Review for Steam Deck Users and friends:

Having a lot of fun with Palworld. Its a buggy mess and crashes every time I play it more or less, in a hour of playtime but when it does work, it's very, very mechanically sound and fun.

Palworld reminds me of Ark with the dinosaurs and I didn't care for that kind grind. The good news is in Palworld, the grind is optional for the casual and there is a challenging game for the hardcore gamers out there looking for it.

Character customization is pretty bare bones but that really is the only issue I felt before the crashes. When you make your world there are plenty of ways to tweak your experience playing. Pal spawns for example, I left on default and there was always something to catch on screen. I turned on max experience making my world and I was max character level at sixty nine in-game days over three sessions of roughly eight hours each. Over that course of time I died twice on default Hard, now just trying to catch the rest of the Pals and dipping into breeding them.

Controversy:

The rumors are this is Pokemon with guns, as much as I would love Nintendo to do this (for example the Pokemon Wars that are mentioned by Serge in gen one) it is not the case in Palworld at all.

I've easily played over five thousand hours of Pokemon over the years and even comparing the newer games to this, there is some questionable design but nothing in my eyes that should be a problem to those that are complaining to Nintendo over these few examples of quote-on-quote "plagiarism".

Its hard not to look at this clown fiesta on twitter and I noticed Nintendo/Pokemon Company made a statement over alleged infringement which is crazy.

Yes, you throw ~Palballs to catch Pals and then train and breed them with a odd system that give you eggs but these are the only mechanics that are similar but everything else with examples: There aren't any gym badges to collect, only can have five Pals in your party instead of seven, butchering Pals for crafting and food which I have never seen other then the slowpoke tails in gen two which you could only buy; not take them yourself from slowpokes, the ui and more could be stated, but as seen they're very different games.

This is a rough draft and I'll write more then a stream of conscience in the future, very fun. Its still in SUPER early alpha, expect bugs not mentioned here and I'll try it on a PC when I get the chance. This review is based on patch 0.1.4.1!

(( EA Recommended ))