Recent reviews by Deiny

Horrible performance, weirdly split up crafting system that just feels annoying, a dreadfully slow and tedious early game, and sound design that will make you gradually drag the master volume down to zero. This game is what happens when your artists and programmers are good at their job, but are overworked and the writing/direction is "uhhh make it like, crafting, and exploring, and survival! Ooh and you're like, on another world in post apocalypse!". Utterly aimless, a facade of a game. A fantastic looking facade, but one no less.

A couple of years ago this was a bit rough around the edges. Coffee Stain did the hard labor of finishing their game though. A laudable, and sadly rare thing for a game studio to do these days. Rough no more; this game is so, so very silky smooth.
There are shockingly few bugs, the performance is great, the world is beautiful, and the play is exceptional. If building practical things is your fancy, you will dump whole weekends into this and not regret it. You will awaken to the real world after 10 hours stints, bleary eyed and accomplished.

Cute game with nice music. The multiplayer is obnoxious due to sudden death and has us stuck in the first major zone. Since that's all I bought it for, I will not recommend.

I noticed a few hours in, and a few hours later, and just as I'm writing this review. I've run into ZERO bugs. This is like playing a game from 20 years ago where it had to be stamped on a disc and updates were impossible. The polish is that good.

And it's early access? They're still working on this? Powerful aura of quality.

It's a PvE survival game, so you won't like it if you don't like those, but it's a premium example of the genre.

Before the "but it's early access" crowd comes along to tell me all of these criticisms are invalid: Bro, it's $30. That is not an early access price. Ark with all the DLC is $35. Valheim is normally $20. Genuine early access releases are $5-10. Thirty dollars is general release pricing for an indie company.

This review is for the would be dedicated server admin. I am advising caution against running a server with more than a few players. That is all. Palworld is a fun game when the scale is kept small. Unfortunately a whole ton of fun is to be had at a larger scale with many players interacting, but the refinement to support it isn't there.

Poor communication from the devs, limited admin tools, the many bugs present and high hardware requirements make this a difficult game to host. The memory leak is still ongoing, so you'll want 24GB+ allocated. General performance issues will still cause stutter after a restart if more than a dozen or so people are online. The server seems to be mostly single threaded, which I think is the cause. Some settings like server password and port also don't work correctly.

Your players will run into problems, and your only solution will be rolling back the whole server to a previous backup. Take backups, take them frequently, make the decision to roll 20 players back to save one person from making a new character. I wasn't taking backups frequently and had to hack up the save files with python scripts to "fix" three players, including myself. It wasn't pleasant and the end result isn't even ideal. Don't let it happen to you.

There's no roadmap for providing a bigger suite of commands for doing things like noclip/fly, adding/removing xp/skillpoints/lifmunks to a player, or any other commands most games of this type provide out of the box, even at early release. Really obvious stuff, essential for running a server. Game breaking bugs are small inconveniences when a server admin is empowered to triage them. It looks like Pocketpair is going to prioritize new features over spending some serious time on refinement of the current experience, so I don't have a lot of hope that this situation will improve in the near term.

My review is limited to multiplayer because that's all I was interested in.

The modes are very limited, fun for one or maybe two plays, then boring. I also experienced an awful lot of lock-step stutter. My friends and I all played for about 40 minutes, and refunded.

WORM
TOWN

Pros:
Chaos
Novel movement system is a ton of fun

Cons:
Installs Epic launcher for some reason. Please don't ever do this. Especially for such a simple game, which costs over $10, be kinder to your customers.
Unplayable multiplayer lag and rubber banding with only a ~120ms ping. We're talking 1-3 seconds of input delay.

That last one is a doozy. It basically means playing with anyone outside your continent doesn't work.