Recent reviews by Tabunga

I really wanted to like this game.

The idea of a "Pokemon with guns" game, paired with the ability to work your little guys to death in a wretched sweatshop like environment, in order to mass produce arms for your legions of small monkeys and sheep, with missiles and mini guns for your more powerful creatures so that you can go wreak havoc across the continent, capturing more workers the fuel your war machine and raiding dungeons. Sounded like a wacky idea for a game, and its what they advertised it as in the trailers. So I decided to try it out.

It wasn't long after loading into the game that this game was going to be less of a "Pokemon with guns" with action combat, with some base building emphasis thrown in, and more of a "Its Ark with Pokemon". I was surprised, but I was still interested in seeing what the game had to offer so I stuck with it.

My friend and I progressed through the game, establishing our base, catching some pals and setting up our production infrastructure. What I did find to be super impressive, and for sure the strongest thing this game has going for it, is that each and every pal has a unique animation for every task that they can complete, and its absolutely fantastic and filled with character, there was something special about seeing how the pals carry out their tasks that made me want to discover more pals to see what they would do. I remember that I was going to put the game down, but then I saw a new creature spawn into the start zone of the game, and it was a way higher level than the rest of the zone. I had to catch it. And after dying repeatedly, I got its health down low enough for a 4% catch chance, I threw my sphere, it shook twice, and I added a dinossom to my roster. The guy was great, he was able to take care of all the food and lumbering for my base, destroy the fodder pals around me, and his relax animation is great. This guy single-handedly convinced me to keep playing the game, to see what else this game has.

This was a mistake

First off, to the dismay of my friend and I, we didn't have access to a gun for almost the entirety of our first 10 hours. It was also a disappointment to see that the guns we could craft for pals, were not persistent, but were an ability that had a long cool down and a short duration. It also sucked that every, single NPCs AI was completely nonfunctional. Enemies would simply stand and walk around the player for around 20 seconds at a time before firing, afterwards they would run off and get stuck in even the slightest bump or change in terrain and break until they were killed. If that didn't happen they would simply walk a little before freezing permanently in their idle pose. With no exaggeration, this wouldn't just happen sometimes or more often than not, this would happen in nearly every instance. For my entire 44 hours of game play, base raids, dungeons, field pal bosses, and every other kind of encounter would work for less than 15 seconds before breaking and standing still, or running inside of a wall or under the floor for all time.

For another thing, the base feature doesn't work, at all. It is nearly impossible to get your pals to do what you want them to do, Pals will work on a task from anywhere to 30 seconds to a single frame. Pals constantly bounce around tasks, accomplishing nothing overall most of the time, even if you use the pick up and throw command to make them focus on a task, and this is the best case scenario. Half of the time Pals will fall victim to the same terrible AI problems that exist throughout the game. They get stuck on everything, slight raises in elevation, your houses and production buildings you create, even the ore nodes that they're trying to mine, and they don't fix themselves, so much time I had to waste dragging my pals in and out of the base to reset them.

Even if you manage to get your pals to do what you want you have to deal with the stress system in the game, which is yet another broken mess. the idea for the mechanic is simple, you overwork or otherwise treat your pals poorly they get sick or depressed and cant work as well. The problem is, you cant avoid these things happening to your pals even if you give them the best beds, hot springs, and more food than you can eat, they will still randomly get the worst possible stress debuffs, and cleansing them of those debuffs is a complete nightmare. you need to walk up to each pal individually and feed them medicine. This already is painfully tedious, but the pals often bug out and don't accept any commands so you need to reset them at the palbox again and chase them around the base to feed them medicine. This is painful enough without mentioning the cost in materials and craft times for the medicine, and that leads into the next point.

This game is an absolute grindy slog fest that doesn't respect your time in the slightest. No matter what kind of pal your bring into your base, no matter what kind of assembly line you use, you will never have that feeling that you've created an empire off the broken backs of your pals. You will always be strapped fro resources due to base building mechanics being broken, features not existing, such as auto refinement of ore into ingots, and steep crafting costs for basic gameplay necessities like ammo and palspheres. I estimate that 80% of my playtime consisted of mining and refining ore, even after i learned that it was basically necessary to build bases on places of land with a condensed patch of ore or coal, it was still monotonous having to fast travel between all of my bases moving small amounts of materials until my minuscule weight limit into the main production base and then after that wait for my pals to find the strength within themselves to refine them into ingots and then into ammo and spheres. The whole process taking sometimes an hour to fuel a pal capturing session that could end in 15 minutes or less.

Another great thing about this game is that past the midgame, the pals are absolutely worthless for combat. Even max level pals with soul enhanced attack don't even scratch the health of the bosses. Hell even using the exploit to capture the bosses and powering those up to use against themselves doesn't deal enough damage to kill them within the 10 minute time limit, no the only thing that can widdle down those bullet sponge healthbars within the time limit is the assault rifle you unlock near the end of the game.

Lastly, this game is an unoptimized mess, it runs horrible and is prone to memory leaks and low frame rates where its not warranted. I am almost certain this is due to the fact that the environment is almost entirely made up of imported stock assets and lighting systems.

Other things like the lack of story, and the end of the game not being implemented, and everything else I forgot to mention plague this game.

The game is a complete mess, nothing works, and its not even fun when it does. You could look at GIFs of the creatures doing their thing and you'd get the same amount of enjoyment i felt during my entire playtime.

KILL DOGS