TLDR- Repetitive but still fun, great in bursts 8/10
Amazing atmosphere and theme. The game has a "cult like" following for a reason, if you get into the world, it's super immersive and makes you feel like you are one of the dwarves risking your life for Deep Rock. Is a great challenge if you want it to be, and can be a great casual game if you prefer that. Random lobbies are rarely if ever toxic, and still has an active community as of 2024. Would highly recommend giving it a try, but it's definitely not for everyone.

TLDR unbiased 6/10, if you like grinding and hate friends 9/10 ORE ORE ORE

Written before the supposed endgame raid update.

While it's "advertised" as Pokemon with guns, you'll quickly find it's much more inspired by Ark, or other survival games of the genre. It's fun at first, exploring the massive world and finding new items and (legally distinct) pals, but my main complaints come in the mid-end game, and the multiplayer. I played through on a server with my friends, but I wasn't in the same in game "guild" as them, and for good reason. One of the core mechanics is the base building, but each guild is limited to a certain amount of bases (maxing at 3). So while my other friends had to share all of the resources their bases made, I was able to set up my own base of equal efficiency, but use all of the resources for myself. It may seem like I'm just selfish and lazy, but in comes the biggest problem of the entire game. It's a HUGE grind, and not a fun one.

One of the core resources, "ore" used to make just about everything, can only be obtained in large amounts from one of two ways. Either setting up a base for pals to gather ore from, which is pretty slow compared to the alternative, and the pals tend to bug out and get stuck outside your base, unable to work (this could be fixed in the future). Or the far faster, and more boring alternative, mining it yourself. While there is some tech you can use to mine faster, it's an absolute slog. I had about 70 hours in the game before I had reached the max level, and caught every pal, and if I had to give an estimate, about 15-20 of those hours were spent mining ore. If you want to mine efficiently, it’s also a very active grind.

This next paragraph is on the fastest mining strategy aside from using guns, which would technically be faster but obviously would use far more resources than it gains. If you aren’t interested, feel free to skip it.

So the most efficient way to mine is to find and mark all the ore patches you want to go through on your map, and essentially have an ore route you go through. First you swap your entire team for a full team of pals with the Mining Foreman trait (You also want at least one pal that can fly with the trait, and if you have pals that increase your carrying capacity with the trait they are better), then you teleport as close as you can to the ore patch you’re going to mine, fly over, build a base there, mine the ore with a lily spear, and by crouching and crouching you can cancel the animation of the spear to make it faster than a pickaxe. Once your inventory is full, walk over to the base you built, drop all of your ore, and repeat until the patch is empty. Then you pick it all up, teleport to your actual base, drop the ore off, teleport back, and repeat for all of the ore patches you want to mine.

The fact I had to type out an entire paragraph just to explain the fastest mining method shows how much effort needs to be put into what is easily the longest and most monotonous grind in the game. If I didn’t go through all of this effort mining, my time mining would have easily been doubled if not more, and there is a bug where if an ore vein has been mined once, and respawned without closing the game (or the server if you’re playing on a hosted server) you will hit the ore twice with each hit, mining the mining process twice as fast. Meaning if this bug is ever patched, mining will be even slower.

Next topic is the base building. In the trailer you see what look like factories of pals being used for slave labor, and who doesn’t love fictional slavery! But the base building in it’s current state has some glaring issues, mostly in what seem to be bugs. The biggest problem by far is the pal’s pathfinding. Your Catavia’s aren’t going to have much of an issue, but even after a patch to fix pals getting to places they aren’t intended to be, any pal of a substantial size, (which you will want to use because the late game pals have better production stats, and are usually larger) will manage to find a way to get out of the base. I promise I didn’t just choose a terrible location, I have tried to make an entirely flat surface using the foundation, and they will still get out. And once a pal is outside the base, it will stop working until you redeploy it in the base menu. However it will still lose hunger and gain illnesses even if it can’t work, so if you try to leave your pals to work on their own for a while, you will most likely come back to at least half the pals at your base outside the boundaries of your base, or even out of bounds entirely, starving, and sick.

