It feels almost wrong to say that Palworld is great. From its legally-distinct not-Pokemon designs to developer Pocketpairs’ previous project Craftopia, which haไs languished in early access f🅰or years, everything suggested it’d be a cash grab that either got ceased and desisted within seconds, or turned out to be forgettable slop.

Yet here I am, saying🀅 that Palworld isn’t just ‘pretty okay’, but actually great. For all the jokes we’ve spent years cracking at its expense, Palworld manages to be a competent, if still somewhat janky, take on the monster training genre that combines an understanding of what makes Pokemon appealing with fresh ideas that help it stand apart.

That’s not to say everything is rosy. There’s a distinct early access pong about Palworld. Its first hour is full of uninspired tree punching and navigating crafting menus, with only brief glimpses of what’s to come on the horizon. You’ll need to get a base established and a bed made, before you🦂 finally craft your first ‘Pal Sphere’ and head off into the wilderness, to hunt down your very first Pal.

The🌸n you promptly beat the stuf💛fing out of it with your bare hands.

With no Pal to fight with yet, it’s down to you to get your hands dirty, and you’re rudely awakened to just how harsh Palworld can be. It’s full of war, death, and violence, all unflinchingly presented through the lens of a cutesy monster-trai🅰ning game.

Though that dissonance has been the source of many memes at Palworld’s expense, if it moved too far away from Pokemon, the darker tones would feel cheap and tacky. It’d be just another Pokemon wannabe to throw on the pile with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cassette Beasts, Temtem, and Nexomon.

Part of Palworld’s edgy undertone comes from its villainous gang, who patrol the fields and capture Pals in cages for nefarious ⛦purposes. But instead of using these Pals to fight yo♔u like Team Rocket, they just shoot at you with rifles until you die.

Pal-on-human violence is common, and throwing a powerful Pal out to mow down a band of guꦡn-toting thugs makes for some exciting moments.

The unscripted conflicts you stumble across give the world a more dynamic and living feel than any Pokemon🐈 region. The world is vicious, and seeing thugs go up against a pack of Direhowls, while you sit on a ridge and watch the carnage unfold, is oddly satisfying. Once, I hung back and watched two boss-level Pal behemoths duke it out, hoping to take out the winner and claim the glory. Instead, the victor trampled me to death seconds later.

In a horrific turn of events, you can even throw a Pal Sphere at a thug and capture them, turning them into your own human Pal you can pet and play with jus𒐪t like a Fuack or Direhowl.

The other big target of jokes for Palworld is its monster designs, which are admittedly a lot more shameless in how they ape Pokemon. It’s a miracle the game hasn’t been shut down with creatures that are so plainly Pikachu, Zekrom and Electabuzz adorning every promotional shot. ♔Even the ones not shown off before launch look like someone just wonkily traced a P🍌okemon guide and called it a day.

Yet it’s hard not to love Pals. It’s almost like they play so closely to Pokemon that they avoid the “well this isn’t Pokemon” revulsion I get from other attempts at the genre – Grizzbolt is a knockoff of Electabuzz, one of my favourite Pokemon, but it doesn&🙈rsquo;t feel cheap. Palworld understands the visual language of Pokemon and what makes them so popular and is confident to play within those constraints, like the copy of Gliscor being a magician cat instead of a scorpion-bat.

Palworld is excellent at making you care about your Pals too, even as you put them to work making weapons or out on your farms. A big part of it🍨 is balancing each Pal’s strengths and weaknesses 🌸to ensure harmony in your base, and crafting equipment to make use of them in original ways out on the field - like a harness for riding a Direhowl, or a sling to use a Foxsparks as a flamethrower. You quickly come to learn the ins and outs of each and every one of your Pals, rather than just picking one hard-hitter and ride-or-dieing it until the credits like Pokemon.

It feels like the only area Palworld isn’t effortlessly confident in is its minute-to-minute play. After playing more than a ♌few hours of it, you quickly hit a wall and it becomes a majoཧr slog. Leveling is slow and dependent on your base-building, when you’d rather just be out catching Pals, and I’m still throwing myself against boss fights and getting utterly murked within seconds.

You can customise experience gain and the like when building your world, but it feels like the game’s at war with itself. Sometimes it wants to be a big monster battler where you roam from checkpoint to checkpoint to see what the world has to offer, and other times you’re stuck slowly building furniture in your base for 40 minutes because all th🔴e Pals you’ve put int💟o indentured servitude are sleepy.

If Palworld can focus on its high points – its critique of the genre, endearing visual design, and that sense of discovery – it’ll be so much more than it had any right to be as a brazen Pokemon clone. I just hope Pocketpair doesn’t get too mired up in early access trappings like it has for ✃its previous game Craftopia, as then Palworld could blossom into perhaps the best monster-battler to come from outside Game Freak.