Recent reviews by heinous

The magic happened on the very first day I played the game, when my inventory first became full, and I began building a base. I built the "pal box" designating the center of the base, then assigned a pal to patrol around it, and finally I chose a spot for a storage crate. As I began to build the storage crate, my patrolling pal voluntarily came next to me and helped build it, speeding up the process. After the crate was complete, my pal automatically went to pick up my scattered items from the ground, and placed them into the crate, then it flashed me a smile and returned to patrolling. I have not given my pal a single command during all of this. This was the moment I fell in love with Palworld.

The similarities with Pokemon are only on a visual level. Game play mechanics are significantly deeper here than Pokemon can ever wish to do, because even if they ironically copy Palworld's survival mechanics, things like guns and butchering are not something that brand can touch. The 100+ types of pals really do feel like 100+, because the lack of evolutions means each and every pal has a genuine niche, none of them is stuck in the middle of an evolution chain to be passed over in favor of its baby or final forms. The pals are also quite varied, and it would appear that the advertising material strongly push for a Pokemon comparison using pals that resemble Pokemon the most, to drum up attention for the game, for better or for worse. Although there are blatant parodies, such as Lovander, there are also a large number of pals who look distinguished and uniquely "pal" that the controversies have omitted.

On a technical note, it might be wise to buy the Steam version of this game. It costs only $30, and is the best updated version, presumably due to the gamepass versions requiring Microsoft certification which adds a bottleneck to the process.

There are two types of people, those who hate this game, and those who played it.

I have not written a review in years. I must write one now, to undo the damage I may have caused by praising this game verbally when it came out.

This game is visually stunning, and the plot has a few interesting concepts. In the beginning, I was blown away by the freedom that I had, the dialogues, the different beautiful settings, creatures, etc.

They simply did not make enough of any of those to fill the size of this game.

You can explore a planet, discover a creature, and then discover the visually same creature on another planet just with a slightly different name and behavior.

You can go to an unexplored planet, only to find a natural cave and have your sense of pioneering be extinguished because every cave has a man-made locker loot. This is a game about exploration that never really gives you a sense of exploration, instead it instills a feeling that humans are everywhere even though sometimes they are out of sight.

Randomly generated warehouses are full of containers that the game treats as static decorations. Your own ship's interior is also lined with walls of decorative unusable containers. Computer rooms are full of displays and controls with no interaction. Depending on your cockpit, your own ship's cargo console is hidden among a dizzying wall of other decorative consoles. Like a typical Bethesda game, this one has litters of random knick knack laying all over the place, but once you become familiar with them, the static decorative knick knacks become even more jarring.

Leveling is seemingly designed to be tedious. Certain mundane things require multiple unlocks. To craft higher level equipment, you must first unlock special researches, then unlock which genre of special research, before you can research it, before you can finally craft it. In the mean time you cannot use the ingredients for that research so you are inclined to hoard it, except both the ship and your person have carry limits, so you are inclined to leave some things at some outposts, except there is no way to link your stashes across outposts, even though a shipping service exists to cargo-link your raw materials and resources from one outpost to another while costing nothing more than a little Helium-3. Locking gamplay mechanics behind certain achievements would have been fine, but this game is locking gameplay mechanics behind so many layers of tasks, and it just feels like work.

So many parts of this game have the "so close to being good" feeling like that cargo situation above. Building outposts is fun, except your outposts bug out very often (damaged turrets disappear but still costs your electricity, patches of land resources disappear or rearrange themselves, etc) and requires quicksaving-quickloading to fix. Modding weapons is fun, except it's a nerfed version of Fallout 4's, and also locked behind the aforementioned multiple layers of leveled unlocks. Exploration is fun, except the scanner is also locked behind multiple layers of unlocks. You cannot even zoom in without unlocking levels, each level unlock a useless amount of zooming so that they cumulatively produce a usable zoom. The countless binoculars littered across the galaxy are all miscellaneous decorations that cannot be used.

There's a static decorative model of a car in the game, but nobody gets to drive it. This is probably to avoid exceeding the loading limitation of the game engine system, but that begs the question why are they forcing this glorified Morrowind engine to do all of these things it was never intended to do, instead of just coming up with a new engine better suited for the purpose of this genre? They are not a small indie developer.

I can go on and on. I will just summarize now. Once the initial honeymoon period is over, the artificial tedium really kills your joy in this game.

Edited January 3 2024 for wording errors.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was free on Steam today so I bought it. I wondered why it was 1.47GB, turns out it had to play through this thing.

Every time I open Sonic 2, it opens this first, then plays an intro movie that lags. The menu takes the form of a 3D room with retro gaming system set up and ready. The graphics of the room itself is crude but clean. It's honestly "good enough" graphically and the functions it provides to the emulated games is a nice bonus as well. I would have liked it if it weren't such a resource hog for some strange reason. I had dropped frames playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in 2020...

The graphics are pretty basic, but they do a good job setting the mood for the game. I enjoyed every moment that I was able to play the game. There is not so much jump scare, but rather the constant desperation to find refuge from the cold. It works.

Here's the one problem. My PC may be a potato, but it still passes minimum requirement. I am sad to say that, with the advent of Condition 2 weather, which appears a little bit into the game, the game grinds to a halt. It would freeze 30 to 60 seconds to render 5 or so frames before freezing again and repeating. This makes the game unplayable beyond that point because you are slowly dying every second that you are outside.

So unfortunately I had to refund the game, and the view is negative since the minimum specs apparently doesn't mean anything. If you have a beast machine, by all means give this game a try. I am sure the rest of the game is good as well. I would love to finish this game someday.

best time travel device ever, you just start it and it's next week before you know it.

you can brute force every mission guns blazing and earn an s-rank in minutes that would cost you hours if you go by stealth. at least in peace walker earning an s-rank requires full stealth. there is absolutely no reward in this game for using any kind of stealth approach. this is just an action game and not the sneaking game this series is known for anymore.

it's been a pretty acceptable ride so far for $2.50, but you can tell the quality isn't going to blow you away. some jokes run on for a bit too long as well, but again for $2.50 i do not regret it. how on earth did they manage to get a semi decent texture artist and a semi deent modeler, but a total ♥♥♥♥ 2d artist to draw the character profile images? they are totally out of style with the rest of the game. why not just use high quality bust portraits of the character models?

some old ♥♥♥♥♥♥ just said he would prefer to let my group die out there instead of being brought into his hideout. then he has a heart attack and i have to get him pills. why should i? i don't want to get his ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pills. this story needs more options.

"duty calls" was a satire game too, and that was free. i wish i could get my money back.

it's a smaller map than gta, but somehow feels more detailed and real. it's a good game!