Palworld Review

Before Palworld’s Early Access debut in 2024, I remember eagerly wanting to review the completely unhinged-looking “Pokemon with guns” game, mostly as a joke. Hilariously, the joke was on me when it not only became one of the biggest games of the year, but also one of my all-time favorite survival games. Two years later, with more than 160 hours spent in its 1.0 update catching colorful Pals and battling massive endgame bosses, I’m happy to report that it’s improved in almost all of the ways I hoped it would. The worst of the technical rough edges have been smoothed over, progression has been smartly streamlined, and loads of missing bits and baubles have been added. There are still plenty of parts that feel like they never got the attention they deserved during Early Access – most areas are largely empty, settlements can feel downright lifeless, and base building is still fairly janky on its best day. But on the whole, Palworld is more compelling than it’s ever been, and something I’d highly recommend for those with a taste for both creature collectors and tree-punching survival games alike.

If you’ve never played Palworld before, there’s very little I can say to prepare you for this completely bizarre adventure. You’ll recruit a roster of colorful critters who make Nintendo’s legal team furious and use them to perform unpaid labor in your work camps as you explore an increasingly dangerous world filled with gun-toting maniacs. This mix of creature collecting, open-world exploration, RPG-adjacent leveling and questing, and survival mechanics that have you building up a base to store your pals and conquer the wilds probably shouldn’t work. But it really does. And if you did play Palworld during Early Access, know that the 1.0 update fleshes out this world and the kinds of activities you tackle within it, so this over-the-top adventure now feels a lot more complete than the proof-of-concept version from two years ago.

You might assume Palworld is just a straight Pokemon ripoff at a glance, but it actually has more in common with the likes of Valheim or Grounded. After inexplicably finding yourself dropped practically naked into a world filled with magical creatures called Pals, you’ll have to build up a base and craft gear before you starve to death or freeze out in the cold, then level your way through an irresistible upgrade tree that unlocks better equipment and amenities. That climb makes it extremely easy to lose a dozen hours without noticing, as my friends and I found ourselves doing numerous times. You’ll go from swinging a club like a caveman, to crafting leather clothes and hunting with a bow, to building literal guns and ammo. Compared to your humble start, you’ll be almost unrecognizable by the endgame, sporting sci-fi armor that looks like something out of Tron and firing laser cannons at enemies from atop the back of a giant dragon.

Palworld’s twist on the familiar survival formula is how it cleverly blends in components of a creature collector, as you’ll find yourself wholly unable to survive in these harsh lands without the invaluable assistance of the critters who occupy it. By capturing Pals and putting them to work, either at your side as battle companions or at your base where they use their specific powers to perform manual labor, you quickly raise up a legion of workhorses that allow you to turn your barren campsite into an epicenter of industry. For example, a plant-based Pal named Gumoss can use its green-thumbed abilities to plant crops, while the water-based Pengullet waters them, and the sharp-clawed Cattiva harvests the produce and stores it in a nearby chest.

You may assume Palworld is a Pokemon ripoff, but it actually has more in common with Valheim or Grounded.

That automation is incredibly well-thought out and works surprisingly well, even if your dumb Pals can be a bit imprecise at times, dropping valuable materials on the floor when it’s time for bed or walking as slowly as possible to come assist you… only to turn around when they suddenly realize they’re hungry instead. So it’s not as awe-inspiringly smooth as something like Satisfactory, but what it lacks in efficiency, it makes up for in silliness and charm. The more creatures you collect, the more things you can automate at your base – but the harder you push these poor creatures, the faster their sanity will drop, until they eventually crash out and refuse to work for you. Then again, if you ever want to make an example of a slacker, you can straight up butcher your Pals for parts, squeezing the last drop of useful resources out of them in the process. Like I said, this is a super weird game, and I mean that as a compliment.

That said, while growing your base is a ton of fun, the actual act of building it has plenty of room to improve. It’s ridiculous that Palworld still lacks the ability to move items around or snap them into alignment, so you have to completely dismantle and rebuild objects if you want to move them somewhere else or just don’t like the angle they are at. The rules for structural integrity are pretty opaque as well – sometimes you’ll be told a structure lacks support despite placing down a foundation and pillars for it, and on at least one occasion I made a minor slip up by deleting the wrong piece of wall and caused my entire base to disintegrate in front of my eyes, costing me hours of progress. I seem to complain about building limitations in practically every survival game I review, so this is par for the course in a way, but it’s still aggravatingly cumbersome at times.

When you’re not putting Pals to work at your base and evolving your headquarters from a wooden shack to a high-tech factory, you’ll be venturing out into the world to capture new Pals, brave increasingly dangerous regions, and hunt for loot as you contend with psychotic human factions who often attack you on sight. Instead of just letting your party do all the fighting for you, you’re able fire pistols and stab spears into hostile Pals and human NPCs alike while your team blasts them with fireballs. It’s surprisingly fun to dodge magical blasts and then grab one of your fire-based Pals to use as a living flamethrower, especially when your friends are doing the same alongside you in co-op. It’s also a fair bit more challenging than you might think, as hostiles (especially bosses) pack a serious punch, which gives you yet another reason to excited about that new shield or piece of armor you’ve been saving all your crafting material up for.

