A Brutally Honest Review of Palia 

I have been playing it for a week and initially I was quite happy with the pace of the game and progress. It was very welcoming for newcomers. But ever since they lowered the amount of spawns it gets more difficult to progress. It's due to not enough areas and more rewarding resources for advanced players.

In addition to the premium items being overpriced, the bundles are advertising a fake discount. They have a slashed out price and claim the bundles price is “33% off” but that “sale price” is no different than if you purchased each item individually. It’s 33% off of a price that you couldn’t pay even if you tried. If you read the fine print on a premium items page it explains that after you purchase one item in a set, the remaining items cost half as much. The slashed out price for the bundle is the cost of all items at full cost. It’s super confusing and they’re clearly doing it to confuse players, and it’s quite frankly illegal in many countries.

Reading their subreddit, apparently Palia isn't made by an indie dev team. It's full of ex-World of Warcraft and ex-Riot game devs. The dev team also crowdfunded tens of millions of dollars along with millions more in investor funds. So it doesn't make a lot of sense why the game is so lackluster after years of development. It really feels like a cashgrab at the moment.

Never thought I'd see my favorite sims critic do Palia. I was looking so forward to this game, but it's honestly just a less in-depth 3D Stardew Valley. There's no MMO features, you can't even local chat. There's no interaction with furniture (you can't sit, sleep, etc.), and although I was led to believe it would be very multiplayer immersive, the sharding system of the servers means roleplaying is never going to happen. There's just not enough in the game for it to have been in development this long. It's clear they're trying to push it to Switch as fast as humanly possible, probably to appease investors, but I think it's just not going to work out well. It's a shame because of the potential - there's just not enough and it makes me wonder what the hell the team has been doing this whole time.

I played for a couple hours only. My main complaint would be lack of a mini map, you are right, using the compass is a nuisance. I definitely got confused moving around. I would like to see them add new areas with rare monsters to take down via hunting. It does feel a bit odd. It didn't stick with me, but I'm sure some people like it! I may go back to it later to see the building and decorating part of it (that part looks pretty cool!)

My main gripe with this game currently is that rare resources (flow tree's and palium ore) that are needed for all late game crafts (especially for top tier furniture you need a ton) are almost non existent and you need to spend hours upon hours running around all over the place hunting these down and hoping people in chat will say if they spotted one so you can share the spawn, unfortunately a lot of people will just farm these out without telling anyone and as a result they are very scarce to get and it makes the late progression halt to a stand still. They are also nerfing a lot of spawns of more common materials people use to make gold from and you need a ton of gold in this game as recopies for new stuff are expensive. Such drastic nerfs even before the game is officially launched has me concerned for its future honestly.

It's worrying to see such focus on the premium shop. Let's see what direction Palia goes as it moves forward. For now, I'm enjoying it.

BEGGING FOR BRUTALLY HONEST REVIEW OF SNOWY ESCAPE DAY 11 🤠💅

The thing with palia is a lack of purpouse. Like sure you can level mining but... why? what do you get out of it? You could do quests and decorate your house and such without needing to level anything to a large degree. Infact just farming and doing quests is enough for you to eventualy get the money to buy any furnature you want and for npc quests you just need to give them things once a day and do there quests that don't require levels in anything. They should add things like mabey titles for reaching level 10 in skills, mabey a unique peice of clothing or something. Right now there is... almost nothing. No late game no point in progression no nothing which means the motivation can only come from yourself not what the game offers. As it is I can't help but compare it to corralislands early acess. Corral island costs like 15 bucks, there is no monetisation, there is already a ton of content with more coming out frequently, a clear roadmap, minimal bugs as they only release more content after lots of playtesting. As it is the next update is going to have a new festival, a ton of qol stuff, a new location, new npcs, new outfits for all the characters, a new furnature set and so much more. I suppose with what they have done, it makes palia look really underwhelming. Thats not to say palia dosen't have a ton of potential, its just not beta ready. Edit: I made a bad explanation with the levelling. My overall point stands though that there is just not much. Make no mistake I really really want it to do well. I want it to thrive. I was there day 1 closed beta and played in alpha. More than anything I hope it thrives. I played a week before most folk thus me feeling burnt out already.

