Palworld | Best "Scam" I've Played in Years

looks like some new slop just dropped and if you've been around here a while you know I can't help myself I need to talk about whatever crap Games come out and what better game to tackle than a supposed Pokemon ripoff now the truth is this is not a Pokemon clone now the designs are clearly ripped straight from Pokemon a lot of them are just amalgamations of Pokemon Concepts and honestly a huge Pokemon fan could probably make a video breaking down every single stolen part of a model or Texture but I'm not going to do that I don't really care to be honest I haven't had a personal attachment to Pokémon since Gen 5 and like I was saying before it's not a Pokemon cologne it's actually a Ark survival cologne or rust or valheim or any of these other open world survival crafting games and I've said this before on stream and possibly in a video but I really don't like those types of games so I was pretty much ready to hate this thing before I ever touched it but honestly I don't it could just be because I was playing it with friends but I actually had a decent time playing this game now that doesn't change the fact that it looks like a shitty Unreal Engine asset flip again with the copy pasted Pokemon designs and the same survival mechanics you've probably seen a dozen times already but at the end of the day it does have a certain charm ripping off of Nintendo certainly has its benefits honestly my real problem with this game is twofold one the fact that a lot of huge YouTubers and streamers are Shilling this pretending that it's not just an early access survival slop game that again we've all seen probably a dozen times over the past decade and this really doesn't offer that much more than those games and the second thing being that the company that made this game also made craftopia a game that is in Perpetual Early Access yeah it's one of those developers so so don't expect this thing to ever be finished but as expected the spurring from Nintendo Fanboys and triaa developers who are jealous of this game success actually makes me want to defend it more than it maybe deserves people think this company should be sued into the ground just because the pals highly resemble Pokemon designs well copyright law doesn't work that way not even in Japan apparently and I don't know why the hell you would want it to why do you feel the need to defend a multi-billion dollar Corporation oh I know why because Nintendo is the Disney of video games they've got a strangle hold on your childhood and so you take it as a personal slight whenever this Corporation is attacked even though pal world doesn't even directly compete with Pokemon it's not even the same genre of game so while you certainly could make the argument that it sets a dangerous precedent that such a latent Early Access ripoff clone of all these other game Concepts managed to sell 6 million copies already at the time of me recording this it hasn't even been a week but given the state of the AAA game industry and even a lot of indie games being complete slop this is easily A Step Above most of those games that said I think it should be obvious to anybody that this is a flavor of the month game everyone's going to forget about it in a couple weeks but at the very least it ended up being kind of fun so without further Ado here's pal world now like I said in the intro this is basically an arc colog if you played any of those survival crafting games it almost feels like a waste of time to explain the mechanics of this cuz it's so similar but basically you build a base you craft a house various mining stations yes this is one of those games you're going to need a ton of rocks wood or it's etc etc etc to craft various things unfortunately your technology level is gated by your character level so you're going to want to level up which you can do by capturing Pals fighting Pals crafting things picking up stuff pretty much doing anything levels you up and if you were expecting the combat system to be a Pokemon clone um it's not in any way it's not even a third person shooter like the marketing would have you believe no you're just going to straight up run up to Pals and punch them or hit them with a baseball bat or poke them with a spear and any Pals you have captured you can have one of them help you out in combat at the very least there are type weaknesses and resistances but they're incredibly basic every type only has one weakness and one resistance with the exception of the normal type which isn't super effective on anything and the fire type is actually super effective on both grass and Ice there's only n total types and as you can see from this gameplay it's also not turn based and you can't even tell your pals what move to use outside of their special ability or if you're mounted on top of them yeah you can ride some of the monsters and then you can tell them how to fight but yeah as you can tell combat's not all that engaging now something that fans of these survival crafting games will probably enjoy is how much automation there is to building stuff the pals are just straight up your slaves and a lot of them aren't really very effective at fighting but they have special abilities that allow them to mine for you cut down trees plant seeds they can even help craft stuff for you so that really gives you a reason to try and catch as many Pals as possible and that just reminds me of another thing Pals can't even evolve yeah a major mechanic of Pokemon is not in the Pokémon clone you can actually fuse Pals together to make more powerful versions of Pals but there's no synthesis system either like shin Mami tensei or the Dragon Quest Monsters series it's very strange another thing I don't like is the hunger system it's bad enough when you have to feed your own character but now you