Hand in hand, we’ll venture worth and pal around in this brave new world!

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Palworld Review
Platforms: PC(Reviewed), Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One
Developer/Publisher: Pocket Pair

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Background

Palworld was revealed to the world through a pomp-addled trailer during E3 2021, where it became a momentary fixation during one of the most attention starved times amongst gaming enthusiasts. However, despite garnering a small community of interested people during the ensuing years, nobody could have (reasonably) predicted it would make such a splash when it was released in early access in January 2024. It broke records on Steam and Xbox Game Pass, garnered a frightening number of players, and ultimately saw 25 million players in about a month. Oh, and it was also subjected to an AI and plagiarized art controversy that lasted for about a week, before being swept under the rug.

All of this hubbub was enough to pique my curiosity and buy two copies, one for me and one for my friend Cassie. Together, we ventured forth into the brave frontier, harnessing the power of a dedicated server and, more importantly, friendship! A month and seventy hours later, I think I finally played enough for a review, so let’s get on with it!

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Overview

Palworld begins by casting the player into a sizable archipelago filled with colorful monster creatures known as pals. Armed with nothing, they must go through the typical foundational hours of a survival crafting game. Punching trees, crafting a workbench, creating tools, establishing a base, and bringing human order to a danger-rich untamed wilderness. I’d say it’s standard for the genre, but while I have seen the survival crafting genre evolve from Minecraft and an ARMA II mod called DayZ, I never actually touched it. (Unless you count running late 2009 Minecraft, which I don’t.) It just wasn’t really my thing, and what drew me to Palworld was less its genre and more its signature and titular element, pals!

Pals are cute anime-style creatures that litter this vast world. They fight the player either on sight or when provoked. Drop valuable resources and food upon being beaten to ragdoll unconsciousness. But most importantly can be captured using preternatural spheres made by jamming magical rocks, wood, and non-magical rocks, together.

If you somehow hadn’t gathered at this point, the central premise for Palworld is a survival crafting game, but with Pokémon. Though, not like the Minecraft mod Pixelmon. More like Ark: Survival Evolved but instead of dinosaurs, you have creatures who, thematically, stylistically, and conceptually resemble Pokémon.

What do these pals do? Well, they pretty much have two purposes. One, they can help the player in fighting other wild pals, and humans, fulfilling the battle function of Pokémon. Or they could be put to work at the players’ base, where they go about several functions. Using agricultural skills to grow crops, using fire, ice, or electric powers to power utilities, using their strength to mine for wood and stone, or helping with the crafting.

As is common among the genre, the core of the game is based around accumulating more resources to craft better equipment and weapons. Going from flimsy cloth clothes to powerful metal alloys and going from a stone spear to an assault rifle, all while building the necessary crafting doodads to facilitate this growth. Which mostly means crafting better crafting tables in order to craft better construction materials— cements, ingots, cloth, and nails— before straight up making industrial assembly lines. One for weapons, one for general items, and one for pal spheres. With these amenities, the player can venture forth into new lands, find stronger, fiercer, better, higher level pals, and a scattering of new resources. 

Okay, so… what exactly is the goal though, if not exploration and progression for the same of it? Well, Palworld does offer the obvious goals of catching all 150-ish pals in the game, counting alternate forms, exploring every island thoroughly, and unlocking everything in a skill tree. (I miss when you just got skills for leveling up, not skill points.) However, the main goal, given to the player before they start playing the game, is to venture to the five towers throughout the world before them and defeat the leaders. Characters who probably have lore behind them, yet lack any story beyond brief pre-battle cutscenes that exist to show off personality above all else.

After defeating these five super bosses… the game’s just kind of over. It is clearly building up to something happening at Yggdrasil up near the north of the world, yet that part of the game isn’t finished yet. And not in the AAA sense of ‘ship broken and patch later.’ In the sense that the game just is not done yet. This means that the goals in Palworld tend to be more… open.

Some might want to build a base that is both practical and visually appealing. Others might get into the mechanics of breeding pals in order to create ones with passive skills that boost their stats dramatically, going so far as to double their base attack. The open world encourages exploration and rewards it with treasures, new scenery, and new pals to capture. And for those attached to certain pals, there is a somewhat extreme amount of ways they can be enhanced by sacrificing members of the same species. There’s a lot to do in Palworld… and as much as I would like to say otherwise, a lot of it’s pretty rough.

