Summary

• Palworld is a mix of proven ideas from other games like Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda and manages to be fun despite its lack of originality.
• The game offers a variety of gameplay elements, including survival, base management, and exploration, inspired by games like Valheim and ARK: Survival Evolved.
• The AI for the creature companions, called Pals, is decent but can be frustrating when they get stuck. Combat is clumsy, but players can rely on their Pals to do most of the fighting.

Palworld is a colorful sample platter of proven ideas and concepts, a recipe which has already paid off in a big way for developer Pocketpair, Inc. That its recent preview-labeled release is even table-ready is a miracle in and of itself; this blend of survival gameplay, monster-collecting, base-management simulation, and somewhat cumbersome third-person action/exploration sabotages most expectations of coherence, even managing to squeeze in some decent 32-strong multiplayer netcode on top. It's a little frustrating, goofy, squeaky at the ts, and garishly constructed, but Palworld is still an indisputably fun hang in these early days.

The discussion of Palworld’s connection to Pokémon rages on, and its post-preview life is probably cursed with continued comparison and contrast to Nintendo’s flagship franchise forevermore. It’s also a predictable discourse which manifests in response to virtually any monster-catching game, but Palworld's design complicates things further. Inspirations run rampant here, mustering elements, motifs, and outright imitation of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Valheim, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Fortnite, to name a few.

The question is thus: where does this leave Palworld's own legacy? Wherein lies the kernel identity of a game whose very foundation seems parceled from trusted fonts of familiarity and nostalgia? It's true that many of the game's collectable "Pals" perilously boast comparable designs to those of Pokémon (as well as a notable Studio Ghibli characters' familiar grin), but there are a few new ideas and functions within this arguable mimicry. Which is all to say: the game can feel like an ethical conundrum at times, albeit an eminently playable and accessible one.

The Call to Palventure

Palworld's Early Hours of Survival

As a castaway awakening on the shores of the (survivor-dubbed) Palpagos Islands, Palworld's first hour is spent on the usual survival resource-gathering shtick. Absent almost any direct narrative – journal entries of an earlier castaway can be found on pedestals scattered throughout the island, but the game’s story is primarily self-construed – players begin gathering wood, stone, and berries, building campfires and beds and box-houses, and gawking at the marshmallowy cartoon creatures steadily wandering around them.

Once stabilized, exploration in Palworld always yields dividends, be they special items, unique creatures to kill or tame, or new digs for another base. A steady stream of checkmarked tasks in the upper right corner of the screen helps keep player growth focused at the start, all the way up to the game's first intended boss encounter, but that’s as far as it goes in issuing hardened objectives. By the time that list is cleared, player curiosity and moxie will take them the rest of the way, pushing into the distant biomes of the expansive map, all packed with tougher Pals to subdue, bosses to defeat, and dungeons to get lost in.

Like Valheim (another video game Early Access success story steeped in homage), Palworld is expressly designed towards player-directed pace. Prefer to stay home, train Pals, and construct a massive tile-based mansion? The starter islands are replete with replenishing resources and field bosses, and there’s always more XP to rack up. Got a wanderlust for new environs? Palworld’s map is expansive, and the game offers craftable tools and rideable Pals that make every inch of it traversable. Want to min-max and fashion an epic loadout? There’s plenty of high-cost gear to craft, which will require higher experience levels to unlock, rare special ingredients, and truckloads of common resources.

Adding to the numerous inspirations, there’s even a little good ol’ Crackdown in the game’s design, in the form of liffermunk statues, which appear from a distance as green glowing orbs scattered throughout the world. As with Crackdown’s agility orbs, players can spend hours scouring the map for these, which can later be cashed in to improve capture-chance percentages with Palballs. The grind here is fierce and the tech tree sizable, with different currencies to unlock new structures and equipment paths, detailing the arms race from caveman clubs to firearms.

Pals Fight, Defend, Cook Meals, and Procrastinate

Autonomous AI Lets Pals Keep Busy, But They Do Get Stuck

As expected, Palworld will feel like a different game between singleplayer and multiplayer, but its Pal AI is such that even solo-Pallers can easily distribute resource gathering and crafting tasks to their cute beast brigade. Up to five of them can be equipped to a quick-draw slot, and upgradable player bases allow increasingly larger cohorts of worker Pals for chopping trees, farming, crafting items, and defending their digs from enemy invaders.

Like Pokémon, Pals are quite distinct from one another, with elemental affinities, attitudinal quirks, and semi-randomized skills and abilities. Pals with hands can often perform more detailed crafting tasks, whereas ice/water breeds are perfect for powering a mill’s wheel or watering a wheat field. There’s some level of finetuning available to situate Pals to tasks best suited for them, but their general AI is remarkably decent when left untouched, notwithstanding the annoying Pals with the “slacker” trait who like to ditch work.

Unfortunately, this AI also fails to meet the greater challenge of navigating simple sections of level geometry, and Pals can get easily stuck and starve by mistake. However, this affords no serious penalty, and players can grab and reset them from the Palbox base hub at any time, where they can also completely heal up for ten real-world minutes. Then it’s chop-chop, back to work.

Whether at the base or at rest in a player’s bag, Pals are constantly leveling up. Their raw stats can be improved at special statues, and unique fruit items teach them different skills, allowing players to invest in a select few Pals to play Pikachu at their side throughout the bulk of the journey, growing continuously stronger along the way. Still, there are so many new ones to find with each new clearance of the map’s fog of war that it can be demoralizing to burn resources on a favorite, then finding a new Pal who seems better in every way.

