It’s a pretty standard survival crafting game, I’ve seen it describes as Ark + Pokémon (particularly Legends Arceus if you’ve played it) . The game actually doesn’t have much of the wild shooting combat until much later levels. For the most part, you focus on catching “pals” for xp while putting them to work on your base. Like Pokémon, you get wild pals’ hp down to increase the chance of catching them and then throw balls like your life depends on it.

The combat with your pals is pretty basic, you can command them to help you in battle but they really do their own thing beyond that (including kill the things you were trying to catch). That being said, managing large battles while throwing out balls and trying not to die can be pretty fun.

The real appeal is setting up your base and putting your pals to work. Each type of pal has a different set of jobs they can perform, so you have to plan somewhat carefully to make your base as efficient as possible. Generally, the jobs involve either resource gathering or crafting. Crafting lets you queue up items for your pals to work on so you can start cranking out supplies pretty quick. Really, though, the appeal is getting to see a couple dozen guys running around working like a well oiled machine, and they have some fun animations to keep things interesting.

It is pretty playable, though there’s definitely a few bugs (mostly pals disappearing into the terrain). The amount of damage various pals do with attacks seems almost divorced from their level, so you can be blindsided by something half your level if you don’t dump a lot of upgrade points into your health. Also, you currently have to run your own server to play multi-player, so it’s tough for people who don’t know their way around port forwarding and stuff like that.

All that being said, I’ve put about 10 hours into it so far and am having quite a bit of fun with it. It feels like there’s still a lot to explore and do.