3.5/5 ★ – wesleytypes's review of Palworld.

You'd be hard-pressed to find many original ideas in Palworld, but you may also find it equally hard to put down. That's certainly been the case for me. Palworld is more or less an amalgamation of several other highly popular games, with Pokémon being the most obvious. It's been touted as "Pokémon with guns" by the general public, but thankfully it's not that simple, and that's why Palworld is so much fun. You explore the world, catch Pals, craft items, build bases, and defeat bosses. It's a survival game first and foremost. Throughout this whole journey, your Pals are your biggest asset. They fight with you, supply crafting items for you, provide transport, and even automate the functions of your base with their respective skills. Meanwhile, you as the player gain levels, assign attribute points, and advance a technology tree that allows you to build and craft more and more stuff. I don't know a lot about survival games, but Palword's systems are more fun and addicting than any other game I've played with similar features. It's a surprisingly deep gameplay model, and it feels very feature complete for a title that is this aggressively early access. Palworld takes what you're familiar with, and expands on it in ways that many fans of other games have either only dreamed of or begged for. It's not all roses in Palworld, many bugs and dips in quality abound, but they also don't impede gameplay in my experience. As I mentioned above, the game isn't even finished yet, and the developers are hard at work improving it. The team has communicated very clearly and delivered updates almost daily. All that remains is to see what Palworld will eventually become, but as it stands right now, it's already a very impressive game that deserves all the attention it's received.