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Palworld is now available in Early Access on Steam (and Gamepass, I believe)
(store.steampowered.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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Looking at the Steam page for this game shows that it’s all sort of genres, so what actually is this game and what do you do in it
It's a pretty standard survival crafting game, I've seen it describes as Ark + Pokémon (particularly Legends Arceus if you've played it) . The game actually doesn't have much of the wild shooting combat until much later levels. For the most part, you focus on catching "pals" for xp while putting them to work on your base. Like Pokémon, you get wild pals' hp down to increase the chance of catching them and then throw balls like your life depends on it.
The combat with your pals is pretty basic, you can command them to help you in battle but they really do their own thing beyond that (including kill the things you were trying to catch). That being said, managing large battles while throwing out balls and trying not to die can be pretty fun.
The real appeal is setting up your base and putting your pals to work. Each type of pal has a different set of jobs they can perform, so you have to plan somewhat carefully to make your base as efficient as possible. Generally, the jobs involve either resource gathering or crafting. Crafting lets you queue up items for your pals to work on so you can start cranking out supplies pretty quick. Really, though, the appeal is getting to see a couple dozen guys running around working like a well oiled machine, and they have some fun animations to keep things interesting.
It is pretty playable, though there's definitely a few bugs (mostly pals disappearing into the terrain). The amount of damage various pals do with attacks seems almost divorced from their level, so you can be blindsided by something half your level if you don't dump a lot of upgrade points into your health. Also, you currently have to run your own server to play multi-player, so it's tough for people who don't know their way around port forwarding and stuff like that.
All that being said, I've put about 10 hours into it so far and am having quite a bit of fun with it. It feels like there's still a lot to explore and do.
Can you explain more about all the pals with rifles - and how they fit in?
Screenshots make it look like it's edgy pokemon with guns.
Not OP but I think this needs to be said - it's not that it's a pokemon-like game that just happens to randomly include super out of place looking modern weapons for the hell of it. It's a game with sweatshop labour, eating your pals, pals eating other pals, cannibalism, poaching, death from overwork, all sorts of messed up lore etc. The guns aren't an outlier, they're a fitting part of the game's zany atmosphere
Don't forget legit slavery. You literally can catch humans as if they were pals. And then force them to work or fight for you. Or even butcher them...
There's even a pal trader you can sell pals to. So you can literally sell people into slavery
That's about how well it fits in. You produce and find guns and can equip yourself and the pals with certain weapons. Modern firearms in a generic fantasy setting. It's like a meme game that has too much production budget.
The marketing oversold how much gunplay is in the game. A handful of pals have craftable weapons that enable their special ability, whether that's shooting a rocket launcher or throwing a grenade. You can also craft a gun for yourself, but that doesn't really open up until 2/3rds of the way down the tech tree. Honestly you can go most of the game without using guns at all, only encountering them when attacked by the human NPCs. Even then, their damage tends to pale in comparison to the other attacks Pals have.
For the most part, Pals auto-battle with very Pokémon-esque moves. A good half of them just have a mount special ability, the ones with guns are relatively uncommon.
It's an open world survival game where you wake up on the beach of a mysterious island and need to scavenge resouces, explore, build bases and tame monsters to fight for you. You send some of the caught monsters to work in your base, they generate resources which you use to make new equipment to fight and catch stronger pals, eventually reaching the point where you have a powerful team that can take on dungeons and bosses who you want to defeat for story reasons. I think the game's strong points are the base automation and the variety of pals.
It's also got co-op and 32 player public servers
Got a few hours in last night, quite fun and it very much is pokemon with guns, but at-least rather original for half the designs. So far its base building/exploration while training up legally distinct monsters, doing what everyone would ACTUALLY want to do in a pokemon game that gave you a weapon.