Speaking of the bases, turns out it’s actually a terrible idea to be using all of your bases as actual bases. Since you can disassemble a base on the map from anywhere, and build a base just about anywhere, you can use a base as a portable fast travel point. You get all of the resources back when you disassemble a base, so from anywhere you can get the resources to build a base, and unless you’re close to a boss you can throw a base down right where you are. This is incredibly useful, but that means if you want to use this strategy, you can never be using all of your bases for production. This strategy is also worse for anyone in a guild with other people, because your guild is still limited to 3 bases, so only one person can use this “fast travel base” at a time. If you choose not to do this, you will be spending a long time flying back and forth between waypoints on the map, which get very sparse in later areas, whenever you run out of resources, a pal you really need dies, or you die

I know I already mentioned how being in a guild is detrimental to your production, but there are even issues outside of that. Apart from being able to access the same chests and give people key items they haven’t unlocked, (there are methods to do that if you know how) there is no benefit to being in a guild whatsoever. No drops are shared, there’s no reward for “helping” someone catch pals other than doing it out of the kindness of your heart, and you have to share all of the crafting stations at your base. I promise I’m not some selfish fun killer, and if you want to play with your friends, more power to you, and I hope you enjoy it, but after spending hours mining ore to get ammo for my weapons, I want to gain something from that. Personally I find you can have the same experience by just playing on the same server, all in separate guilds, and just be in vc chatting about your epic .1% catch or your 10th hour of mining ore..

That’s a lot of negatives, but there are some things I think the game does great, and one of these is its map. While it’s not perfect, and there are definitely some bare areas (top right desert) most of the map is unique, with different themed areas that are all fairly dense with content, from the Lyfmunk Effigies, to world bosses. The combat can also be pretty in depth until the end game. You can recall your pals to avoid them from taking hits, so it’s possible to take on pals much stronger than you or your team by dodging attacks directed at both yourself and your pals. However I said “until the end game” for a good reason.
Once you unlock the assault rifle, easily the fastest and easiest way to kill anything is by using a pal that enhances your own weapon attacks with an element, and just unloading on bosses. I had invested no points into attack until I realized how strong the guns are, and that the attack modifier isn’t bad by any means. Using this strategy, you can kill anything except the 3 legendaries, and the tower bosses, with one or two mags before they can even attack, and this was without a high rarity assault rifle.

Speaking of rarities, trying to get a good rarity of a weapon you want might come close to as tedious of a grind as mining. The t2 (green) to t4 (purple) schematics are randomly found in chests out in the world or in dungeons, but the t5 (legendary) versions can only be found from specific bosses in the world. That doesn’t sound bad, until you realize the drop rate for these is a pathetic 3%. I wanted to get the legendary assault rifle and shotgun, and I killed both of those bosses over 50 times (I was keeping track at the time, I don’t remember the exact number I gave up on though) and never got either of the drops. The default world settings have the bosses respawn every 15 minutes, and you can change this in the configs, but if you plan to play the “intended” way you will have to wait 15 minutes for each attempt at getting a 3% drop rate. While I did get unlucky not getting any, I highly recommend either changing the boss respawn timer, or not bothering trying to get these schematics.

With all of my main talking points out of the way, what kind of score would I give this game? I have two takes on this, my (attempting to be) unbiased opinion would be around a 5 or 6 of 10, as it has major flaws, that being a HUGE and very monotonous grind, and the fact playing with your friends is a huge hindrance, only making said grind worse. However my personal enjoyment with the game would make me want to give it an 8 or 9. That sounds absurd given all of the negative things I had to say about it, but personally, I don’t mind a grind. I’ve played far more boring games for far longer (I have 3k hours in Hypixel Skyblock, anyone who knows a good amount about skyblock understands how much of a grind that is) so my “standards” for a grindy game are horrendously low to say the least. If you like a grind and have time to kill, or like playing games more for the fun of experiencing a new game and screwing around with friends, I would highly recommend Palworld. However if you enjoy min-maxing to an extent, I think being in a guild with others ruins the entire experience, and if you don’t mind playing solo, but don’t want to grind, I would suggest giving it a pass. A game with a great world, and interesting combat, but some huge flaws in both what seem to be intended as the main drawing point, and taking you away from what should be fun to mine more goddamn ore really tanked the enjoyment of this game.