This game is really, REALLY fun, BUT, it has 2 major issues.
I will start this review by saying that the only reason I played this game again is because I already had gotten all of its achievements on Xbox when it was available on game pass in like 2022, and it wasn't that hard to 100% back then, how hard could it be to 100% now? it was freaking HARD, it was not only a completely different game than what I remembered (thanks to seamless mode) but it was way more challenging combat wise.
As for the positives of this game? it's a lovely game to get lost in, you'll have plenty of caves to loot, farms to build, a HUGE map to explore, strong enemies to face, combat builds to be made & experimentation with all kind of the weapon types it offers, this game has it all from resource automation, to literal petting/monster collecting, it's extremely easy to sink a bunch of hours on any of its 4 main aspects: Automation, Building, Exploration, & Combat, I only engaged with the later 2 the most, as automation and building are not quite my cup of tea, but the engagement I had with those 2 was phenomenal.
The 2 major issues I briefly mentioned at the beginning are quite literally a deal breaker if you can't get past then, so here they are:
#1: Optimization
Yup, this game runs BAD, this is the first major issue and it will hit you in the face right away, not even with a high-end rig like mine's was I able to keep a stable 60fps with a decent render resolution, render distance or shadows activated, as soon as you try to aim for a medium kind of setting the game drops to low 40s and to be honest I preferred to just straight up run it on low to keep it locked to 60fps (Not always as it still continued to drop by the end game as I had accumulated a bunch of resources and needed to pile up chests to store then, lol), but yeah it runs bad and DON'T get me started on the crashes, sometimes I couldn't even play for 5mins straight without having it crash on me, time and time and time and time again, and again, if you play this game make sure to disable auto save and keep saving yourself manually every so often, because the auto save feature defaults to once ever 10mins and trust me it will crash by then, and then it'll crash again as soon as you open the game again for good measure, and it's not something you can control or predict this game has no trigger, it literally just crashes out of nowhere, without even nothing happening so be on the ready.
#2: Palworld.. Palworld.
This is the same developer that launched Palworld way back in 2024 and WOW, wouldn't you figure? they would definitely want to support the top #3 all time steam chart game rather than their failed 2020 attempt, right? Of course they will rather support their biggest game yet, so yeah, it's literally abandoned, not updates in months, and the only reason it has not been kicked out of early access by steam it's because they drop a patch every once in a while to fix some really dumb bugs or glitches like "a flower being darker in color than intended", so yeah, don't expect any meaningful updates in the future what you see now is what you get..
So yeah, choose wisely!