50 millions $ and 150 devs on this project, from Riot and blizzard for. This. Wow.

As you said the PRICING of the cash shop is a huge red flag. It isn't that it is cosmetic only that is a good thing, it is that a basic outfit set costs 30$.. They are following the whale model of pricing instead of the walmart model. As such I see them having serious money issues as time goes forward because those games that follow the whale model are basically cash grabs and die out fairly quickly. Other then that, I liked your review. More need to be critical of what the game is today, not forgiving of saying ooh it's early release, early beta, excuse excuse excuse. No Just say what it is today, as they improve so will the reviews. Based on merit I say. As to playing for free it is worth taking a look at and see if it is your jam. YES a few bugs, YES a few annoyances, but for free worth it. For 1 cash shop item price, I would say no. Sorry they need to fix that before I spend my money on that stuff. Which is a shame, since I would like to support the game, but that pricing model is stupid and I refuse to support such poor decisions.

I have around 70 hours in the beta, played in several of the closed alphas. As always your review is spot on…Thanks Satch!

oh thank you for the review! someone mentioned this game to me just yesterday and i was curious to check it out, your opinion made me realize i'm better of just checking the news for now, hoping they add more stuff to the game to make it worth playing for me

I’m so disappointed when a game comes out that looks promising just to find out it is not a fully fleshed out game. It feels like people are being asked to play test free or even in some cases pay to test it out with in-game purchases of “exclusive” content.

Personally I'm enjoying it but I'm hopeful for it's future if they add more to it. I agree with most of your criticism. Hopefully by full release it'll be a lot more fleshed out.

Palia actually has some of the old WoW developers on board so I would hope that they might have learned from previous experience - specifically, the issue with other people mining and stopping you from gathering materials is something that wow really suffered from. They did fix it though.... eventually. The MMO side of things; I think they could do with some group quests maybe.

When I heard there was a cash shop in Palia's beta, I was concerned. When I saw how many cash shop items there are for sale and how expensive they are, I wrote it off completely. If they prioritized their monetization over the missing/unfinished portions of the gameplay itself, that tells me all I need to know about the experience.

There are a few major issues with this game. The first of which is the predatory way the premium shop was introduced and is shoved in your face in game as well. It is extremely over priced. The whole having to purchase coin packs to purchase premium items is a lousy way to offer paid for features. There are no game play features to purchase BUT all of the most wanted features of every game - pets and outfits ARE pay for only. If they were to offer fancier versions in the shop that is fine but there is no way to earn anything in game. It not only divides your player base but gives major vibes of not being all inclusive. Nothing COZY about that folks. The fact that their very first update for the game was mostly about the premium shop is a very bad sign. The BIGGEST red flag for me is the fact that the game is not even close to a release and they already added a premium shop in the first place. So, you want us to dump all kinds of money into a game that might not ever be finished or released??!!!! Another major issue is the fact that there is nothing to do. You can grind, grind, grind for resources but what's the point? Other than upgrading your house and making yourself furniture there are only a very small amount of quests that can be quickly finished - other than the super annoying shep one - what else is there to do? The secondary area BB is like a ghost town with only 3 npc's and absolutely nothing else. You need to go there for the resources to upgrade tools but that's it. Other than needing others to chop down flow trees there are no other multiplayer aspects. There are no seasons, events or optional game play involving others. In the 3 years that this game has been developed so far this is all they have to offer us? It does not make me feel good about the future of this game.

I knew I wasn't being harsh by saying that I was underwhelmed with the gameplay and experience so far. .

Satch I love your sims pack reviews and I was really hoping you would start posting some more content of other games I am so glad you posted this ☺️☺️

An MMO element of Palia you did not mention is the cooking party feature. Cooking party is huge fun with friends and is one of the best way to make money.

