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Palworld First things first, I played a version I stumbled upon while sailing the high seas lol. That out of the way, I was super surprised with this game, first of all, this is more Ark than Pokémon. Normally, I'm not a fan of crafting/survival games, too much resource management, too much not being able to do fun stuff because you have to build or gather resources, too much worrying about your character's food/water/whatever, etc. This manages to do away with most of that... For a while at least. Pals are able to gather stuff, move it around and even help you build and craft things, on top of that, early resources, like stone and wood can be obtained from structures you can build, as opposed to constantly having to look for them around the world. You can also get some items which help with your character's food needs, all you need is to have something in there and automatically, your character and pals in your party will eat when needed, no need to worry about water or sleep either. You can even build bases where pals handle pretty much everything, all you have to do is occasionally pop in and select a crafting recipe, then go on your way as your pals handle the rest, you get a notification when the stuff you wanted done is completed. Eventually however, you do reach a point where the usual issues pop up, gathering late/end-game resources takes forever, building certain items takes a ton of resources, some stuff can't be efficiently farmed, certain resources are better bought than farmed, but that takes a bunch of gold, though there are some relatively easy ways to deal this, crafting nails and selling them makes you a decent amount of money. This is where custom settings can help, a really neat thing, you can change a ton of things, like XP multipliers, catch rate, pal spawns, day/night duration, player damage, pal damage, stamina usage, you can even disable raids, which can be annoying in the early game. All of this is of course, just part of the game, the other part is the pal catching and collecting. I was also pretty surprised with this. Yes, as has been mentioned many of the pal designs are pretty much just Pokémon with some slight changes, as well as some that, like chikipi, are just a chicken, or other animal lol. That said, I think that's precisely why this works, I've seen some other creature collecting games being mentioned, but this is one of the few with creature designs that I actually like, they're fun, cute and cool, in ways that IMO, only Pokémon and Digimon have been able to manage. In fact, unlike every Pokémon game, this is the first time I actually give nicknames to my main party. Being able to actually fight alongside them was also pretty neat. While the trailers and discussion were all about "Pokémon with guns! Enslave pals and force them to work until they die! Have them live in miserable conditions as you build your empire!" I found that this is up to the player entirely. Yes, you can overwork your pals and force them to make stuff for you, or you can treat them with care. I built high quality beds, hot springs and made the best food for my pals before I even had a bed lol. That said, there are some issues. Some to do with the early access nature of the game, others to do with some design choices. Pals have some serious AI issues, they'll get stuck on stuff all the time, sometimes you'll fast travel back to your base and find one of your pals is hanging out on the roof of your house, how they get there? Who knows lol. Other times they'll just stay in one corner, unable to do anything, getting stressed and hungry because they can't find their way out. You'll find them sleeping on top of furnaces, crafting tables and other areas instead of their beds. There's no easy way to set them to a specific task too, some pals have different abilities, like mining, crafting, kindling, etc. And there's no easy way to tell them "hey, mine this thing" instead, they'll just sorta do whatever. You can, in theory, lift a pal and carry it to the thing you want it to do, but this is janky as hell. Building is also a nightmare, there's so many issues and things that don't make sense. Stairs can't be connected to anything, some platforms will whine about "not being connected" or "not being on the ground" until you angle the cursor just the right way for it to work, no easy way to build certain things, placing down your base marker makes it impossible to build certain things around it. On a more personal nitpick, I wish metal structures were less industrial/prison style and more along the lines of the pal armour you can get. Maybe allow you to choose which you want, a prison, or a Star Trek style future city. Bosses also have a ridiculous amount of HP, def feels like they're made with 4 player co-op in mind. I enjoyed my time with it, and hope that more devs will try and make fun creature collecting games like this, with creature designs that actually make you want to capture, raise, care for and battle alongside them, wouldn't mind doing away with the survival crafting stuff though. TL;DR: It can be summed up with this exchange between Josh and Cotton from RageGamingVideos: Josh "I can't get over how well made this game is, I was convinced it would just be a giant meme" Cotton "I think it still is, but it can also be good" Josh "It's a well made giant meme" Grade: A