Palworld review: A crazy but genre-bending survival adventure

Palworld unfolds like a fever dream of so many games I’ve played and loved.

I charge into the vast world on the back of a mythical deer and capture cartoon creatures as if it were a Pokémon game. These fights with the creatures seem hectic at times; The combat itself plays out like a first-person shooter, with me shooting at monsters and dodging their attacks by rolling around like I would in a Soulslike game. After catching creatures, such as a giant dinosaur that looks like a rubber toy, I realize that my character needs to eat just like I would Minecraft. Luckily, the food I collected and cooked in my base hasn’t expired yet. I make it and I’m ready to go, so I jog across a wooded section of forest to get to a new waypoint in the vast natural world – just like I would The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

For some people, Palworld might be a bit too much and overwhelming since it combines elements from so many different games and genres. The fact that the game works at all on a basic level feels like a miracle – an opinion shared by the CEO of Pocketpair, the Japanese indie studio that developed it Palworldwho described the making of Palworld as a “miracle”. But as a person whose gaming tastes have largely been shaped by series like Pokémon, Fourteen daysThe Legend of Zelda and Minecraftthe unpleasant hodgepodge of Palworld feels like it was tailor made for me.

Palworld It begins with a tutorial that works like an extended to-do list, leading players through to the first boss fight. Slowly but surely, I worked my way up from picking up items from the ground to crafting items and harvesting materials, then automating several resource-gathering processes by continually upgrading my bases and deploying my Pokémon-like buddy creatures . As I play, I vacillate between managing my base and catching buddies while exploring the game’s overworld.

Image: Pocket Pair

Although forcing my buddies to work is an inevitable part of the game, the way I catch and play with the buddies in the game doesn’t feel overly dark or transgressive – at least not in the way that as the game’s advertising suggests. Sure, I can fire the adorable penguin-like sidekick Pengullet from a rocket launcher and he’ll explode like a bomb, but the game’s cartoonish nature leans more toward absurdity than brutality. Palworld isn’t graphic and doesn’t seem to particularly encourage mistreatment of buddies since I need them to work. If anything, I found the way the systems explicitly highlight the inherently exploitative relationship between the creatures and the player character refreshing, even if the game’s text makes no particular commentary on that relationship.

I dropped a Relaxaurus, the big, stupid rubber dino I had caught earlier, onto my base for the first time and just roared when I saw it completely dwarf all the Pals and stare blankly at them , who screamed, “I have exactly two brain cells and I use both to water your damn berries.” Then there’s Depresso, a grumpy cat who needs constant chemical motivation by pressing F to give her one Administer “caffeine vaccination”. It’s so good that I kept one of these in my group the entire game, even though it’s relatively useless. Little flourishes—like the hugging animation where my character buries his entire head into a slime monster’s wide grin—endeared the game’s many adorable creatures even more to me.

Image: Pocketpair over igamesnews

These buddies also play a central role in game progress. Palworld rewards players with additional experience points for catching the first 10 of a particular type of Pal, which gave me an incentive to grab as many Pals as possible. For comparison, crafting items might only net you around six experience points, while taking a few moments to catch a weak level 4 Lambball can net you more than 500 experience points. Leveling up my character is an extremely important aspect of the game as it allows me to improve stats such as stamina, attack or health. And Unlock the blueprints to create important technology for my base and crafting recipes. For example, you must have reached level 26 to unlock a generator, which is a requirement for leveling up in the base.

Since I have to catch tons of buddies to level up my character, progress seems to be largely dependent on the number of buddies I can catch, which in turn depends on the number and variety of buddy orbs I can craft to make them catch. In this way, Palworld

Progression system has a domino effect where I need certain types of ores to create pal orbs, which in turn requires me to build mines on my base or level up so I can build a second base to mine a certain ore, then what’s the point certain technology is required Keep your friends happy and working. Once I’ve made the right orbs, I can explore the region and capture as many friends as possible.

Image: Pocketpair over igamesnews

The result is this progress Palworld is not that flexible. Sometimes I wanted to focus on that Only explore or only catching friends, but these actions wouldn’t improve my character or give me the resources I needed. So in order to continue my progress I had to really focus on crafting orbs and subsequent upgrades that would help my player character explore regions with new friends, in turn allowing me to gain more experience points. While it might feel limiting if someone wants to focus on a specific element of the game, this progression system also adds an overall sense of structure to a potentially unwieldy game despite encompassing so many different forms of gameplay.

In the early days after release, many players experienced problems Palworld for his perceived lack of originality. The game is clearly based on several games that I listed in the introduction. But Palworld doesn’t simply “steal” game concepts in a way that seems like pure copy and paste. Instead, the developers have taken aspects from so many of these games I grew up with and incorporated them into a revolving door of varied gameplay that results in a cohesive loop.

Better yet, the elements of Palworld clearly inspired by other games, allowed me to approach the game’s multiplayer with a common vernacular. When we played co-op with my brother, we called each one by the name of their Pokémon doppelganger before learning their buddies’ actual names. I actually started yelling one time when my brother frantically yelled at me to “save him” because a buddy had knocked him out, like we were running around in one Fourteen days to match.

This game tries to achieve a lot and as a result has some rough edges. Don’t expect the polish and thoroughness in design that would be present in a big-budget AAA game. It doesn’t have the fanciest soundtrack, and while the overworld map is truly huge – I can explore volcano and snow biomes and everything in between – the environments don’t exactly feel imbued with a sense of wonder or mystery. The game is still in Early Access and has many bugs. The Pals can easily get stuck while running around a base, and sometimes my character will get stuck in certain animations or crash when I try to jump while climbing, for example.

Play over my time PalworldI didn’t experience a perfectly balanced and consistent ramp from start to finish. The transition from making regular old Pal Orbs to making the Mega and Giga Orbs felt a bit bumpy and tedious. At a certain point, the standard Pal bullets become completely useless because catch rates are so low and making the next level of Pal bullets required some fiddling; I had to find a solid storage location and find the right friends to build the infrastructure to mine sufficient amounts of ore to make ingots for the orbs.

Image: Pocket Pair

Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time with it Palworld. There was just enough structure and variety between working on my base, exploring, and catching buddies that I enjoyed the fact that it all worked. It’s a game that made me rethink what types of games and genres can and will fit together. At times the game buckled under its huge size; Certain systems do not work or function as if they are being worked on. Still, this Frankenstein’s monster of a video game packs a survival adventure that’s both tough and surprisingly entertaining. It’s still in early access, but I can’t wait to see what the future holds Palworld.