I can’t stand co op I’m not good with people. Also limited resources sounds like a pain. The prices for clothes doesn’t impress me either. I wish single player games were more popular. This is why I love the Sims and Zelda it’s good for someone like me who has become a filthy casual as I have aged.

The developers are from large game devs like WOW so they are aware. I agree that it needs a lot of work if it stands a chance to last any amount of time.

Other games introduce inconvenience to monetarize convenient items. Since Palia is not monetarizing convenient items, I wonder why they introduce so much inconvenience in the game from tedious travel to lack of mini map to long item processing time. I hope they do not confuse inconvenience with challenges.

You were pretty accurate in your review. I have a rule with games that are beta or alpha. That is not to buy real money accessories. Reason the game changes and may even close down. Thus eating your money. In this game, they just added $39.00 pets feature... hmmm. Which I might have been willing put money down for to help support the game, but not in beta form. It's too much money, too early. To many ifs yet for me to start dropping "big" denominations, at this time. Nice review.

Keep being yourself 😊 ur content is the best

While I'm probably a little bit more positive on the game than you, I agree with just about everything you said. There's just a lack of content right now, but it feels like it has good bones. I'm glad Starfield is coming out because I can jump into that and come back to Palia after to hopefully more things to do. But it does feel like it has good bones.

Thank you for a thorough and honest review! I’m interested in how gameplay compares between PC and switch.

Have not watched your review yet but I am also playing this game and though I am enjoying it, I already reached endgame after only about a week in.... and I am not sure how it can be called an MMO since there are dozens of instances with 25 players each instead of them all being on one map... Edited: BTW, you can use your middle mouse button on a villager or location to "mark/highlight" which quest you wish to get to and it shows that with a white circle on your compass on top. Also the majority of resources can be shared... you hit it once and get the full loot =)

Honestly, I am really glad you made this. As much as I love Palia, there are so many things that can be approved upon, the extra content is way too expensive, and you are not wrong in regard to it not quite feeling like a real MMO with BOW features. I hope someone who is a dev for Palia takes criticisms like these and improves upon the game from there.

i don't doubt that palia could be way better in the future but as it is now here's my experience with the game: it just takes too much time. the lack of a minimap makes it hard to know where you're going, especially when the quests constantly send you running back and forth across the map, and the animations for basically anything start to feel tediously long pretty quickly. i also ended up getting softlocked twice and had to manually crash my game with alt+f4 to get out. so as of right now there's probably a long list of qol changes that could be made and my biggest recommendation is just to wait until they get addressed

"No one can sabotage your home." The fountains disagree.

"Designing your home can take a long time." Me: *digs a hole and throws a bedroll in it* Done!

It looks like a combination of zelda and fortnite with a stardew valley gameplay imo

I remember when they first started announcing the game and they made a whole point of not making it a cashgrab and not having a bunch of excess stuff to push you forward. However looks like they immediately went back on that.

As long as you shoot near the animal or hit the node/tree before its killed/breaks you should also get a loot drop from it of your own, at least that's been my experience. I feel the same about the cash shop...its way to over priced $10 for a cosmetic outfit is more then reasonable. I also agree I'd love to see something like a random event every few hours...like say a Giant Flow Tree that you need at least 10 people to chop down or else flow trees stop generating as its sucking up the magic with say 10-20 flow log drop & maybe a mini Flow Tree you can use as a decoration, or a giant bear that needs to be hunted (with our bows) and other animals won't spawn until its killed & as long as you participate you get a "Taxidermed/stuffed Bear" trophy the first time & say a random amount of a rare herb/plant & small amount of gold from the mayor for getting rid of the problem and saving his beloved Chappas. :)

As someone who haven’t played Animal crossing/ stardew valley, I actually really enjoy this game and have played for several hours. Also, I see the money spent in the premium store as necessary as the game is free, and I would love to pay for this game. But I just paid for some coins instead, to support the developers.

Activities where all people can participate...it would be a good Idea to build or rebuild buildings on the map. For example...there is a broken windmill next to the village. Or repair the lighthouse after a storm. Anyone can then pur resources in this task and gets reward....should write this the palia developers too

Does everything get wiped after the beta is over? or do we keep everything?

