Palworld Isn't Good Enough To Be This Controversial

I wrote last week that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Palworld could be the b�𓄧�est Pokemon game in years, offering a fresh perspective on a tired series that can’t let a 30-year-old formula go. I was wrong. Only a week later, Palworld has already grown dull and repetitive. Yet it’s the second-most played game on Steam, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:sold seven million copies in five 🌟days, and is all the internet is talking about.

Shovelware clones of bജetter games that shamelessly rip off the biggest IP are plastered across mobile ads all the time, and we see an unending wave of such games dredge onto the shores of Steam’s ‘New’ tab every week, but they don’t make nearly the dent that Palworld did.

It’s the perfect recipe for mediocrity to blow up. We’re coming down from the holidays, survival games are huge, it's known as ‘Pokemon with guns’, and has been roped into the console war as Xbox fans use it to mock PlayStation, while everyone is picking sides over a 💧potential Nintendo lawsuit like it’s a football game.

Put aside the drama and controversy, and it’s a very bland game. The world is unbelievably generic with no real identity of its own, like you’re playing Ark inside of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild. The most interesting landmarks are the haphazardly placed ruins, but players have pointed out that they look suspiciously like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring’s. Levelling up increases arbitrary stats and gives you points in a skill tree to unlock crafting recipes, grinding progression to a halt, and the gameplay itself feels floaty an🔥d clunky all at once.

I’m not too surprised. It’s par for the course with games that rip ideas from a million better places and Frankenstein them together, hoping to make a quick buck off recognisability before moving on to the next thing. Developer Pocketpair releas▨ed a Breath of the Wild clone only three years ago and is already publishing a Hollow Knight copycat. I doubt it expected Palworld to be much more than these imitations cashing in on iconic games.

The internet would have had a field day with t✃he mountain of Minecraft copycats on Xbox before Mojang finally ported the game.

What I am surprised by is that anyone cares about it. It has vehement loyalists swatting away any criticism online, but it has also cemented itself in th♛e zeitgeist (at least for a little while) as much as Baldur’s Gate 3 did. This resounding popularity and infamy for what amounts to any other Tuesday on the Steam store is baffling. Five minutes in Palworld is enough to show how shalloಞw and empty it is. It would be like spending the first month of the year arguing over Spy Kids 3D.

Key art for The Last Hope - Dead Zone Survival.

It isn’t a plucky indie game sticking it to the triple-As, it’s yet another copycat without an original bone in its coding. It’s not heralding the death of creativity in gaming, either. The CEO is a big AI fan, but with a catalogue of not-Breath-of-the-Wild, not-Ark, and not-Hollow-Knight, is it really shocking he would endorse a tool that shamelessly rips off artists? And copycats like this are a dime a dozen, not indicative of the industry's future. Everything about it is something we’ve seen countless times already, this is just a rare instance of the knockoff blowing up.

Fans will latch onto it as ammunition in endless arguments online, but I can’t see Palworld sticking around for long because it simply isn’t that good. Everything it does, ten other survival games do better. It’s just a convenient gotcha for everyꦉ shred of discourse right now, but when the internet inevitably moves on, that hollow foundation will crumble.