I saw the discussions online about this game and since I woke up in a good mood I decided to ignore the clear red flags and give the game a chance. I mean, surely there's a good reason for it's ridiculous sale numbers, right? Well, there's a reason for sure, I'm just not sure it's a good one.

There seems to be a very popular misconception going around that this is "Pokemon with guns", I say misconception because that is not what this game is. Palworld is a survival crafting game with Pokemon, meaning the Pokemon are secondary to what you will spend most of your time doing: grinding materials, walking around in an empty map, collecting useless or uninteresting treasure, the usual gameplay loop for a creatively bankrupt game in this genre.

So after realizing that this game has literally nothing interesting to offer I circled back to my initial question, what's the reason for it's insane success? I reached the very depressing conclusion that this horrible slop fest of a game is so successful purely out of spite.

The gaming community has decided that plagiarism should be financially supported and celebrated as long as it’s happening to a company making terrible games, regardless of whether the hundreds of artists working within it have anything to do with the decline in quality or not, their work deserves to be stolen and the thieves should be rewarded for stealing it.

Please, if you’re against plagiarism, if you support artists, don’t buy this game, don’t play it, if you ever feel tempted to try it out because of the constant discourse and publicity online, just load up Minecraft with Pixelmon and BlockFront, you get to enjoy “Pokemon with guns” and a survival crafting game that’s actually fun sometimes.

It's not pokemon with guns. It's ARK survival Evolved with pokemons. Even the progression system is lifted from Ark.

There's not a single original bone in this game, and I think that's ok. Even the UI is a ripoff of DEATH STRANDING of all things.

But as a survival game, it's quite enjoyable and much more approachable than Ark, Conan exiles, and maaaybe Valheim, because the whole point of the base is to have it automated by the pals.

Gameplaywise, it's serviceable at best, it takes ohours to get to a proper gun and everything in between the Bow and the handgun feels super slow.

It's a hit game just because of the memes, not because it's a great game.

Setting whatever moral opposition I have towards Palworld aside, I think its biggest crime is ultimately that it's just plain boring. For all the things it's derivative of, it doesn't especially exceed at anything. The base building and automation involving the Pals is probably the most unique concept the game has to offer, but it's extremely shallow. There's no real strategy, or depth to any of the gameplay whatsoever really. Gunplay is unchallenging and very dull outside of few instances where you may acquire a new toy, such as a Foxparks flamethrower or Mossanda bazooka. However, these moments are few and far between, and their magic fades very quickly. The level of customization allotted to the player in terms of what Pals to use and how to use them is straight forward and uninteresting. It's very obvious what passives are best on what Pals, and you'd build most Pals exactly the same no matter what. Half of the Pals are simply mounts, and the other half don't do anything particularly interesting. The most you get is bland passives like "Water Pals drop more items when defeated," or a flat damage increase for a certain type, there's not really any feeling of meaningful party synergy. Pursuing said customization is also a discouraging process, as on default settings you may be waiting up to 2 hours real time for eggs to hatch late game - an absolutely absurd time sink. I don't feel this way about the other time gated activities in the game, like crafting, because it's encouraging to find a Pal that can craft faster - that's progression! In general the game isn't too terribly grindy, but it definitely picks up later on. I will say that there are a ton of handy adjustable option sliders for tweaking these issues to fit what you want, as well as other things like difficulty. This is very appreciated, but probably not going to be a perfect solution for everyone. Moving away from customization and optimization, lets shift our focus now to collection and exploration. First of all the map is not procedural, which does mean it was actually thoughtfully crafted, but also means that once you've seen it you've seen it. This is especially bad in the "dungeons" because they use the same repetitive handful of tiles over and over again, which makes them super tiresome, and quickly. I actually forgot they existed for like my first 40 hours of gameplay, and they only do so you can get practically meaningless accessories. There is no real story, no lore, no proper world building, or really any other goals or reasons to care about the world you are plopped into. You are only vaguely pointed towards towers, and they end up just being anticlimactic boss fights which are basically just normal Pals with more stats and an irrelevant NPC on their back. Collection isn't much more interesting either unfortunately, as the pool of fresh Pals to discover dries up pretty quickly. They don't evolve, and there's no sense of growth or any feeling of a meaningful relationship building between the Pal and the player - it's all very disappointing. There are a few cool Pal designs, ironically enough they're usually the least obviously plagiaristic (Cawgnito my beloved). Something I would like to genuinely praise the game for is the Pal animations, many of them are quite charming. Despite the aforementioned distance between the Pal and player, they can still be endearing due to the level of character expressed through their animations (Cawgnito my beloved, again). They aren't all perfect, and the non-Pal animations aren't nearly as stellar, but proper good animation work is one of the main things series like Pokémon have been sorely lacking as of late I feel. Speaking of the art generally, the style is all over the place. Having highly stylized, cartoony Pals, anime-inspired character models, photo-realistic guns, and semi-realistic environments all thrown together really makes you feel like you're playing a disjointed asset flip! Music is also completely unremarkable, but inoffensive I guess. I feel like a lot of the game's long term draw is going to be banking on the PvP being worthwhile, because there's no real replayability, value, or depth in any of the present systems. Overall, the game is fun for maybe your first 10 hours at most until you get truly settled into your first base and start to ask yourself "why?" I understand that the game is in early access, and it has some decent foundations. There's a lot of potential here, and as big as those shoes are it should have the funding to fill them. However, I cannot recommend Palworld in its current state to anyone who has any respect for themselves or their time.

I give it a half star for every Pal design I actually like.

When you get over how absurdly hilarious the idea of personally beating up your Pokemon and then forcing them to do slave labor with these blank, cute, stupid looks on their faces is, there is something genuinely unsettling and disturbing about driving your "Pals" to the brink of insanity as a result of overwork and slave-driver labor conditions. You can't even say it's an effective political statement - or a scathing critique of Nintendo and Game Freak's business practices - because Palworld is a soulless, empty, plagiarizing husk of a video game whose sole interest is capitalizing upon the initial shock value that comes with a hook as brazen as 'ripoff Pokemon slavery simulator with guns'. This is a Family Guy Cutaway Gag of a video game, a Robot Chicken skit turned viral, a shitty Smosh parody given a source code. Apart from the weirdly interesting and complex slavery system, Palworld is clickbait and nothing more.

me, last week (naive): our struggles are many, but the uniting force of our basic humanity is the stuff of legends. working together we can do the impossible, move heaven and earth, and with our brothers and sisters the world over build a brighter and kinder future for our children and our children's children.
me, after playing palworld for 1 second: we live in a pit. a void where the light of goodness can not and will not penetrate. we crawl on the ground, our bellies dragging in the dirt, mouths filled with ash as we gaze up to the polluted sky and cry out to a god that doesn't care or doesn't exist, asking where it all went so wrong. every morning we awaken and try to move but find our bodies as if suspended in pitch, our frantic and helpless attempts to wrench free only serving to drive us deeper into the mire. our once immaculate souls, our most precious gift, have been cast onto an infernal pyre, are now charred and blackened, the detritus of an unending cosmic cyc