I can't play yet because it won't effing download. My friend who has it says the microtransactions are out of hand which is a bummer. And people posting criticism are getting banned from the Discord :(

lol, actually, with the most recent bug of plots being combined, people have been stealing furniture ...

I've been waiting for a farming game like this for a while and i'm having a blast

I love there is no battle in this game. No fighting, no death. And still there is lots to do and lots to achieve. I hope we can interact with furniture soon. I play together with my friends and we try some sims-like roleplay, but we end up just cooking together. We were hoping for a multiplayer sims game. It comes close and I look forward to future updates.

I can't even play, mine freezes up in certain spots and after the Palia intro at the waterfall after you come out of the cave, as soon as I walk down the stairs mine crashes EVERY time lol if I even make it that far before crashing. I have 4gb RAM which is it's min req and I have AMD Radeon graphics and Ryzen 3

Satch! They've updated Palia and it's now on switch too. I've been playing non stop and I love it!

Imagine you could expand your lot like this in the Sims 4, starting out by 20x20.. buying to more lots 40x40 and so on.. this would be so cool! Also.. I kinda hope they give us more options to get money fast. Most of the time if you craft things from your ressources you get less, or the same money that you would get for the ressource anyway. That's kinda not worth it.

That looks so cute and fun!!

Palia is fun to progress toward the end of the "tech tree" for your gathering tools. After that, it feels like someone took one of the absurdly long sidequests one might find in a game that earns you a short, spicy FMV at the end, took the FMV out, and made the sidequest the whole game.

There is 1 thing palia did great for me: building is fun and intuitive! I never build in any game i just find it tedious. But in Palia I actually really enjoyed decorating my house and unlocking / building all the different items. Also, the game is good to make you work together. For example, if everyone hits a stone once, everyone will get the resources, and you actually get more than if doing it solo.

I first wanted to support the game and team by buying an outfit, to then realise I would have to pay 5 euros and then 10 euros so I can buy 1 outfit and then have leftover coins. It is bullshit that they put such expensive items in their "premium store" in the first place. Also, do they add so much to the premium store when you can't even sit in a chair! It is so greedy.

Cool, might try it

My complaint is that the controller is not actively supported but you could have still played with one. Problem - got used to it then with the upgrade allowing companions all the controller functions were moved around and thing that used to work cant and now can only be done with a keyboard. I haven't touched it in two days because of this

wait not clear on where the stables are ... (the fast travel maps are shown on map with "the hoof" symbol)

Not being able to use furnitures like chairs and beds is a dud

their is another area bahari if you head north east of main map you can go to where hadari goes to at night I didn't know about the travel board though

Id like to see events and titles shown in game based on achievements.

I totally agree with everything you said, especially the Premium Store part.

Paylia yes not Palia, has great potential but has terrible execution. Game is lack of basic aspects of MMO and cozy games. Game labels itself as Cozy MMO but it fails on both. With the latest patch it went even worse you can have a peek at the discord and decide. Me and my friends were playing since the first day of closed beta and we stopped with last patch. Developers went completely silent I hope they take some measures or game is going to die sooner than I expect.

Do you have buy it ?

Super hopeful for this to turn the game around.. After a week of excitement and grinding, I felt a HARD drop off after becoming a "veteran" per se. limitations of farming, area farming, no general chat, lack of community stuff I started to notice taking a toll on me. I find that I just dont see much reward logging in to do dailies at the moment.

5:09 Oh, my sweet innocent summer child 😅

Whilst I entirely agree with the constructive criticism, im more than willing to give it the time to develop. I don't find it excessively grindy, because it's easy enough to set things to process and go play something else while I wait. 😁 I do think they need to spend a lot of time on developing the co-op features to really incentivise the multiplayer elements. Certainly some side-quests that require a team to complete would be nice. Another thing that needs to come in is livestock farming, for those items you can only currently purchase from the general store.. but I hear this is planned. Overall, it is a very enjoyable game and quite the departure from my typical pew-pew fare. 😅 I look forward to it's progress.

does your data get erased when the full thing releases? thats always my fear in early access games...

i’ve played for about two hours. the main reasons i hesitate playing again is the awful control mapping and the map/waypoints/teleport system.

very good review. fully agree. plus.. I would buy a lil something to support the dev team.. but.... credit card only.

