IF YOU'RE INTO SURVIVAL GAMES CHECK OUT PALWORLD
Game: PALWORLD
Platform: PC
Genre: Survival, Multiplayer, Crafting, Exploration, Monster Taming
Overview
Palworld has been going in and out of my mind throughout the years. I was likewise one of the outsiders looking in on a franchise that I had lost stopped caring about that being Pokémon. Palworld differs significantly from Pokémon. It's fun, new, and daring, and it's here for a reasonable price on sale since release. In Palworld, you tame Pals, which we all refer to as Pokémon because they are essentially spliced versions of two or three to create a "Pal" to get around legal issues.
You'll be surviving, accumulating resources, and expanding your capitalistic empire while putting your Pals through the grind until they incapacitate themselves from working too hard. That is if you don't take good care of their working conditions!
Issues
Nobody expected the game to explode up as much as it did. It's a sad fact when a meme takes over a game before it's even released and makes it extremely popular. Though many believe this will not last long, after a few months, the euphoria will most likely go down as people discover there is nothing currently in the late game.
Multiplayer works, however there are many issues as a result of the hundreds of thousands of people overwhelming their servers; even hosting players from your own PC has issues, that being performance issues and freezes that lag you out a lot.
Graphics & Presentation
Besides the character customization, which isn't really fantastic. You can put a male body on a female head and vice versa, as well as be fat or anorexic with different voices and a little customization here and there, but what's currently available in this Early Access state is enough content to keep you going for about 40-60 hours, depending on your difficulty settings and whether you're playing solo or with others.
After 9 hours, I couldn't handle the grind. It took 14 hours on standard settings to complete the final tutorial, which required killing a level 32 Syndicate boss. Leveling with the basic world settings of x1 is dreadful; I advise anyone who dislikes tedious, drawn-out farming for progression locked behind hours of menial labor to enable at least 15-20x EXP to avoid wasting so much time so you can explore!
It looks great as long as you aren't too high in the air or bugged out inside mountains and walls. The Pals do their jobs based on their traits, therefore you must decide where your starting point is and what is available for your Pals to work on. If you have nobody with a Lumber trait, you can't harvest wood with them and without a Helping Hand trait, they will not help you craft. So get out there and find more Pals!
I truly wish there was more ambient music. There are as of now a lot of idle waves, howls, and no music. The OST is amazing, but as of this review, there isn't much that catches your attention, so you're better off playing your own music; otherwise, you can listen to the music of chopping wood and mining ore.
Gameplay
It's an open-world exploration game themed around Pokémon. You have your complete choice over what you do, although one of the main goals is to level up, catch Pals, and unlock more base furniture and crafting tools by following the directions on the Guild Board. This will unlock further features and allow more Pals to work at the base. So get out there and see what bosses and dungeons you can find.
Around 73% of the 20 hours I spent playing this game consisted of sitting in base and teleporting from one base to the next to grab resources so that I could continue creating specific items for the necessary Guild objectives to level up the bases.
If I hadn't grabbed 3 players to help speed up the process and allow me to go exploring, especially with some of them maxing out their work speed and consuming a lot of food to enhance that stat even more, this would most likely have been a much more unnecessary time sink, as this game is much more enjoyable with friends.
Conclusion
I haven't cared for Pokémon since the GBA versions, Sapphire, Ruby and Leaf Green. The game seems to have had a mixed review but it is still a decent game.
Could it get better over time, especially with a lot of excellent modding support? Absolutely, if properly cared for and handled by both the community and the developers, this might quite literally match Ark, which I have always perceived to be a more serious and less casual and pleasant experience due to the community.
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