Palworld has been on my anticipated games list for years now. Its announcement back in June 2021 shocked and excited me from the instant I watched the reveal trailer. Pokémon clones aren't difficult to find, as many games feature cute monsters that you can train and fight with, but the idea of shooting at them with handguns and assault rifles was absurd — I was hooked.
Now, the day is finally here, with Palworld releasing into early access on January 19, 2024. And I've been able to experience the game after waiting to shoot, and strangely, enslave a race of Pokémon-like characters in a game that has surprisingly dodged The Pokémon Company’s ruthless lawyers since it was revealed. But how is it? It's actually pretty good.
Let's not beat around the bush here. Palworld is a strange Frankenstein's Monster of ideas pretty much copied from other places. The introduction, stamina, temperature, and finding points of interest are all way too similar to Nintendo's recent Legend of Zelda games, namely Breath of the Wild. And of course, the cute little monsters that parade across the world either living their lives or waiting to fight you are all eerily similar to Pokémon, even going so far as to recreate the series’ iconic eye designs and having a "Paldeck" roster. But, once you get past the freak of nature combination that Palworld introduces, there's a really fun experience at its core.
For starters, Palworld is undoubtedly a survival game at heart. While the adorable Pals do make up a huge chunk of the experience, your overall plan is to survive. Fortunately, Pocket Pair have a decent range of difficulty options, allowing you customise elements to your liking. You'll have a huge variety of resources to find, and Palworld introduces new things to craft and upgrades to your gear over time, ensuring that you don't get overwhelmed with the staggering amounts of content you'll take part in.
As you slowly build up your gear and collection of Pals, new mechanics are introduced. Interestingly, Pal battles aren't turn-based fighting sections like the Pokémon series is known for, but instead happen automatically, like Scarlet and Violet’s auto battle mode.
However, unlike the iconic monster collection series, you’re able to fight alongside your Pals by shooting at enemies or attacking them with spears. You can also issue commands to your Pals to keep things under control, but I rarely needed to do that, with the AI fighting your unfortunate enemies on their own accord.
There's also the goal of building up your base, which goes from a simple little camp to a factory run by your Pals. By assigning Pal Jobs, your creatures continuously create resources for you to use. Unfortunately, even bumping up the custom settings to make things faster, I found a lot of the generic survival stuff fairly lengthy. Crafting stuff takes a fair while, especially at the start of the game, and stronger gear takes even longer.
Your Pals can help you out, but it still takes a while to get into the deeper mechanics of the game. I've played roughly 20 hours of the game, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what's possible. In similar games like Satisfactory, I felt like I had a fairly automated system that I had to only work on expanding, but I still feel like I'm micromanaging a lot of Palworld's various systems hours in.
That's not including the rest of the world. Palworld has a huge world to explore, and there's a variety of "raids" for you and your friends to take part in where you'll capture stronger and rarer Pals, and bosses with various Pals fighting beside them. Even when you're at your base, you're not safe, with enemies coming to invade your turf at random times.
As I mentioned before, Palworld does a pretty good job at easing you into the experience and tries not to overwhelm you. But it can definitely feel tiring remembering so many things. My brain felt scattered as I went from collecting Ore to turn into Ingots, managing my weight so I didn't become encumbered with too many resources, before setting up the furnaces to craft Ingots, and then getting invaded and returning into the world to go fight bosses again. There's also how to cook, breeding Pals, as well as crafting gliders and all manner of contraptions.
In Palworld, there's a lot going on, and unless you have a group of friends where you can designate jobs, you'll definitely need a lot of free time if you plan to complete certain milestones in the game.
That being said, considering this is an indie game from a fairly small team of people, I'm pleasantly surprised with the amount of things you can do, as well as how cohesive this strange beast of copied ideas actually feels. It feels like the best parts of Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Breath of the Wild were smashed together, and then they added Pokémon enslavement and factory survival/simulation ideas to the mix too. It shouldn't, under any circumstances, work. And yet, it does.
I felt a smile on my face when I finally captured a boss Pal that was giving me trouble, adding it to my team almost straightaway. A lot of the challenge in later Pokémon games has faded in favour of approachability. And yet, Palworld knows that winning a difficult fight feels more engaging, and it really does. I haven't felt this excited experiencing a Pokémon game since Platinum in 2008, and this game isn't even made by Game Freak.
It just goes to show the absolute passion behind this project from the developers at Pocket Pair. Sure, they may have taken some ideas that would make any Nintendo lawyer salivate at the money they could make, and it's very obvious where the inspirations are from. But arguably, they've made a better Pokémon game than Game Freak has made in years. And I'm happy a developer out there understands what some players love about the franchise.
However, I wish there was a creative mode that many survival games feature. Palworld's extensive and lengthy survival process is fun, and feels satisfying to engage with and complete, but I would love a mode that lets me freely create a massive factory with hundreds of Pals, without having to spend hours and hours of my free time reaching that point. Nevertheless, it's only in early access, and I have no doubt Pocket Pair will include a creative mode in the future.
Overall, I was fairly surprised that Palworld not only delivered on everything I anticipated from the first few trailers, but the fact that so many copied ideas actually worked in unison together. Palworld's open-ended nature gives you plenty of chances to explore and lose yourself in a chaotic, gun-wielding, Nintendo-inspired world that actually feels fun to play in. And while I understand there's content to still add in the future, Palworld undoubtedly has a great foundation right now.
