hypothetical life partner walks into the room

"Vee, what are you doing?"

"Playing Balatro."

"It's 4 o'clock in the morning. Why on Earth are you playing Balatro?"

"Because I've lost control of my life."

Palworld is at the forefront of a lot of controversy surrounding its likeness to Pokemon. As someone who hasn't played a Pokemon game in about 12 years, I have no stake in that game.

This is a graphically unimpressive, slightly enjoyable time killer. For the 15 or so hours I put into it, reaching what I'd consider the mid game, I was confident I'd had my fill of Palworld. I would regret the time I spent with it, had I not enjoyed the co-op aspect; time spent having fun with friends is never time wasted.

What was a waste of time though, was how often this game crashes. It's unforgivable how frequently this happens, at least on the xbox port I was playing. It crashes when you open menus, engage in combat, catch things - and this is made even worse when every player now has to go through the slog of rebooting the whole game (from the console home screen no less, or else it doesn't work) and entering the unique join code.

Let's talk about other fun glitches. There was one dungeon that kept crashing about 30 seconds after our entering no matter what; there was a point we managed to get to the boss before it crashed for the 8th or so time and we gave up on ever doing a dungeon again. There was also the time I spawned under the map (after a crash) and had no choice but to respawn myself - leaving my bag with all my items and money lost under the map forever.

Fun parts of this game include the catching of the Pals and the subsequent putting them to work in your slave camps. It's a morally dubious concept and I loved every moment of it, it really leans into the stupid idea of having a labour force and I think it's the games best aspect.

The combat is terrible, I managed to do one of the major boss fights and a half dozen or so of the smaller ones. There is no strategy or skill involved, you just need to have a high enough level team of Pals.

Finally, the building is also terrible. It copies the system from Ark: Survival Evolved (as well as most other aspects of its progression system), which in of itself is a terrible system. There was satisfaction in making a half way decent looking base, but the process of building it genuinely might be one of the boring and tedious tasks a video game can oblige you to perform.

I feel my score may even be too high, now that I've highlighted my major gripes with it while simultaneously being unable to give it any real praise now that I'm looking back on my time with it. But I did find myself quite addicted for a few days there, and maybe that's enough for you. Get a few friends together, and play this if you really have nothing else going on. But honestly, just play one of the other survival games on the market; they're probably slightly better.

it's... fine. Honestly, the discourse around this game has been wild to witness. I'm glad it was on gamepass so I could try it out - I needed to play it for myself to properly form an opinion. Just by looking at it, I could tell something was off. My suspicions were correct. It's mediocre in almost every aspect outside of the creature designs and some of the animations/UI presentation. Unfortunately, it's borderline IP theft due to the way the pals are designed. It's so obvious, and I don't think it should be championed. I'm all for companies ripping off other companies that do things well; but this is a step too far in that direction when it comes to lifting art assets. Maybe not -literally- but -essentially- based on the proportions, the shapes, the colours, etc. It's shameless.

Otherwise, it's a basic survival game and it's boring.