I’m not especially sure how to “review” Palworld in the traditional sense, given that it’s an Early Access game with no development end date in sight, and aspects that are very clearly unfinished.
And yet it’s one of the most fun games I’ve played in the past year, which yes, includes all of 2023’s bangers. This game has gone from the meme of “Pokémon with guns” to genuinely being the type of Pokémon game I’ve wanted to see out of Nintendo for 25 years. And have never gotten.
Why since 1999, as per my title? That’s the year Pokémon Snap and Pokémon Stadium came out on Nintendo 64. After playing Pokémon Red and Blue in 1998 as a kid, I was losing my mind that Pokémon was coming to Nintendo 64, having experienced its incredible, unbelievable three dimensional space. I could walk around a landscape and have my monsters fight in real time? Incredible.
That, of course, was not what either game was. Though perhaps a classic now, twelve year-old me was not thrilled about Pokémon Snap asking me to ride a little car around and take photos of Pokémon. The same went for Pokémon Stadium, which contained extremely basic battling options and almost entirely static monsters. I was let down.
Over the years, we never really got there. Even in the age of 3D Pokémon games the last few gens, when the game finally did move in that direction, it has still remained first locked behind Nintendo’s limited tech, and now, even failing to live up to that with underwhelming, visually horrific releases. Above all else, ironically, the series just seems to refuse to evolve.
Enter Palworld.
No, I do not think it’s especially cool that Palworld chopped off fins and cut out eyeballs and glued nine generations of Pokemon together to make their own monsters. But for better or worse you will forget about this almost instantly when playing, and unless Nintendo is shutting them down with a lawsuit, a lack of creative monster design is not a crime.
But what you do with those monsters is the reason Palworld works, simultaneously a monster collector/battler, a base-building survival game and an open world exploration game. I get that there have been jokes about going around shooting Pokémon stand-ins with a shotgun or AR-15, but the conceptual goofiness aside, it makes you a more active participant in combat, as it does when you watch your trained Pals fight enemies in real-time, be they human or rival monsters.
Managing a base to automate mining, logging, building and harvesting may be relatively barebones, but that’s good in the sense that it can attract non-survival players like myself to the concept. And Palworld’s massive suite of difficulty options makes customizing the game to your liking incredibly easy, taking out bits and pieces you don’t like, reducing penalties or decreasing timers. Or counter that, ramping up the difficulty to be exceptionally hardcore. On top of all this, this is a sprawling world you can occupy with a number of friends, scattering bases across the landscape, raiding, exploring and eventually, fighting with each other, in a future update.
I have…grown attached to my Pals. Yes, you can “abuse” them, which is what has made a lot of headlines in the game. But working your Pals to the bone or starving them or tossing them off cliffs is just going to hurt you in the end, and while good for memes, perhaps, it’s much more enjoyable to try to keep a happy, functional Pal base and fighting team.
Palworld does lack in many regards. As much as the monster-filled open world can indeed be fun to explore, it’s clearly unfinished. There are wide, empty stretches with nothing in them. Dungeons are four rooms repeated over and over. This has maybe 2% of the story and personality of an actual Pokémon game.
But it doesn’t…really matter? What is in Palworld already is so enjoyable that you can overlook what hasn’t been patched into the game yet. Its biggest annoyances aren’t what it’s missing, but more technical, like Pals getting stuck navigating around your base until they break bones or starve themselves into unconsciousness. Those fixes are badly needed.
The comparisons to Pokémon are obvious, not just the stolen monster designs, but what it does better. Action-oriented gameplay made within Unreal Engine 5 so it plays smoothly and simply looks two generations better than the last few Pokémon games do on the Switch. Even if Nintendo tech is limited, Pokémon games now look terrible even by Switch standards, and many aspects really feel phoned in over the years.
Palworld, with a tiny team of amateurs and close to no budget, has made something that can stand toe-to-toe with a 25 year classic and arguably the biggest entertainment brand in the world. No, in its current form it is not exactly designed for anywhere close to the same amount of staying power, but what it has accomplished, and how it’s drawing astonishing playercount records as a result, has already made it one of the wildest success stories of the past generation.
The future of Palworld likely depends on the team at Pocket Pair scaling up quickly in order to fix issues and add content. I have no idea if they’ll be able to do that, but if my time with Palworld ended tomorrow, I would still consider it a huge win and an enjoyable time. And I…don’t think my time with Palworld will end any time soon.
Score: No scores for unfinished early access games, but I’ll go with “Play it”
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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