Can’t help but feel like this is the market that exists for anything Pokémon adjacent because Pokémon has sucked ass for like a decade.

This game gives me weird vibes. The studio already had 2 other games in early access before this one, both of which are seemingly abandoned or at a standstill development wise. The gameplay itself just kind of looks like a generic base building game but with Pokémon and guns. Most of the steam reviews are just making jokes about the knockoff elements, guns, animal cruelty, etc.

I honestly can't tell if this game is actually good or if it's just a brief trend.

I've got 14hrs played so far and I am enjoying it still. I am currently level 21 and have beaten the first story boss.

TL;DR Jack of all trades, master of none, but does a good job of mixing things together. 8.5/10 so far.

Palworld is kind of like fortnite imo: it didn't invent the monster capturing, exploration, crafting, or building, but it is one of the first games to mix them and it doesn't run like complete ass. The building is kind of basic, the exploration isn't too in depth but there is always something going on( you can find fast travel beacons, area 'boss' monsters, story bosses, dungeons, and there are pokemon throughout all of this), the monsters have some variety but they all feel like a mix of different asset grabs, and the crafting is simple (BUT, you can use your monsters to craft for you and take care of your base).

I'd say individually each of these things are rated 7/10 or 8/10, but when you put them all together it's pretty great. The crafting and the base building are there, but I just come back, build some things up, and then the monsters do all that for me while I go back to exploring. Last week I went through and beat Raft and Palworld is a breath of fresh air: I'm not spending hours grinding resources and crafting shit, instead I'm wandering around finding new monsters and locations and I come back and stuff is built. The crafting and resource finding isn't the entire game but it's a nice accessory. Similar to fortnites building + battle Royale, I didn't think monster capturing + base building would be that fun, but they have done a great job of mixing the 2. I find myself looking for certain monsters so that I can have them do certain tasks at base, and that's a win-win in a way.

The game is kind of janky in parts: I've had monsters fall through floors, some areas feel like they were ripped right out of other games (I swear some of the old, broken down churches look like they were stolen from elden ring), and the climbing mechanic isn't fully polished, but unlike other early access games it runs pretty well so far performance wise. I've gotten so used to games like valheim, cyberpunk, and starfield where the game comes out and just runs like complete ass (30fps or less) for the first few weeks. Hell, we were playing Raft last week and our host told us to stop building the boat more b/c he was scared the game would crash. I'm not running Palworld like I ran CS:GO, but it feels like a steady 60fps+ at all times which is really great. As a counter to that though, hosting a dedicated server is okay at best so far. There is a memory leak that has the game go from taking 2-4gb of ram up to 8gb+. After 8gb gets used the computer I have hosting it tends to crash and then I have to manually turn it off and on again to get things going.

In the end, I know I'm going to get my money's worth out of it (30+ hrs), maybe even double that(we'll see) and I'm happy with that. I'm not expecting this to be the next Skyrim/baldurs gate/fallout, I don't expect to play this for thousands of hours non-stop, and that's fine b/c there is other stuff out there I'd like to play anyways. Similar to Valheim (I have 58.2hrs of playtime as of writing this), I expect to play through palworld, shelve it, and if there are any updates in the future I might come back to it.

On the one hand it's kind of disgusting, but it's also heartening: this is a studio that had done nothing but asset flips. Their artists didn't even know what a rig was. They were completely out of their depth.

And while the game is the most cynical thing I've ever seen, its creature designs are blatant mash-ups of Pokemon, and its media hype is absolutely bewildering and somewhat suspicious... but by all accounts it's decently good fun and looks decent visually too.

So, a studio with no idea what they were doing managed to poop out a moderately good game and smash it out of the park in terms of success.

That should be heartening. That should say "maybe I can do it too" to all the hopeful indie devs out there. That should be a massive endorsement of the tooling that the industry has developed, that a completely unqualified group of guys can make a fun and successful online multiplayer action game.

This game will be dead in 6 months.

I've played a night so far and prob got my $26 of value in the next few days.
It's fun and think I can spend some time on it. What else is there to ask?
Also, you know there's going to be mods to add licensed chars to the game so that should add another level of fun when you can ride Thomas the train to run over legally distinct pikachus

I keep seeing that yellow Totoro everywhere.

I don't know, for some reason I find the addition of guns to this type of game upsetting. But I also want to try it.... I don't know.

I've played it: Pretty fun for $26 and better than Pokemon games I've paid more than twice that for.