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The Problem With Pals

So, the general idea behind monster taming games is that if you get a monster early on, it will have some use in the later game. In Shin Megami Tensei games, you have demon fusion, where you can combine, summon, and recombine demons in order to make stronger ones. Chances are that a player’s endgame roster has some lineage to demons they found at the start of the game. In Pokémon, you have the straightforward level, item, friendship, or whatever gated evolution, where most Pokémon can become better via training and most of those can be used to clear the game. 

I could go on, though the point I’m making here is that Palworld does not have any monster evolution or fusion system. The cowardly fox bipeds one finds at the start of the game will remain that way no matter how much training they receive. Pals are just disposable creatures, and there will inevitably be something better later down the line, until you get to the endgame pals, who are universally the best ones, no question. Sure, one could say the same thing about Pokémon, though the differences in power are far more extreme in Palworld.

This approach makes pals feel more like gear than anything to really care about, when, from a design perspective, they are clearly meant to be lovable. Say what you will about them being derivative, but these designs deserve fan art, they are merchandisable, and I liked seeing them while venturing out in the world. They can be cute, cool, or just look weird in an endearing way.

I want to use them, want to see them get stronger with me while going on a journey, yet the game… just tells me to switch out for ones found later in the game, because they are objectively better. I’m not sure how an evolution system would work without creating a lot more designs or going full-on Digimon with its nonsense lineages. Though, the lack of one definitely doesn’t help the experience.

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Rough Draft World Design

One of the defining features of any open world games is… just that, the world. I would go so far as to say that in certain examples of the genre, particularly when it comes to a lot of MMOs or games like Skyrim, the world is the main character. The unifying element that combines all elements and the thing that players are always engaging with no matter what they are doing.

With Palworld, there was clearly a lot of effort and time put into this world. It’s massive, clearly uses some procedural generation to create the broad strokes, shape, and nebulous detail, yet is also obviously hand-crafted in other places. Sure, it has a bit of Unreal Engine 4 ‘Nintendo hire this man’ energy that contrasts with the cartoon characters, yet I think it ultimately looks good. Sadly, this world has two core problems. 

First, rather than being a more linearly denoted cluster of interconnected biomes, Palworld has multiple low level starting areas across the archipelago. I could just see this as a way to increase replay value in the game, letting players go through the world from different angles and perspectives. However, the non-main starting areas… kind of suck.

They’re big, full of empty fields or dense forests, and lack any of the same intentional design as the starting mountain that most players would begin at. They have fewer resources, making the early game slower. And are generally empty and bereft of anything interesting, featuring little to nothing for players who did not originally start in them. Also, there’s no good way to determine when entering a new level-based biome unless you actually enter it.

Secondly, the late game environments— the desert, ice lands, and volcano area— are all promising concepts that offer plenty of new pals and different aesthetics. However, they all feel more like rough drafts, areas that were given a first pass after being crafted, saw some care put into them, but are ultimately little more than… big and empty. Well, except for the volcano. That place is big, full of mountains, and is just visually unappealing to look at, especially at night, where it becomes one of the most unintelligible locations I’ve ever seen from a game..

This is not to say that there are not good environments. I think the standard starting area, while bad for base building, is a compelling introduction to the world, and I enjoy how the narrow mountain pass leads into an open field with alternate paths. The designers clearly understand a thing or three about world design. …They just didn’t have the time or workforce to finish a world of this scale.

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A Miserable Little Pile of Numbers

If I had to pinpoint a single favorite feature in Palworld, it would be one that doesn’t even really exist inside of the game. It would be the fact that the game lets PC players host a dedicated server where they can customize a large number of variables, altering their play experience. As a jaded preservationist who has come to accept that most games released these days will die as servers are shut down, this… is baffling to me. You mean to tell me that a primarily online game can just ship, in early access, with player hosted servers? With the feature for people to host their own worlds, customize drop, EXP, and damage settings, and substantially change the feel and pace of the game? Why can’t every online game do this? …Yes, I know the answer is money, but why not develop these tools from the start?

