Recent reviews by 00DeadMonkey

Game has poor tracking, and is a poor shooter overall. It mostly rides its super gore factor. Much better games on the market. Very disappointed.

Overview: Palworld is a third person survival shooter with food resource, crafting, and base building. Each aspect is flushed out but not to any extreme degree.

Quick summery: Its good
Survival game: Light but okay
Third Person Shooter: Bland and boring
Tactical Strategy: Non-existent
Base Building: Horrible system, nice concept
Graphics: Gorgeous to “Ouch, that’s not finished”
Open World: 20/10 first time playing Breath of the Wild experience
Early Access: A damn good start

Survival: You will likely never be short on food and quickly unlock an item that stops food from being an inventory issue. You may need a fire for your first night but different pals, items, and armor mean that environmental dangers will likely not be an issue after the first hour or so of game play. If you are a fan of hardcore survival games you will find Palworld to be lacking in this area. If you like more casual survival then this will likely be more to your liking.

Third Person Shooter: Palworld has 3 melee options and roughly 2 types of ranged options. The melee options are your fists which are only effective against the very lowest level pals but can be used to bring them down to a capturable level. The second is a club-like variant which is very short range, and the third is a spear which has slightly longer range. Overall melee is not very flushed out with only one attack type and very unresponsive controls often leading to you hitting one or two more times than you meant to and sometimes killing a pal you were trying to capture. It is also very risky as many pals have large AOE attacks that are very powerful. Range combat is split between two types, fast firing low damage (bows, handguns, rifles) and single shot / low rate of fire high damage (crossbow, musket, shotgun) with a few variations in-between. You also do not unlock guns for a fairly long time and will likely face the first boss without them and the second boss with only basic ones. Your pals get guns well before you but are also typically more of a gimmick for lower levels than a strong combat ability. There is no cover system, but headshots do inflict more damage. You have a shield and a dodge button which together give you good defensive options, which are needed as there is zero in combat healing outside pals who can give you a heal on damage ability. Overall, the solo player combat is nothing special.

Pals + Shooter: Adding pals to combat changes up the shooter aspect significantly. Some pals can remain over your shoulder while not summoned and shoot like a turret. This can become frustrating as they will often kill pals you want to capture, or get in the way while building. Normally summoned pals grant abilities while out such as life steal, more defense, or keeping you warm in cold areas. Some also have on activation abilities such as giving them a SMG, turning them into a flamethrower, or allowing you to ride them. Riding a pal is the most versatile as it is the only way to manually command your Pal to use their abilities which they otherwise fire off at random. While in combat it is also a good idea to summon and unsummon your pals as you can use this to dodge enemy attacks or break some entirely if they require a lock-on. While the pals + shooter aspects are fun, they are still very lacking without the ability to issue commands to your pals outside the mountable ones. You can’t direct your pal to “go there”, “stay at range”, or “get in close”. There is also no basic attack for your pals. If their abilities are all on cooldown they will just sit there and often take damage while waiting for them to come back up, which only takes a few seconds but does make for moments of “What are you doing just standing there?” There is also a lack of different Pal abilities at this time with most being some variation of “shoots magic ball at enemy” and some elemental effects such as freezing, burning, or entangled. Which again, are slightly pointless as you cannot direct your pal when to use them. So when your target turns into an ice cube it feels more like a happy accident than a strategy If you are expecting some kind of tactical gameplay, you will not find it here. Just cool monsters fighting in the equivalent of mashing action figures together.

Base Building: When it works building up your base is fun and the sheer amount of furniture and options will let those interior decorators make some breathtaking pal mansions. If you can get the system to work long enough to place anything. The devs seem to have had a visceral fear of objects clipping together and as such you cannot place things up against each other a lot of the time. Some ghosts when places objects are also nearly transparent making them impossible to see what you are doing, and a lot of the clearance on pal buildings (looking at you ranch) make zero sense and are happy to clip into the ground, but will not work if there is a wall within 100 yards of them on one specific side. The pals behavior in base is also strange with them sometimes teleporting through solid walls, onto roofs, or just getting stuck inside things resulting in them starving and getting depressed requiring expensive resources to fix. Furthermore, the automation system his horrific with pals being able to work on things from across the base sometimes and not being able to turn around to use a work bench at others. Overall this is the biggest area the devs need to work on and is so apparent it was on their very first roadmap. You will also need multiple bases as there is simply not enough room to fit everything and you will need to place down mining bases as there is currently no other way to easily get large amounts of some resources such as coal, quarts, sulfur, and ore. Manual mining is an option but carry weight is something you need to speck into and even with it maxed out and some pals to increase it, you can carry maybe 2-300 ore per run which comes out to only 100-150 ingots. For context a basic handgun is 100 and costs 1 ingot per 10 bullets. Not to mention the ones needed for repairs and the 100 per crafting station and… you get the idea. Overall this is a good idea with a very bad execution that is only just this side of functional.

