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Palworld is, at its core, an Open World Survival Craft game. While it adopts familiar mechanics: climbing and gliding like Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls-style dodging, chests scattered around like in Fortnite, and Stardew Valley fishing; it sets itself apart with the introduction of creature collecting: the Pals.
The game follows a standard survival loop: gather resources, build a base, and craft gear at your own pace. However, the experience evolves through automation. By capturing Pals and assigning them to tasks, you eventually shift from manual labor to managing a self-sufficient base, leaving the "survival chores" to the creatures you catch.

• The Pals are cute: Even after over 100 hours of playtime, I still get a kick out of watching Cattiva's determined expression going about their business out in the wild.
  
  
• Rewarding Exploration: The map is densely packed with new Pals, dungeons, loot-filled enemy bases, and world bosses.
  
  
• Combat: in Palworld, the Pals don’t just fight for you, they fight with you. You can use them to boost the damage of your weapons, combo them by using support pals that boost your main attacker, swapping through pals so you can spam a specific move, and riding them to (and in) battle.
  
  
• Movement: traversal feels surprisingly good! As you progress and acquire a fast mount or catapult yourself by comboing a grappling hook and glider, navigating the world is genuinely fun.
  
  
• Promising Development: For an Early Access title, the content volume is impressive. The developers at PocketPair seem to genuinely care about the game and its longevity.

• Basic Quests: Current quests are barebones “fetch X”, or “kill Y” missions. There’s a bounty hunting system of sorts, where every bounty has their own background, but it doesn’t really translate at all into the gameplay (they’re still just enemies you find and defeat, scattered throughout the world).
  
  
• Static World: With only inhabited towns, the world can feel empty. Friendly NPCs are mostly just standing around, and vendors that don't match the aesthetic of their surroundings, making settlements feel "thrown together."
  
  
• Dungeons: there’s only a few designs that you see recurring, no matter which dungeons you enter, and a lot of them aren’t very interesting. Some do, in fact, have moving traps, but since you can glide and climb, or even fly around them, they don’t really serve any practical purpose of deterring unprepared explorers. I really wish they made dungeon delving a bit more involved.
  
  
• Restrictive Building: You can build your house/castle by placing floors, walls and roofs freely, but production buildings have fixed, often awkward shapes (like the massive Expedition Base) that limit creative base design.

Unlike what a certain other videogame corporation would have you believe, Palworld is more than just a 'clone' of its inspirations. While it can be a relaxing game in the sense that it allows you to play at your own pace, it can be very, very grindy, if you want it to (and want to meet the demands of end-game content). Still, by blending exploration with creature-collecting/taming/training, it creates a unique identity and delivers a chaotic, but very fun experience where I’m sure there’s a bit of something for everyone.
It’s not a perfect game yet, but the current content is already well worth your