Tangent aside, the dedicated server feature allows players to customize how Palworld functions in a major way, and allows me to comfortably navigate around the game’s many balance issues. Such as the insultingly low catch rates that turn even routine captures into an ordeal depending in the pal’s level. Or how easy it is for the player character and pals to get wiped even on normal difficulty settings. Or how the game only allows 15 pals at each base by default, unless you dump the right 2KB file in the right place. Or how spongy the enemies are. …Okay, Cassie didn’t actually allow me to change that one, but if I wanted to deal double damage, I could have. And that’s cool!

I love the fact that the player can customize so many things, rather than rely on a per-determined difficulty setting. Though, by being so open, I couldn’t help but wish that the game did… more. Without relying on mods, the player cannot have more than three bases, despite a variable setting the limit at 128. The player can only store 480 pals, which is a frankly insulting number for reasons I’ll get into later. And most glaringly there’s no way of getting around encumbrance.

While I agree that limiting a player’s inventory before they go off on some manner of adventure is a fully permissible design concept, I cannot think of a defense for encumbrance. What is the game design benefit of limiting how much loot a player can haul before going to base? Are players not supposed to get frustrated when they encounter a mound of rare minerals that they had to haul back to base? And… are designers and testers just ideologically incompatible with this line of thinking? Because this is a problem that should be clear if anyone so much as tries to mine two huge chunks of coal right after the other!

From a design perspective, there is something to be said about the ‘value’ of the default balance. There is a good argument to be made that one should not need to triple a variable in order to have fun with a game. And that players should not need to rely on damage over time to defeat endgame bosses. However, I am also inclined to be lenient toward Palworld for, one, featuring a remarkable level of customization, and two, ultimately being an early access title. Being an early access title often means being unbalanced, sorta broken, and not great when it comes to the minutiae. It’s janky, unrefined, but at least it has some options and it could’ve been way worse.

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The False Prophet

Over the past decade-plus, I have become increasingly vocal and displeased with much of the mechanical minutiae of Pokémon as a series. The balancing of natures, EVs, IVs, abilities, and breeding make for a system that I strongly dislike, and often feels restrictive far more than it feels rewarding. With Palworld, I was hoping that the game would dismiss many of these complexities and be a simpler, less restrictive, experience by making pals just… be good by default. Not forcing players to invest in them in multiple ways. Instead, Palworld makes things… dramatically worse.

If one wants to get the perfect pal, then they need to invest in them through the following three means: One, they must breed a pal with the best passive skills (which really should be called abilities or quirks, as skills are active). This is achieved through a mixture of RNG, finding pals with good stats out in the wild, and having them breed while hoping to get better passives than what the parents had.

Two, enhancing pals by using pal souls found in the wild or after defeating boss pals. Which sounds straightforward, yet the distribution and costs become increasingly expensive as players near the 30% increase for attack, defense, HP, or work speed. If players want to improve their pals through this process, they need to go out and farm for these resources and spend them on every specific pal they want to enhance.

While the third avenue to power involves using an essence condenser to sacrifice a total of 116 pals of the same species into a single pal in order to make them better. How much better? Well, it upgrades their partner skill by a level, boosts their HP, attack, and defense stats by… an amount, and improves their productivity stats by one level. It is an objective improvement, yet the act of obtaining 117 pals of any species is such an absurd and laborious process that I can scarcely believe that this concept was so much as designed. Even gacha games aren’t this absurd.

Oh, and pals also have individual values assigned to them at birth, and I don’t think there is any way to manipulate those without obscure breeding mechanics not explained in-game. A move that I would criticize… if not for the fact that people would just look this stuff up on wikis anyway.

Overall, I think these are all bad ideas that do little more than waste the player’s time and encourage a mindset where perfection is the baseline, and anything that deviates from this idea is some form of failure. It is an artificial barrier introduced to increase engagement time with a title and, to me, goes against the core ideas behind this game’s identity, or the identity it shows the world. 

With Pokémon, the games tend to be lowkey and mellow affairs where an activity like breeding are not that much of a change of pace. But when a game has an open world, a gunplay system, rocket launchers, and is partially being sold on its irreverence or edginess, I don’t think there is a place for this kind of tedious busywork.