Graphics: The starter area is beautiful. The water is vivid, the pals are cool, the environment is well rendered. And then you start finding areas where the textures are obviously placeholders. The mountainous areas are the words offenders with some areas looking like unrendered oblivion assets at times. Which can be really sad when they appear right next to a glossy crystal or other high resolution texture. This is another area they devs really need to work on. Ther are also some issues with flying trees and ore deposits.

Open word: This game is breath of the skyrim tears of the days gone. The open world is phenomenal with one glaring exception being the largest map feature, the giant tree in the distance and focus of much of the games story entries, is unreachable. Hopefully that is a “at this time” exception as the devs have planned to flush out the map more. But overall the variety of the area from bamboo forest to volcanic basalt is amazing to explore. Your map comes with some basic marking capability so you can pin POIs such as merchants, dungeons, and chest spawns.

Early Access: If the devs were to declare the game done tomorrow, it would be a solid 5/10. It is fun but basic and will likely see a rapid fall off between major updates without some massive system overhauls. Some of which are already on the roadmap. As it stands this is a damn good start and could become game of the decade if they go through and enhance the basic systems they already have in place.

Played On Index

How is a VR port better than most VR shooters on the market? First off if you don't know the Dead Effect games they are basically Duke Nukem style arcade shooters mixed with some old-school Resident Evil enemy design. It does not take itself seriously and your only objective really is to have fun.

Pros: Solid VR shooting. Your hands snap to your guns, you can pass guns between hands freely, you can snap two hands onto two-handed guns to steady them, or just Rambo one from the hip. Hit detection is decent, movement is smooth, and there are lots of customization options. Normally this would make for a solid 6/10 FPS. But its implementation in VR scratches a very special itch which kicks it up to a solid 8/10 on gameplay which is all that matters with this sort of old-school arcade shooter.

Neither Pro nor Con: If your looking for a realistic zombie shooter for your VR immersion pleasure, this isn't it. Its an arcade shooter 100% meaning that a lot of the potential of VR is not used. You reload by slapping your hand to hip. Another point is that some of the guns have holographic reflex sights which some people really do not like in VR.

Cons: Not too many really. It is very hard to mess up an Arcade shooter and for a VR port it is very hard to tell it is not a made for VR game. The controls and interface can be a little janky at times and will be very frustrating to some people who don't have good tracking. The over all quality of the game is slightly above what you might find on a good VR chat game. Its fun but there is still a moderate level of janky feel that never quite goes away.

Worth full price?: Frankly, for a VR game of this quality I would say yes its worth the $25 price tag. If it's on sale then I would say it is a must-have for most VR libraries.

Almost unplayable on Index even with mods.

A game with great promise. Over all Volcanoids is a decent game with a strong concept. You build, progress down the tech tree and then go take out a boss so you can enter a new area and repeat.

Pros: Drill ships and mobile bases are good concepts that is well executed and the constant threat of the volcano eruption can truly keep you on your toes when doing some objectives.

Cons: By the 3rd area the flaws start to become apparent. There is nothing beyond pushing to the next research. There are no cosmetics, no decoration, no branching paths, just a linear progression. Your ship can never be truly maxed out due to the core slots mechanic and the attack waves are never really big enough to threaten the drill ship you do get. Even if you use custom difficulty to spawn a maximum sized attack wave the game cannot handle more than a handful of bots and will actually break resulting in there being no bots anywhere.

WIP: The whole game is still being worked on and has the potential to become something quite special. It already has workshop support though its modding scene has yet to take off in any meaningful way. For right now this is a strong sale buy and a even stronger wait and see.

