Palworld

It has a lot of interesting pokemon-like creatures and a lot of game mechanics overall, but the pacing is meh. Popping-out creatures of nowhere (game doesn't respawn them in time, don't even remembers if there's a lot of creatures or not, it just spawn and de-spawn creatures in the certain radius from the player – you can kill/catch all pals in a tiny island and it will spawn again as soon as you walk away few meters and go back) making the world feel empty and very unimmersive. Progression feels overly grindy, fighting/shooting elements are bad too. The pursuit mechanics is just the worst possible – if you commit the crime, guards start falling from the sky the same way as palls – you walk away and they're spawn just in front of you, or just near you infinitely untill you quit to menu and load a world again. There's no challenge or anything but frustration in this pursuit mechanic.
[Bases] It has interesting bases mechanic, but player by default have too little bases and you can't transfer anything automatically, even food. You have to constantly go to every base, check if there's enough food, manually fill every feeder, manually launch every production, manually take resources from mines/lumberjacks (pals can do it too, but they doing it so slow and by few amount, you need like 5+ mover-pals per every 2 worker-pals for them to catch up). In the end, the gameplay loot becomes "place your loot in the base, check the bases, add food to feeders in all bases, gather raw foods (ingridients) in one base, start food production in some base, gather minerals in mining base, place them in storage in other base, go grinding untill your inventory fulls, but not for too long otherwise your palls (ones that can manufacture the guns and cook a meal, but can't do it without your order) will die out of hunger becouse they can't cook meal on their own". Base-managing routing is taking too much time IMO. Just adding infinite production with limit (product something if there's less than X amount of this something in the base), automatic moving items between the bases, mechanism/upgrades for materials-grinding-buildings to automatically storage mined materials - would make base-managing much less tedious.
[Catching] Catching a pal is easy, with high-level sphere you can catch every single pal you see even without damaging them, while even the highest-level sphere can't catch the highest-level pal downed to 1 hp. The catching process of these pals are tedious – you throw a sphere, wait for it to catch, it don't catch - throw sphere again, repeat 10-50 times. It don't adds anything in the gameplay and I don't get why it's done – over-grindy catching high-level pals and over-simple catching low-level pals (you don't even have to damage them!). IMO it would be better if pals has 100% chance to be catched with corresponding spheres when below certain hp% and 0% chance to be catched with any sphere while at full hp.
[Breeding] There's breeding mechanics – throw 2 pals of different species and get 3rd pal with completely irlogical species. There's nothing in the game interface to remember which pal species combination makes what. Only either your manual writting on paper or check sites (there's around 200 pals and so ~200² Combinations). Again, idea is interesting, but becoming very tedious in the end.
[Pals] There's flying, ground and water mount palls, also there's 9 elements. Each of element is vulnerable from one element and advantaged to another. Except fire that advantaged to 2 elements and neutral that's don't have advantage. You have only 5 slots for pals that you can deploy. That's makes all neutral pals practically useless, same as non-mount ones – you have limited slots and the best you can do to be most effective is having all three mount types, these mount types should be specific elements (or specific dual elements) and other 2 should have specific elements too. It makes a lot of palls useless and limits player choice to specific pals (but it still more than just 5 or even 20 pals). If space weren't that limited (like 10 pals), you don't have to be that specific on elements and mounts and also take whatever pal you like.
Overall, the pal-management system is lacking QoL features, managing pals is very tedious.
[Boss towers] There's a bosses in this game, but you won't know are you grinded/leveled enough or not untill you face it. Just add "boss level" to the boss tower!
Fighting is level/perk dependend, not skill-dependent. If you don't have enough level, you won't have enough damage to kill the boss until timer end. There's a dodge button that really adds dinamic to the combat, but overall combat is just "shoot it till it dies" or "wait for you pal to kill it". There's more than it in pals aspect (like you need to consider elements and breed pals with best triats for more damaging/protected pal, managing their abilities, etc), but overal it's progression-based combat. Most of the work doing your pal. That's why not showing level in boss tower makes no sense.
[Optimization] With that not really beautiful art-style and graphics, game is very perfomance demanding. Not at the extreme level, but it could be better.
[Pals design] They have quite inconsistent art style and there's a lot of pals that just are the copy of pokemons. But overall they're have nice design and cute animations and sounds.


Overall it has very interesting idea, a ton of cool pok... pal species and a bunch of interesting mechanics, but overall gameplay is extremely grindy, tedious, unimmersive and boring. Updates adds more and more mechanics, pals, islands to the game, but never fixes the main game problems (and probably never will).