For the record, I am not saying this based on direct experience with these systems, though I have seen my buddy Cassie spend days breeding pals and… I just view it as a waste. In a game, you can do basically anything, and the fact that the folks at Pocket Pair chose to do this is… pretty dumb. I know this is early access and everything is subject to change but I don’t use that as an excuse for math that’s bad by design.

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Yet It Seems Like a Dream Game

Okay, I know that I have offered a lot of criticisms of this game, but I played it for 70 hours for a reason, and not just spite. 

For all of its clunk and kinks, Palworld has the trappings of a dream game for a lot of people. It is a monster taming game with real-time combat, where the player can fight alongside the creature they caught, raised, and bonded with. A game where you can both hop on the back of the creature, use their moves, and also take an assault rifle and shoot at either a cartoon chicken or a draconic creature of legend. But not in a grotesque gorey way. In more of a silly cartoonish way with no blood or anything. 

When Palworld works, it’s almost surreal how competent it can be. The gunplay and melee combat function well, as the developers kept things comfortably simple. While pal movement is prone to jank, including some out of world issues and bad pathfinding, it still works most of the time. The pal combat, though a bit simplistic with its use of three cooldown-based skills for pals, manages to feel urgent and dynamic. Enemy pals can hit hard, and so can yours. Type advantages require team synergy and strategizing to optimize damage. And the combination of regenerating health and shields makes the encounters feel tense and not like one can power through them. They require dodging, using terrain to block attacks, recalling the pal out of harm’s way, and alternating pals to dish out status effects while distracting the enemy..

When the game is all about exploring the world, taking on wandering bosses, catching them, and steadily building up an army while going through well designed locales… it can be wonderful! It’s just that, as time goes on, it strays further away from this ideal. Pal spheres become more expensive and less effective. Combat gets harder and more tedious. And the general balancing of the game, in pretty much every way, gets worse. Hell, even fast travel points get further away, encouraging more focused and narrow-minded exploration to avoid getting bogged down with heavy loot.

Palworld has the telltale open world game problem of starting strong, yet not really knowing how to balance itself during the latter parts. As the player learns what the game is truly capable of, it seems a lot more shallow than it initially appeared to be, and the repetition to its open structure is laid bare.

I’d say something about being surprised by this turn of events, yet I could see this coming after just a few hours with the game. When offering my first impressions on the game, I said the following:

Palworld is capable of some truly enticing moments, yet it suffers from the fate of being a game not yet exposed to widespread criticism, meaning it has some pretty significant issues. Still, I want to love it. The game manages to scratch the same general itch that Legends Arceus did two years ago with its core scavenging, capturing, and exploration gameplay loop. Now, Palworld is not as good as PLA. It has too much bullshit inherited from survival games and focuses on a loose, indirect progression system that I just find to be worse from a design and gameplay level. However, with a year or two of updates and refinement, I think Palworld could get pretty close to PLA’s level.

Natalie Neumann, Rundown (1/28/2024) Palling Around in Palworld

And you know what? I still think that, though I would be more sheepish about the time frame and odds of becoming as good. Some of the systems are worse than I thought, and there is so much hubbub about the games, I don’t know if the developers can properly sift for the best criticism.

This is the problem with trying to review an early access game I suppose. One needs to balance reality with potential, and the reality is that Palworld is… pretty good. It has a lot of little things that annoy the crap out of me, however I cannot deny that I had a lovely time taking my initial stroll through its world. Building bases with Cassie using its surprisingly robust building system. Amassing a collection of pals to work at a base and generate useful goodies. And going up against bosses with a shifting team of buddies who I tried to love… before I realized how I could get ones that are twice as good… and that legendaries are twice as good as that.

Palworld is definitely an interesting game. It does a lot well, yet makes many mistakes that I would mostly expect from an early access game aiming to combine several disparate elements. After spending so much time with it, I’m left more than satisfied by my experience, and will be keeping a close eye on the game in the coming months. Because, if it gets the right support, if the developers see what I think they have here, then the game could transcend this flash-in-the-pan success and evolve into something amazing.