have to feed all the pals as well this is not a big deal when you're at base because you just build a food pit basically and the pals can basically automate the process of filling it with food so that takes care of itself but when you're out in the field especially if you're riding on one of your pals it can starve pretty quickly and it's not like it's actually difficult to get food it's just a chore that's why I don't like survival mechanics it just feels like a chore so ultimately the gameplay Loop is pretty simple in this game once you got the base set up you just go wander out into the world and capture Pals or battle ones you find strangely enough there are no trainer battles which is really weird no instead you just find poachers or paa yes there's a paa type organization and their AI is exactly the same as the poachers so they'll actually fight Pals out in the wild figure that one out if I didn't know better I'd say it's commentary on Peta euthanizing so many of its own animals but no let's be real it's just laziness out in the sandbox you can find materials just lying on the ground obviously or deposits and various other resources you might need there's a few little towns spre throughout the map where you can buy or sell items you can even buy Pals and sell them which is pretty weird again considering this is supposed to be a Pokemon cologne but pals are treated as so disposable in this world and the game even encourages you to catch 10 of the same pal for a huge exp boost so yeah don't expect to get too attached to most of these guys this is a mistake I see in nearly every Pokemon clone is that you never really get a attached to your monsters which is bizarre considering for me personally and I have to imagine millions of people that enjoy Pokémon that's like half the appeal of those games it's the reason why most people stick with their starter Pokemon from beginning to end do you really get attached to the guys on your team I didn't really feel that playing this so you might be wondering what are the replacements for trainer battles well one there's many boss fights out in the world where you'll come across a pal that just has way more health usually a significantly higher level than you are and a really low capture rate and so you can catch those guys and they have a special symbol on their icon that tells you they're a boss monster and I'm pretty sure boss monsters have better stats and I wouldn't be surprised if they come with better passives as well there's also dungeons which are probably the laziest looking part of the game they're procedurally generated rooms that again just look like Unity or Unreal Engine asset flips where you can find a few rare monster types and a boss Monster at the End there's also a treasure chest scattered throughout the world some locked some unlocked there's a boss of each region where you go to this huge Tower and fight a raid boss inside with your friends but again I still have no idea why there aren't just trainer battles maybe because this game is so poorly programmed and the combat is so janky that would probably look really stupid and somehow I haven't even mentioned the AI it's probably about as bad as you'd expect they'll try to attack you through walls there seems to be something wrong with the aggression system if there even is one in the first place where the enemies will just lock on to usually the player character if you're playing with friends one of your friends in particular and then everyone else can just blast its ass until it randomly decides to attack another player for one of the many bosses out in the world I just crouched on a leg Edge above it and none of its projectiles could hit me while my pal slowly whittel down its health bar so yeah I can't imagine if there were trainer battles that they would be really any more engaging than just beating the out of Pals or the poachers out in the world but I have to imagine they're going to add that later down the line This is Early Access after all assuming they actually finished the game unlike craftopia and to briefly talk about the pal designs they're definitely a mixed bag I'd say the best designs are the ones that are blatant ripoffs from Pokemon Aesthetics there was a bit of a controversy that this company is known for using Ai and so allegedly this company used AI to make these Pokemon designs and so the ones that do just look like an amalgamation of Pokemon you've seen before those are the ones that look pretty good but the farther they stray away from actual Pokemon the shittier they look for sure like there's this D dinosaur that just straight up looks like a plush dinosaur it looks worse than most fake Manon I've seen it just looks like dog and so the AI Theory seems pretty plausible to me just because it lacks cohesion in the art style there's also a couple that are blatantly sexual in nature which look I am not by any stretch a Puritan I've talked about my karism in the past but I got to say some of these seem kind of in bad taste like the one that is a clone of salaz just kind of looks like furry bait and ironically maybe in how overt it is it is less suggestively sexual than the actual salazzle and don't ask me to explain that okay just trust me but maybe in the other direction there's a pal that's supposed to be a genie that is straight up a loli with a cloud lower half I'm sure that one's already pretty popular on rule 34 if I had to pick a favorite pal I guess I would say depresso he's a little little dude given the cynical stare and he drinks energy drinks to increase his movement speed so he's literally me so overall I think I'd rate the designs in the just good enough territory they certainly wouldn't pass for real Pokemon designs but then again I'd say the last three generations of Pokemon don't pass as real Pokemon designs the