• Open world
• Survival
• Crafting
• Creature collecting
• Guns/shooting

This really comes off as someone just looked at a bunch of stuff that's popular in games and jammed it all together in order to sell millions of copies and make money rather than starting from any real creative vision. Things like that can be fun, especially if well made, but rarely if ever will such a game be truly memorable.

Just got done playing about 3 hours via game pass and it is quite fun.

It is much more a survival game than pokemon. You put your pokemon (called 'Pals') to work on what is essentially your farm. It is much more a survival game as you are always looking for resources and crafting the next thing for your homestead. I have yet to shoot a gun, currently rocking a spear, bow and arrow, pick axe (for mining), and axe (for chopping wood).

I have ventured off my base twice and you do come across a wide variety of creatures once you venture far enough and there are small towns, people, many creatures, and more materials the further out you traverse. There appears to be 'bosses' as there are marked high level creatures and even gangs that will occasionally raid your base.

I could see myself sinking a lot of time into it as it does take a bit to get your base running smoothly to generate the needed materials without too much manual work on your part.

You have a party of 5 creatures but can only have one out at a time. You start with another creature at your base working and as you level gain more slots for more creatures to work for you. It's kinda funny because you basically beat the shit out of these creatures, capture them, and then put them to work at your base.

All in all I hope development continues to expand on this game as it's got a solid foundation and I'm not generally someone attracted to survival type games. I'm looking forward to continuing to level up and see what the game has to offer.

Played itast night on Steam. It is stupid fun, reminds me of valheim when that dropped.

I tried the Game Pass version. No access to community servers and for me the game kept crashing (unreal engine crashes) even when in the menu.

Ended up getting the full game through steam, works like a charm, access to community servers (my own dedicated server) and the game is fun so far. But I have some grievances with the UI.

• Many of the skills and their function can only be seen from a specific screen, meaning you have to equip the pal and then you can see what the skill actually does.
• some of the screens are a bit cluttered.
• combat fiels clunky -building of items lacks snapping/ a grid so everything will always be slightly off.
• pals will automate stuff but just randomly dump stuff in chests, meaning my desire to keep stuff organized is constantly irked.
• characters are bound to a server. So if you play on a public one and it's full, you are SOL and need to start over on another server (afaik).

On the good side:

• it is gorgeous
• pals are hilarious
• automation works funny with the pals used to automate tasks
• the world seems big
• cooperative play seems to be implemented well (you can even help other players craft stuff)
• crafting is done from chests in your base directly.. so no running around collecting the items you need.

I do have to say that setting up your own server was a bit of a pain as the documentation is horrible.

• many of the server settings are in an inifile that does not allow newline characters making it a pain to edit.
• many settings are in properly documented where the setting or available values are not explained.
• dedicated servers can only be used with a password if set as community server
• the community server list caps out at 1000 servers so if yours is not in the list, you cannot find it (you need to connect via IP and then it's listed under recent servers)

Just played it through gamepass, it's incredible how a survival game is much better when you have these pals to help out and don't have to do everything yourself, I bet this game will get very factorio-like down the line.

I don't know whether I would be comfortable murdering pokemon, but if the gameplay turns out to be great, I would give it a try. I think I'll wait on this one until it develops a bit and there are enough reviews to balance out early adopter (dev friends & family) bias.

Direct link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623730/Palworld/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623730/Palworld/

I truly cannot think of a less appealing pitch than "Pokemon with guns". You've just made the original premise worse.

I have been REALLY waiting for this game but it ended up only releasing in early access so it is a no go for me for now