Palworld is a weird one, as someone who’s not an avid player of the survival crafting genre there is a lot to unpack due to the amount of content plus the addition of pals which is the main drawing aspect of the game for a lot of players. I love the base building in conjunction with the pals, due to them working on the base while you're out and about catching more powerful pals so that you can make better things which has a good feel of progression throughout the game. The pal’s tracking works half the time and then decides to shit the bed, I have had multiple instances of a pal full sending it into a tree at Mach 1 and getting stuck leaving me to respawn them multiple times or forgetting to reset them and going out on an exploration for me to come back with 0 ingots smelted because a pal has decided to mine 600 wood and go to bed.

The exploration side of Palworld leaves much to be desired for me personally, go out, capture some pals, mine ore because your pals have decided to go on strike, maybe do a boss come back and then upgrade some of your gear, rinse and repeat. One decent part that I have enjoyed about the game when leaving the base is the different types of pal bosses around the map, it's basically a larger pal with slightly more health and defence within an arena but I like the difficulty and sending a pal out to 1v1 it while dodging attacks and potentially die in the process, it's no dark souls but it's something. There are a few tower bosses scattered around the map which is the game's main objective apart from a big tree (unless there's something I'm missing) which houses a much more powerful pal and a “trainer”? These guys are much harder to kill, have a 10-minute time, and are a good test of the equipment and skills you’ve gained up till now.

What might be the biggest gripe with Palworld is the sheer unoriginality of the game, there is so much going on with what it's trying to be that there's too much at times and you could probably see that by watching 10 minutes of gameplay, Pals and tower bosses (Pokémon), Technology tree and base building style (Ark), Exploration and discovery chimes (Breath of the Wild), Boss arena entrances (Elden Ring). It's like just shooting a few darts at a picture of 50 of the most popular games and taking stuff out of it and a couple of years later you’ve got Palworld.

After around 25-ish hours on the game, I hit that blockade of going further with the game due to the number of materials and gear you need to reach the endgame, again other players may love the game progression and never burn out after completion but not me.

As I said at the start of the review, it's a weird one, a jack-of-trades game, to purely focus on the content and what I got out of it I think it's just a very average game, to be honest, if you have a group of friends who want a competent survival crafting game and you’ve played all of the other ones on the market before this then I would say get it on sale on Steam if you have Game Pass, then I would say give it a shot for a couple of hours then decide if you want to take it further. It's a very decent first start with the amount of content there is for v0.1 and I'm intrigued to see how quickly a fairly small team can keep up with the demand of over 8 million players in its first week on Steam alone.

My pal is stuck in a tree again. 2.5★