Comparing this to the mods does it a disservice. True, it feels like they took some of the best mods, polished them to developer degree, and added a healthy dash of Rimworld awesome. But its that polish and spice that makes it sooo so good. The only gripe I have is that I feel there isn't enough interaction between this and the other two DLC. I feel there should be more memes and such for the ideology focused on children and the mechanitor. And I think they should have added two more shattered empire like factions which have royal ranks. One would be ruled by a mechanitor and brings mechanoids on raids alongside their cataphract troops. And the other would be genetic fanatics who are trying to make a supreme genetic being. Just something small like that to tie it all together would go so far.

Bad hit detection aside, this isn't called Doom VR for nothing.

Pros: Fast, fun game play with great atmosphere and true Rip and Tear feeling. Kill hoards, harvest blood, offer it to the metal faced god, grow in power, repeat. Fun platforming which is something I never though I'd say in a VR Shooter like this. Its a good game, and likely will be great by the end of development.

Cons: The hit detection is jank squared. The enemies just kind of hit you regardless of where you actually are and you can't really block or do anything about it. And your hit detection can bug out as well meaning that its entirely possible to have your weapon pass through an enemy without touching them. Though this is more rare. That said the grappling to enemy function is really, really janky and usually just results in you taking damage and getting way too close to an enemy to actually hit them. Speaking of which, the arm gun / grapple control is a little twitchy since it revolved around you, well, revolving your arm. Palm up, shotgun, palm down grapple... sometimes. They really need to tighten up the detection on it since when your in a hurry you don't have time to double check that the gauntlet actually switched over and the last thing you wan is to either waist ammo and shoot your grapple point, or worse, grapple into enemies you wanted to blow away. That all said, these are all easily fixable and are more a lack of polish on an early access game than anything deal breaking.

A lot of the missions just are not fun. Its a long 20-40 minute grind through waves of enemies that are just a little to tanky to be cannon fodder. You really have to get lucky and get a good weapon early on or your just going to get burred under endless waves of cannon fodder which for some reason can harm Terminator armor with lead bullets. Your units feel just a bit too flimsy compared to the hoards and most of the ranged weapons are traps that just eat Action Points and don't do a damn thing. Really needs some balancing.

Better then you'd think, less then you'd hope.
The games good. Really good. But not great. The VR isn't fully taken advantage of and it feels more like a VR port then a full VR experience. A lot of the immersion elements which other VR games have, IE manual reloads, finger tracking, and intractable terrain-objects are non-existent. Though some of this is a sacrifice made so that you can easily use a weapon in each hand. If your a fan of the 40K table top games you'll appreciate the attention to detail. If your a fan of the book lore however, you'll be very upset with the inconsistency. You can kill a Chaos Terminator with a few shots from a guardsmen lasgun for example. Chainswords are arguably more powerful than power weapons and bolters sound more like normal guns than the booming fully automatic rocket launchers they should be.

This game has promise. But sadly as is I cannot recommended getting this game until it has received a game play over hall to its combat system.

Pros: Amazing customization on everything. Good tech tree. Good animations. If you ever wanted to dress up a anime mecha this is the game to do it. Very nice to look at and you can spend hours making cool looking robots.

Cons: Game play is brain dead requiring no thought other than spamming the attack key. Occasionally you may have to hit the shift key to boost out of an enemy AOE but even that turns into a reflexive spasm where you just tap the shift key every 3-5 seconds as this is more than enough to dodge most attacks. This combined with kicks and flourish attacks which just trigger randomly when they feel like it means there isn't even consistency. If your in the air trying to combo a target half the time you will randomly do a ground pound instead. And in point of fact there is no air combat really as you are almost constantly force back down to earth while other enemies are free to take off and fly around to do their special attacks. Even the boss fights are mindless which is a shame since they are programmed to have very clear attack patterns which could create an almost Souls level of action reaction combat if only your controls were in any way able to match. As is you just hit the boost key to get out of the flashing zones then hold down the forward button to walk towards the enemy your auto locked onto while breaking your finger spamming the attack button.

WIP
The story of the game is very generic and is almost ripped beat for beat out of an anime. That said as far as I am aware at the time of this review it is incomplete and no further details have been released. Meaning that there is still hope for it to have some twists and turns to make it more compelling.

I have been informed that a rework of the combat system would take a considerable amount of time and would require the dev team to stop regular updates. As the team seems to prioritize regular content for fear of being accused of 'abandoning the game' I very much doubt this will ever happen. As is the community and the dev's discord specifically will likely prevent this game from ever being anything more than just okay in the long term.