4:32 lol thought thats Ryze from League of Legens for a sec xDD

I agree with most of what you said, except the feeling I'm playing a solo game. I'm constantly surrounded by other online players. Feels very MMO to me.

Like it so far. IMHO It needs Clothing crafting. Mini Map, Real time weather, Seasons, the ability to sit and lay on furniture, and the ability to find and catch Pets. Im scared to get invested in this game, Im playing it on a hope they add the ability to Craft Clothing and find pets NOT on the cash shop. Also could use more NPCs, Locations, Zone enviorments like a forrest, desert, Snow, Mountains. I just want this to be a great game. They have to find a way to monitize it that doesnt block players from things. Sell clothing, but allow us to make it too, sell pets, but allow us to find and raise our Own!!!!! If not, I rather just buy a Game where i get the features i want. Paying 30.00 for Pets and clothes is NOT reasonable for most people. Otherwise, I love it... For now..

Ok but will there be ;) mod?

I saw another review on this game and I gave it a try...I've been playing online games for 20 years..I have played a lot of games over those years...I am addicted to this game and I never played farmville back in the day or stardew valley...I'm really enjoying this game though..

What a lot of people seem to purposely miss the point about is criticisms regarding the cash shop. Absolutely NOBODY is saying this game shouldn't make any money for being free. What folks ARE saying is that it makes no sense for cosmetics to be fully a premium thing with no way for F2P players to earn basic versions of those items in-game. Maybe to some it doesn't affect gameplay, but what people aren't thinking about is how F2P players put in just as much time as paying players, possibly even more. The little cats were sent as a thank-you for the support but they only meant MONETARY support which is a huge slap in the face to people who still support the game by logging in and playing every day. Hoping they get it together before the Switch release because they're fumbling really bad as of right now.

I've played quite a lot, I haven't come across really many bugs, I would say the progression is slow but there's enough tasks and incentives where it doesn't feel too daunting. It is similar to Animal Crossing where you get to a point where you'll login for maybe an hour or 2 and do your dailies until bigger things come. It is fun and it's free so it doesn't feel bad to play. I personally don't love farming simulators and other games of the sort but this one has been enjoyable.

After I played this game I never played anything else. This game is the game I've been wanting for a long time. Nothing can top this for me... My time at sandrock is a close 2nd place because of the full voice acting and open world

I wish it was for tablet or for phone. My laptop died and my pc is in a room I can not use all the time.

the fact that you even cant zoom in or out in the game says enough...i get motion sickness of it sadly. Don't have it with other games. Unless its very zoomed in and moving fast. Good review, agree with all of this. I quit the game, in the end i feel lonely af in the game and stressed cuz of the farm tension, sad gamer heart.

Something I hope will be integrated is mounts

I really love the game but I do see a lot of room for improvement!

Alot of the things mentioned are mmo things speciifcially the mount. Unless its not in the game yet youd probably get a mount much later

I've managed to get into a closed beta, loving it so far, been playing for a couple of weeks. Reth is love ^^ The absence of mounts really bugs me as well. The absense of more in-depth mmo elements is actually fine by me, takes a lot of the pressure off, I come there to relax)

I dont care about the premium stuff, i dont really care for the issue of that. BUT the main issue is the lack of social aspect/interactions for a MMO, which they advertised about it being a social game. I need furniture interactions as well.

did you know, if multiple people hit the same thing everyone gets the resources? lmao the price tag thing, agreed 1000%, but it is Starcraft and LoL devs here, i dont expect prices to drop for a long time

Is it just me or does this look reeeaaally similar to Dreamlight Valley? Is it developed by the same company?

