. Is it because it borrows from so many different games For me I love that it's cherry picking a lot of the systems from other games to be great. Is it lazy Sure, but is it fun Yes. Its like a Pokemon, Zelda, Ark, Valheim, and about 30 other games tossed in a blender and personally I'm really liking it. I could say the story sucks by design because its a survival game and I legit can't think of a survival game that has a palatable narrative. We'll see, I don't really trust the developers to make the game any better, my guess is they will take the money and run, but what is out now is a fun survival game and a glimpse at what pokemon could be if nintendo knew how to make pokemon games. Its goofy fun with the boyz and I think many times that is enough.
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So for me I didn't get into it until a couple days after release because it wasn't my cup of tea type of game but I saw the news and I had to try it. So I started playing in instantly I got hooked with the building mechanics and building a base I built an entire house on a cliff overlooking the water and soon I needed more supplies to keep building my giant mansion and that's literally what I did for the first couple of hours and that's how it got me. Then after I realized that it was supposed to be a farm I was building lol. I really just want to keep building houses everywhere and fill the world with houses cuz there's not many
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Never been a Pokemon fan, BUT I was introduced to a similar ideea as a kid when I randomly discovered Zanzarah and I freaking loved it. So I'm sure there's a market for games like this: explore / craft / survive (typical RPG stuff) with the added feayure of beasts / fairies that act as pets or actually working for you (including doing battles. It was similar in zanzarah without the survival part. Oh and you had fairies doing magic fighting first-person in an Unreal Tournament-like arena instead of beasts.
So in the end I am curious to see where this game goes. Looking fwd to the next video on it.
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i met up with my old WoW and BDO guildmates thanks to this game
we joined the same server, we met up in the south-most island to set up base there
crossed the sea to the east just to get murdered by a bunch of huge cute looking monsters before finding out it's the supposedly end game area
what ARK complexity this games discarded, it made up with the not-pokemon breeding
creating your very own perfect pal takes a lot of work, but it's very rewarding
it's always fun watching your pal murder bosses you struggled with before
if you like ARK and pokemon, you gonna like this game
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Game is actually shit in so many regions
The most fun I’ve had with the game so far is unlocking new stuff (which slows to almost a halt around lvl 16) and glitches which there are a shit load of not to mention how barely functional online play is even with someone who doesn’t even live 10 miles away like I caught a bird for a mount and have gotten stuck in the air being constantly set back 5 times in the first 10 minutes of me having the sadle so why people see this as anything more then so bad it’s braindead and sometimes kinda funny is beyond me
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you missed the lore that is hidden like ark did. you need to find pages. I am totally invested and 9 others are with me. it will slow down when you need to make anything above refined metal. sometimes breeding is a mess too LOL and yes there are shinys. they jingle when you get close so keep your ears peeled. you can slide as well. Here is a tip. when you slide down any type of slant like a hill, then jump and glide. SPEED! jank is frustrating but it is a lot of fun. already put in 56 hours LOL
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it all comes down to. are u having fun with the game for most people this is the key factor. its 30 bucks for tons of hangout fun to be had with friends and chill around and explore. compared to the stuff big game devs are pushing out for 70 usd. feels super fresh and charming. and surprisingly i only had one crash in like 3 days and i been running a private server on my pc. this could be the next arc if the devs take it more seriously and get to work now and capitalize on the hype.
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One thing that is kind of bummer, is that gameplay loop drastically slows down around lvl30 - once you discover you have to farm Pal Oil, farming it becomes tedious chore stacked on top of raiding dungeons for Paldium and farming Ore.
Right now I'm optimistic they'll smoothen out levelling after 30, since now they have budget and incentive to go further.
I even suspect they haven't even though of sooooo many people actually reaching 30
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Let be real the Pal are rip offs of pokemon 99% of the time, but does that really matter I mean for me I don't really care. I will say my biggest and only real issue with this game is now I know why craftopia development kinda just got abandoned over the years. I mean this game is great but a shame it clear as a craftopia fan that craftopia was basically just a alpha test of what they can do for the creation of this game in the end.
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Now that theyve made record breaking sales. it will never come out of early access lmao. Just like their last game Craftopia they will abandon this one too soon enough.
This bandwagon hype that the internet has for this game is purely driven by Nintendo hatred (fair) but this game is so far from a polished product and it hurts that its crushing games like BG3 at the moment
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I couldn't care less if they blatantly copied many of the pokemon designs - they've given us a 3rd person realtime pokemon battler rpg explorer thing - we should've had something like this a decade ago imo, can't believe the actual pokemon games still have barely even come close, with all of their power, money, resources. .. . thankfully someone finally did it
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look I love the game, I run it every day with my friend group but its so damn buggy and they literally took the style of breath of the wild and added Pokemon and guns. all the way from the respawn points to the towers and UI they literally stole it all from breath of the wild but regardless its a 10/10 with some bugs.
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It's a revamped craftopia it is from the same creators I like it but I hope they actually put time and effort to make it a actual game I've been waiting for a year or two for craftopia to be fully released and it seems it probably won't happen anymore seems like they moved to this instead so fingers crossed
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This is way, WAY! more than a average game in Early Access. This finally opened the door to what's possible for a something everybody has wanted for decades. AND it's only 60% done making Millions, I'm so excited to see how this game will. EVOLVE. Anyways, I still Gotta Catch 'Em All.
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I played 3 hours and had a very good time. As you say, some stuff seems a bit off and incomplete, but it literaly is (early access.
This has huge potential to be awesome at full completion with all the support from buyers it has been getting this week. I will be eagerly waiting
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Come on dude, the whole pal models are direct rip offs from bla bla bla was proven wrong by the person that uploaded it. They just did it because they hated palworld. Please don't include that in your video.
Also so much of the crap said about this game has been disproven
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Looks like the sort of game that’ll be popular for a month or 2 just because it’s the new thing and has Pokemon appeal, but once that wears off and they don’t release updates regularly the game will die really quickly like the majority of early access survival games
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