For an early access release, this game is incredible. There is more to do in Palworld now than some games have over their entire release. It feels like a weird mix between No Man's Sky, Rust, New World, Pokemon and Zelda, it's addicting, and I find myself grinding for hours before I finally tell myself, "It's been 12 hours, why am I doing this?" and go to bed. While I really love playing this a lot, there are some things I would love to see improved, and after nearly 100 hours into the game, I feel I can confidently list them in order of importance to me.

1. NPC AI: Enemies being able to detect you behind walls and in base. The raids being an exception, I think NPC's shouldn't be able to detect you looking their way behind walls and structures in your base, or attack you from within. I have a base in the desert area, and the human NPC's can not only detect me, but also can shoot me through the walls. I've remedied this by building a second set of walls outside the boundaries of my base, but I don't think this is ideal. Once you build a base, the appearance of NPC's, be it human or pals, should be greatly reduced. I also don't like it when stray pals wander into your base and begin fighting.

2. AI of pals: While I think the idea of tossing your pals at tasks is amusing, a good old fashion contexual menu would actually be more helpful. It would also allow for task rankings. Having your pals focus one of their skills on a task of your choice, then another upon finishing would be beneficial to game-play. One of the biggest complaints I see among other players is the AI of the pals. They often forget their task, or just don't perform it at all. This is super frustrating, and can remedied by either by putting all the pals in the palbox and restating the game, or destroying the crafting table and rebuilding it. The second option is sometimes the only one that works, but usually instantly fills your carrying capacity and leaves a mess that the pals try to clean up and put in the wrong storage boxes very slowly. I think that some of this could be fixed with better base design on my part, but it's unknown exactly how to build one perfectly, and a fix would be a lot less frustrating.

3. Overworld background music: I think there's a sort of BOTW charm to the overworld, and I love that, but it would be so much more satisfying with a great soundtrack to accompany it while exploring.

4. Accessibility options: A brightness slider in game options and other accessibility options. This is mostly an accessibility feature for those who are visually impaired. For me, it was actually streaming this from my desktop to my steamdeck in bed. The brightness was turned way down on the game with very high contrast. As of writing, there is no way to correct it, sometimes rendering the game unplayable and dark. I know this is a niche issue for me, but a game breaking one to those with visual impairments.

5. Settlements and towns: Town NPC's don't really do much. Sure you can buy and sell stuff, but the settlements feel so empty and sad. It would be really cool if they did things, had animations and possibly gave side quests. In fact, having Zelda like side quests and games would be SUPER fun and could be it's own category, I didn't include it though because I imagine that stuff is on the way.

6. The Giant Tree Island: Can't make it to the giant tree. I really wanted to see it, I tried. What's over there?

With all that said, I hope the devs see this review and like it. Feel free to reach out if you're looking to hire somebody with 20+ years programming in the video game industry because working in banking now isn't nearly as fun! haha :)