The storyline that accompanies your climb from “naked barbarian with a stick” to “industrial sweatshop proprietor with godlike power” adds some appreciated context to what you’re doing: You’ve gotta defeat the most powerful Pal tamers in each region, then battle a vague, unspeakable evil within the center of the world tree. Sadly, this setup is mostly just used as set dressing – a stream of generic and entirely forgettable characters who direct you toward your next quest or ask you to go tick some errand off a checklist. It’s truly the bare minimum needed to string a questline together, giving you amusing tasks to complete but never actually making you feel like a part of this world. Unless you bring some friends along for the ride, you’re in for a pretty isolating adventure.

This is a huge campaign that took me over 150 hours to complete.

It certainly doesn’t help that Palworld has a tendency to feel fairly barren while exploring. The handful of NPC villages you’ll find are little more than small camps with a few samey merchants and quest givers hanging around, and you only really have cause to visit them either during specific quests or to buy supplies before rushing back out. The absolutely massive wild areas suffer from this same issue – although they are always filled with Pals to catch, eggs and treasure chests to hunt, and materials to collect, they otherwise feel like entirely unsettled landscapes. You’ll only rarely find NPC Pal tamers exploring the islands, aside from the generic enemy camps where poachers shoot you for no discernable reason. It’s especially weird that some vast islands exist without any clear purpose, covered with low level Pals but no real reason to explore them aside from filling out your map, which can make that process a bit of a slog at times.

But while the story and exploration can’t carry Palworld on their own, the actual action and the progression systems that drive it more than pull their weight to make up for that. This is a huge campaign that took me over 150 hours to complete (with plenty more left to do), and that marathon is paced brilliantly. It gets you into the action fast and points you toward clear objectives that push you out of your base to explore, fight bosses, and capture pals. You’re given loads of XP and access to better equipment by simply following the path in front of you, and I always felt like I was just a tiny bit ahead of the difficulty curve without needing to do much grinding. Occasionally I’d run into a high level boss that’d kick my teeth in, forcing me to regroup and work on my build, but this was a pretty rare occurrence, and one I was never annoyed by since crafting new items to overcome those hurdles was usually a fun challenge.

And although much of the map is more empty than I’d like it to be, certain areas at least have interesting barriers you’ll need to overcome before continuing your march ever outward. For example, one region is dominated by a giant volcano, so you’ll need to craft heat-resistant items to avoid catching on fire and slowly dying to the heat. Another area is suspended high in the air, accessible only by those who know a secret method to reach it. There are some cool boss fights to gate your progress, too, like one against a giant whale that throws massive tidal waves at you, requiring you to have a flying Pal at your side that can outrace the insanely tall walls of deadly water. That said, the number of memorable boss fights like this is dwarfed by the amount of forgettable ones, as most are just a matter of you and your Pals slapping around some oversized creature until it dies.

Thankfully, there is at least a good amount of choice for which Pals will do that slapping. You can battle alongside any Pals you want in order to power them up, and various consumables will upgrade them even further. It’s definitely a lot easier if you abandon your favorite Pals for ones that are naturally stronger, like the options that appear later on – legendaries and whatnot – but as someone who prefers to reject the meta and use whichever creatures I connect most with, I was impressed by how many ways Palworld provides for you to raise lesser Pals up to be viable even through to the endgame.

For example, I caught a fiery Blazamut early on in my adventure that I bonded with immediately and wouldn’t have parted with unless faced with no other option. As I leveled up, I kept finding new ways to improve my buddy’s stats, give him more powerful attacks, and buff him in various other ways – such as grinding up duplicate copies of the Pal to increase his star rating, and increasing our bond just by spending time with him in my party, both of which increased his stats. He even got strong enough that I was able to bring him into battle against post-game bosses without issue. It’s pretty awesome that this is an option, because a pet peeve of mine in other creature collectors is when everyone’s teams look identical by the end as personal flair gives way to the inescapable gravity of raw stats.

You’ll need to develop those Pals quite a bit, too, because Palworld’s endgame kicks the difficulty up to 11. It has some seriously challenging versions of each of the existing boss fights, plus raid encounters where you’ll fight alongside practically every Pal you’ve ever captured to take down a massive, deadly monster. To aid you in the effort, there’s quite a bit of equipment to unlock and rare resources to grind for even beyond the main story, and the Ancient Relic Recycler that spits out high-end resources and equipment when you claim victory against Pals in the endgame region is a particularly nice touch for speeding up the grind as you get even deeper. Some of that grind can be a bit of a pain, like hunting for randomly dropped duplicates of a schematic so you can craft a better version needed to take down a raid boss, which becomes monotonous fairly quickly. But on the whole, there’s quite a bit to chase if you’re looking to extend your time past the credits, and I happily lost way too much time doing just that.

Finally, although the 1.0 update cleaned up most of the worst technical issues that were present during Early Access, Palworld’s performance is still a bit rocky even now. Framerates are quite jittery, especially when loading into a new area or if you’ve got a lot going on in your base, and there’s tons of pop-in while flying around the map. These problems were rarely bad enough to meaningfully hinder my experience, but they can definitely make the whole thing feel quite janky.

via Palworld Review
by Tom Marks