First Swings and Movement Feel
Right out of the gate, the controls feel surprisingly responsive for an open world crafting title. Your dodge roll has decent invulnerability and the recovery animation does not lock your inputs for too long, which immediately separates this from typical sluggish survival games. You can sprint, leap, and draw weapons without that muddy input delay that plagues so many early access sandboxes.
The basic melee attacks with early crafted clubs and bats are straightforward. They have wide, simple hitboxes that connect reliably on smaller creatures, though the impact feedback lacks a bit of weight. You swing, you see the hit spark, and the target flinches just enough to let you reset your spacing. It is functional action craft rather than high-end swordplay, but it keeps you moving instead of sticking you in place.
Trading Blows with Poachers and Wild Packs
Combat gets wild once guns and hostile factions enter the picture. Poaching syndicates roam the territory with ranged squads, forcing you to use terrain, sprint between boulders, and roll through crossfire. Dodging incoming strikes feels good because enemy attack hitboxes are generally clean. If an aggressive brute swings a heavy club, you can roll under the arc and punish the recovery window from behind.
Your summoned Pals act as active combat partners instead of passive pets. Tossing a sphere drops your creature right into the fray, pulling aggro and launching elemental strikes that disrupt enemy attack strings. You have to monitor their health bars and recall them right before a lethal hit lands, turning fights into a tight dance of switching partners, rolling through projectiles, and managing your own stamina bar. The English interface keeps skill cooldowns and commands easy to track during hectic fights, even without any English voice acting present.
Dungeon Runs and Brutal Survival Stakes
The cavern dungeons scattered across the map show off the combat loop at its sharpest. Narrow corridors force you to mind your spacing, especially when large hostile Pals charge down narrow paths with multi-hit elemental attacks. If you misjudge a dodge, you eat heavy burst damage. In tough spots, throwing a high-durability Pal into the line of fire to absorb a lethal slam can save your entire run, reinforcing the harsh survival tone Pocketpair is pushing.
Traversing these zones on mounted Pals changes the pacing quickly. Flying and ground mounts let you bypass hazards or line up high-ground shooting angles on groups of poachers. Some mounts allow direct skill usage while riding, effectively turning your creature into a fast, mobile weapons platform with its own set of attack recovery times.
Automation, Breeding, and Performance
Outside of the battles, the loop turns into pure base building and factory management. Pals chop lumber, generate electricity, mine iron nodes, and cook food to keep production running. Watching automated lines churn out ammunition and gear takes the pain out of resource grinding. Breeding also lets you roll passive traits down through generations, letting you breed tougher fighters with higher attack power or faster move speeds for your combat party.
Performance on Steam holds up reasonably well during solo roaming, but frame drops show up when large base raids trigger with dozens of entities on screen at once. Some pathfinding glitches will leave working Pals stuck on roof edges or starved behind wooden barriers. Pocketpair needs to tune those pathing hitboxes, yet the core thirty-dollar package delivers an aggressive, absurdly entertaining action loop that easily keeps your hands busy.
Comments 17
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Breeding is just a stat grind, not actually fun.
has anyone tried doing the combat without pals? just curious how the solo play feels.
Y'all are sleepin on this meta build, automation makes base building a breeze.
dude the combat is actually insane pals flying at enemies while you dodge roll through chaos feels unreal thirty bucks for this much action is a steal the review nailed the responsive movement part breeding menu ui is whatever who cares when the gameplay is this tight
Movement feels responsive once you commit to the dodge roll timing. Does this have a real ending or is it a second job? Please let me know how many hours it takes before the credits roll.
am i bad at this or is the RNG personally offended by me? love the look of those pals charging in, but the ui fonts look like a mobile port lol.
guess you could say this game really... pals around? sorry, i'll see myself out.
combat animations are surprisingly smooth for early access, love how pals actually fight alongside you instead of just standing there. devs clearly put work into the action side of things. hoping they keep polishing the rough edges!
@needacoffeey'all are fixin to overlook how ugly the text boxes look in the breeding menu. reckon the font scaling breaks on ultrawide too. combat's decent but them ui choices hurt my eyes something fierce.
@mortartbh the UI looks clunky on steam deck but at least my PC doesn't overheat lol
@needacoffeehas anyone tried doing the combat without pals? just curious how the solo play feels.
thirty bucks for what i've put in so far comes out to like forty cents an hour mate. stoked with that value. breeding system alone ate my whole weekend, automation means i'm not stuck punching trees for mats. dodge roll feels clean too which surprised me for a survival game. only dodgy bit is pathfinding, pals get stuck on fence corners heaps. still, cost per hour keeps dropping so hard to complain.
@frodos left shoerefunded by hour three, movement felt floaty and the ui fonts look like a mobile port.
@l33t_strpuretbh refunded too, felt like a reskinned mobile game lol
@l33t_strpureMovement feels responsive once you get used to the dodge roll recovery, it's not floaty if you commit to the timing.
@l33t_strpurel33t_strpure, i get the floaty feeling at first, but once you nail the dodge roll timing it feels solid! maybe adjust the UI scaling in settings, it helped me a lot.
@frodos left shoeBreeding is just a stat grind, not actually fun.
@l33t_strpurekinda hate how breeding and base automation just turn the creatures into work tools. the review calls it deep, but you're treating them like spreadsheet numbers instead of actually caring about your monsters. just feels cold ngl.
@frodos left shoeY'all are sleepin on this meta build, automation makes base building a breeze.
@frodos left shoebreeding system is deep, try messing with base automation before you talk to me rn.