I have about 150 hours in. The guts of the game are cute and fun, but holy cow it needs some more content. As of now it's just a kill deer, chop, mine, grind fest. Literally that is all there is to do in the game. I hope they don't reset, and i hope they make more content ASAP. Great review!

is it online only?

I agree with everything u said!

looks like the previous wow staff still didnt learn from wow's mistakes. you're better off trying Guildwars 2 Satch. it has everything you like in palia and it doesnt have what you dont like about palia.

Palia: oi mate can i copy your homework BOTW: sure but don't make it too obvious. Palia:

Here for the official release now, I don’t feel like most of these suggestions have been addressed.

Played it for a bit, quit when I could hardly find iron ore for a couple days due to competitive mining. Not worth the time. Bad system. The cost of the coin to buy outfits combined with time to do things and lack of resources also suggests heavy monetisation incoming.

With regards to the mining - actually, I think they implement it well. As long as you get ONE hit on the ore, then you are ALSO able to get the loot from it. I've been in multiple instances when there are groups of people heading for the same ore vein (particularly with the rarer ores) and everyone has stood back and allowed each person to take one swing at it so EVERYONE gets the same loot.

It's a shame the game is being hacked as it has no anti cheat. so many speedhackers and fishing hackers.

I do like this game because its simple enough to teach others who just want to chill and they are playing mmo for the first time.

Thanks for introducing the new game. It sounds like a promising and fun to play. Is it really life simulation slash adventure slash farming? 🤔 I agreed the conpass isn't good enough, there is need a mini map. I'd be running around in confusion. I have one complaint, it supposed to be life simulation but one doesn't need to eat nor sleep?? I'd preferred to hunt and grow a crop to eat and build a bed to sleep, it would be more challenges. Finally, can it be play as single player? I have no interest in multi-player mode. Cheers

most of the people making Palia, comes from Blizzard. Their leader, actually was one of the CEO's of Blizzard.

To be honest im playing it for a couple of days, but hours at a time now and i really like it so far. Especially in the beginning i came across so many features i didnt know where annoying in other games but super easy to work with in palia. First of, the fact that every player, besides tool quality, can play eaqually together. Im playing it with a friend and we totally enjoyed going on farming tours in the world, or stant next to each other and fish while just talking about our day. Small things like the quick change of tools even while running or how naturally making progress feels like made me very happy. I like how many fish and bugs are there to collect already, and that you have to try a bit harder to find rare specamins. The characters? were so in love! The animations are super cute and they are designed and told with love. Also, there are no long loading times, besides when other players are in the queue for travelling. Yes, going across the map is a bit frustrating, if we get cute mounts im so hyped! also cant wait to own farm animals. And events are in the making!

You should really play the Witcher 3 if you haven’t yet, I have a feeling you’d like it a lot

I think that Singularity 6 (the makers of Palia) only made this game an MMO to make money. As you pointed out it is quite obviously a single player game, just with a lot of different people all playing their single player game together. I followed the game for a year and was super excited to get into the closed beta. I played it non-stop for a week, and then dropped it. Every single aspect of the game is designed as a money-grind, from expanding your house, getting recipes, seeds, basically everything. It's really quite stressful, and after a while, quite boring. It is not what I am looking for from a "cozy" game. I'd understand this if the devs were communicating with the players on their concerns, but they are actually doing the opposite; they aren't interacting with players on their discord, and every time someone comes up with a way to make some money, the devs instantly nerf it. I suppose that is to be expected. Singularity 6 style themselves as a small company when actually they are a corporate gaming group with over 100 employees and more than $25 million behind them. If the devs don't get with it and address the problems the players are citing, I'm afraid that most people trying this free game will eventually stop playing.

Don't forget it is still open Beta. They already announced new content, events and quests. I play Palia since two weeks and it's still fun. I'm sure that the game will be improved.

Am i the only one struggling to download this game? I keep getting an error😢

i heard another person review the game and said everyone who is mining a resource gets the loot