open world itself is also pretty good and looks visually distinct enough across the regions that I actually kind of like the look like I said before this element of the game is obviously inspired by breath of the wild they even stole the climbing mechanic where you could pretty much just latch on to any wall and there's a parachute too but it's way worse like way way worse it consumes probably three times as much stamina as the Zelda version but I think the ability to climb anything instantly makes your world more engaging at least for me it does feel a bit empty at times the enemy density can be quite low in certain parts and there's way too many repeat Pals in certain regions but there are over a 100 total to catch there's lucky Pals which are essentially the shinies they have better stats and better abilities or moves and there's also subspecies of Pals where they are basically just a palet swap with a different type now to get back to the progression system this is another one of the elements of the game I just don't like after a certain point it seems like leveling up slows down considerably that could just be because I refuse to catch 10 of the same type of pal but either way you're going to find this problem where you'll go to a new region to catch more guys and they're just a significantly higher level than you and so they're going to kill you in one or two hits and it's kind of hard to progress and it's just boring to catch the same guys over and over again and like I said before level Gates technology and Technology is where you craft all the cool stuff like your partner pal abilities every single pal has something you can activate with f whether it's mounting them or some special combat ability like the fox you find early on can turn into a flamethrower which is really good the Chipmunk can use a submachine gun the monkey and assault rifle but for a lot of these pal abilities you actually have to craft an item to unlock that and that's gated by the technology tree and obviously higher level technology trees unlock better gear for your character there's also quite a few other things I didn't cover like there's Collectibles to find in the open world you can breed Pals with each other much like Pokemon you can even butcher your pals for materials yeah that's kind of dark apparently you even unlock the ability to enslave human beings and sell them at some point which I have to admit sounds pretty awesome again again I think you've already played a game like this before these open world survival crafting games have been popular for like a decade and pal world really just doesn't have anything to offer to this formula that's new except the Pokemon gimmick and I think that's why everyone bought this game cuz they just wanted to play another Pokemon like game and I'm completely fine with it being in a different genre I think that is what gives this game its appeal that it's not another term-based jrpg and so I could go into further detail about certain elements of this game but I think I'll just get to the conclusion should you buy power world only if you like open world survival crafting games if you're looking for a Pokemon clone this is not a Pokemon clone it's an arc clone with Pokemon instead of dinosaurs now if you're looking for a casual game to play with three friends I actually think this is a pretty good choice as long as all four of you are okay with survival mechanics even me somebody who hates survival mechanics I was able to tolerate this game because the open world is actually all right I wanted to explore and catch new Pokémon even if a lot of the pals seem completely useless well you never know until you actually catch them so that was kind of exciting to find out sometimes but I guess my ultimate problem with this game other than it looking like a cheap asset flip is the progression I just think so much of this game is locked behind the progression and having Pals that are objectively better than other Pals with no Evolution system kind of ruins a big part of the appeal of Pokémon and yes I realize the Pokemon games are not balanced at all but to me this feels even more severe a lot of Pals just aren't good for anything once you get past a certain point in the game a lot of the later monsters have better skills and especially any of the ones that have a really good combat skill are probably the only ones you want to use in combat regardless of type advantage or disadvantage now I'm saying this with the disclaimer that I'm not a super high level in the game yet but there's no way in hell I'm going to change my opinion on this even once I unlock a bunch of guns to shoot it's not really going to change anything it doesn't feel good as a shooter it's a Jank ass Survival game right the combat's not really the appeal here the complete package is and I guess on some level this is maybe greater than the sum of its parts I could describe how every aspect this game is flawed but at the end of the day if it's still decently fun especially with friends who am I to tell you not to buy this but you just got to know this probably will be in Perpetual Early Access despite these devs being Japanese they seem very Chinese to me if you know what I mean so as long as you're okay with the state of the product as is you can just drop 30 bucks and not feel bad about it then it who am I to tell you not to buy this that said Don't expect this on the top five best games of this year it was an okay distraction but I think it should be clear to anybody that this is pure unadulterated slop certainly not a replacement for Pokemon but I doubt anything ever will be that's about it see you next time guys

Channel: Synthetic Man

Views: 183,771

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Id: AVGfDezjoaw

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024