Combat is Cumbersome, So Just Leave it to the Pals

Let Pals Do The Dirty Work

Palworld’s bosses are where strengthened Pals feel the most impactful, and it’s hard to imagine players solo-ing these timed battles with a single weapon. The first has tens of thousands of hit points, strikes hard, and moves much faster than unaided players, so a strong companion is required to deliver the bulk of the damage.

It doesn’t help that direct combat in the game is much clumsier by design. The main character controls a little like Valheim avatars mixed with those of Fortnite, complete with a simple repeat attack for melee weapons and more survivability when jockeying at a distance with a bow or gun. A powerful Pal at the ready can be sent in to run effective interference and pull aggro, and a rainbow of different saddles allow players to ride on the backs of flying Pals to pepper enemies from a somewhat safer airborne position.

This relative vulnerability remains consistent with the game's monster-catching theme, and it’s satisfying to try out a roster of Pals at a larger threat, watch them thrash around and fire off combat skills, then catch a few headshots with a gun amid the rampage. It’s a sensibility which urges players to design a team of summonable Pals for all occasions, and poking at a tough field boss to gauge their weaknesses before scampering away to reassess Pal selection is a strong combat hook throughout.

Creating the Exact Palworld You Want

A Myriad of World Settings Lets Palworld Players Finetune Their Experience

Palworld’s largest enemy might be the diversity of its gameplay, as it aims to serve the tastes of so many different types of players at once. Despite the essential freedom of choice, anyone who wants to just get out there and scrap with the various bosses will soon realize that they’ll need to slow down, develop their base more, amass more resources for boss-killing armaments and upgrades. Focusing on the Pals themselves is generally a quicker strategy for progress, but capturing Pals has its own grindy resource costs, and good Palballs aren’t free.

The developers may have anticipated this, so the world creation stage at the start allows players to fiddle with various sliders, including reduced death penalties that preempt having to return to a corpse to reclaim any dropped items. Wild Pal density can be shifted, resource accrual can be tuned up or down, and a few other settings are available that allow anyone to shape their specific experience to their own tastes.

We restarted a few times to experiment with these settings before finding our perfectly tuned Palworld, but the nagging thought remains that some might consider this cheating. That being said, Valheim feels much the same, with plenty of mods and built-in dev tools to alleviate some of the sudden difficulty spikes present in the game, or to resolve an unjust death caused by clipping through the world.

Palworld functions likewise, and several dev messages even explain how to instantly respawn when stuck. It’s hard to fault them at this stage – it is a preview, after all – but we’ll be paying special attention to see if and how the game’s fundamental movement and combat mechanics meaningfully evolve over time.

Palworld Has Everything... Except A Distinct Personality

The Culture and Lore of Palworld Remains Difficult to Discern at the Moment

That Palworld became such a cultural sensation in its early days makes sense. Its design satisfies so many gamer appetites as to feel almost performatively perfect overall. The main self-guided progression path proves a juicy carrot for the stick of its survival elements, and the collectable monsters are a joy to watch as they bounce around the workshop, relax in the hot tub, or smash into others in the field.

The vibrant personality of a Pokémon, Digimon, Pals can even be outright culled with a special item.

And yes, there’s plentiful jank, whether it’s Pals getting stuck in corners, the player getting stuck in the floor, or attacking enemies permanently running into walls. These bits will probably be massaged in updates, and we didn’t spend undue time on them in this coverage, mostly because it remains impressive how much of the game does function perfectly well, even at this stage.

Final Thoughts on the Palworld Preview

Even With Such A Strong and Contentious Beginning, Palworld's Future Is Fertile

Part of getting comfortable with Palworld requires attitudes and perspectives differentiating theft, inspiration, and homage. The games’ general absence of distinct personality – even when compared, in certain respects, to Pocketpair’s own previous open world survival adventure Craftopia – could lend credence to the pitchforks being raised at the moment.

Still, gamers are aware of the contour of trends and the mileage wrought by great ideas in this biz, with the largest and smallest games happy to trade, beg, borrow, and steal. Fortnite wasn’t always a battle royale, monster-catching and survival sims have always shared detailed notes over iterative generations, and everyone knows (or should know) that Minecraft would probably never have existed without Zach Barth’s Infiniminer.

There are homages to Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, and other classics scattered throughout the Palpagos Islands, but the primary spotlight has been set on the Pal designs themselves. It’s thus worth considering that Palworld has shades of Pokémon, but also Fortnite, the modern Zelda games, and many others to spare. It fashions something seemingly new and mostly functional from all of these and more, and the resultant composite survival adventure is hypnotically playable as it is. Mere mimicry alone could not afford that result.

We’re then left with Palworld’s future to consider. Critics of Pocketpair’s previous games have claimed that the studio abandons its older releases; Overdungeon, to its credit, returned for a gameplay update after four years, citing publisher squabbles and low sales for the delay. Well, Palworld runs well on modern PCs, its presence on Game bulked up its first-day fanbase, and it’s already stacked up a healthy war chest of sales. The Palworld preview release, for all its faults, teeters on the edge of early greatness, leaving the Palball in Pocketpair's court from here on out.

Source: Pocketpair/YouTube