I’m not usually the kind of person who enjoys survival-type games, at least initially. I find that the genre requires too much prep work before the fun actually starts, which is why I usually give games under this category a pass. Then I was gifted a copy of Terraria by a friend who got a multipack bundle for cheap – and who promptly quit before I did because a borked drive yeeted his save into the ether – and now the genre has one hook in me.
I also don’t buy early access games on principle, the same way I don’t pre-order games as a rule. But against my better judgment I bought Palworld, so here we are. The silver lining is, with my doing so, I’ve had a few extra hours of fun, though I can’t say I’ve learned more about what makes the game fun, or why it’s been so controversial. Emphasis on the word “more”, as my opinions after having played the game has not changed since before going in.
With that being said though, let’s get on with our irregularly scheduled listicle, this time for Palworld. Here, I share what I found fun about the game, and issues that hopefully gets addressed over time, as well as my other opinions not included in these two. But for now, we’ll keep that last one for another time, so in the meantime, treat this as an unconventional review of the game.
The Fun
With the discourse that the game is getting, it should be no surprise to anyone as to what the nature of Palworld is. But to quickly go over what makes the game fun:
1. The Best of a Few Worlds
Despite the Pokemon with guns nickname, Palworld takes blatant inspiration from multiple different games. The quietness of the overworld outside of combat situations, the jingle that plays when you arrive at a landmark, and in some ways the world itself. These are all reminiscent of the current iterations of Hyrule, as seen in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as well as Tears of the Kingdom.
A bit of a stretch, but I’ve also heard the argument that the giant tree at the distant north is a nod to the Erdtree from Elden Ring. Perhaps more than that though are the way the boss-only dungeons work. But then of course there’s the whole creature catching part. And you know what they say about inspiration and flattery.
Gameplay wise though, Palworld is a survival game, a-la Ark: Survival Evolved and the likes. Except rather than relatively realistic dinosaurs named after Greek and Latin root words, you have cartoon creatures with portmanteaus of English words (if you’re playing the game in English, that is).
2. A Survival Game, First and Foremost.
With that being said, just because you like a game like Pokemon, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically like Palworld. There are a lot of elements of the former that’s missing from the latter, with one key example being evolution. Which is strange, because there are plenty of creatures that look like they share an evolutionary line. Pengullets and Penkings look a lot like the former should turn into the latter with sufficient levels, but that’s not a thing. At least, not yet.
Going back to the Ark: Survival Evolved comparison, the creatures in Palworld, known conveniently just as Pals, are another resource that you make use of in the game world. A Rushoar, for instance, can be killed for its meat as well as captured to fight alongside you or be designated a mining role back at base.
As you progress, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of these too as progressing your tech tree will require a lot of materials that come only from Pals. You’ll probably never catch or defeat Pokemon in such large quantities unless it’s part of a shiny hunt or just the EXP grind, the latter even less so with the newer generation games.
3. Difficulty Of Your Choice
If you’re playing alone, or setting up an instance only for yourself and a few friends, you can tune to some degree the difficulty of the game. The range of options include the ease of resource acquisition and their respawn times as well as Pal capture rates and egg hatch times, among others.
This means that, if you want your survival experience to be as punishing as possible, you can tune your world to be like that. If you want to hit the end game within a day, you can too.
Of course, this won’t be the case if you join an official server, or any of the other private servers set up by strangers. It’s also not the correct way to play. in my opinion, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
4. The Mismatch Is Part Of The Experience
Survival games, with the exception of maybe Terraria and Minecraft, are usually darker in tone, with a more realistic style for a more gritty experience. Palworld goes and mix its bright Fortnite colours, cutesy Pals with guns, and the threat of dropping everything on you the moment your health bar gets depleted. It’s part of why people are calling it satire or parody, regardless of if that was Pocketpair’s intention.
Some spoilers ahead but another mismatch, which may actually not be too far-fetched, is the fact that most of the weapons in the game are pretty ineffective. When you first get the crossbow in Palworld, the thing is a menace, capable of killing many things with two headshots. By the time you get to the end though, the assault rifle, just about the second best weapon in the game, struggles to deal two digits of damage per shot on enemies with thousands of HP.
Other Pals are naturally the way to go when getting newer ones, but you’ll still have your metaphorical peashooters around for some manner of self-defence when it comes to that. This mismatch is obviously less funny, but it’s a form of challenge for those looking for this very specific flavour of difficulty.
5. The Only Way is Up
As an early access title, Palworld can only improve in the months ahead. Even if you’ve endured all the jank in its current state and have gotten to a point where you’ve run out of things to do, you can always come back a few months later, assuming more content is added by then. Not much else to say on this point, as it should be self-explanatory.
The Jank
On the flip side though, being an early access title also means that Palworld is very unfinished as a game. As such, there’s naturally a lot of jank, and here’s a list of some of them:
1. Pathing is Terrible
One of the most annoying things about exploring the Palworld right now is that pathing and collision are terrible. The earliest example shows up at the very beginning of the game: there’s a set of stairs right where you start, but you cannot walk up it, because every step is a miniature wall that you have to jump over. This specific instance has since been patched, but it’s far from the only one in the world.
Similarly, as you go further you’ll get to the foot of some hills that your character just refuses to walk onto. As it turns out, you have to jump over an invisible step to get on the slope to begin with, complete with the mantling animation to show you’ve climbed over something. This makes exploration more of a pain than it needs to be, and Skyrimming (the act of attempting to climb steep mountains/hills by jumping at various angles repeatedly) becomes an exercise in frustration, if not outright death of your character.
2. Character AIs Break Often
This applies to both your Pals and enemies alike. Thanks to the aforementioned collision problem, enemies sometimes dodge themselves into walls and floors. The result is not only are these enemies now immune to damage, their target acquisition, as well as that of your Pals, just break completely as they try – and fail – to get each other within their attack ranges.
More specifically to your Pals assigned jobs at a base, they sometimes find themselves stuck behind the most inconsequential things. The bigger the Pal is, the more frequently this becomes an issue. Because of this, they can’t do the jobs you’ve assigned them to, and your Pals starve themselves to incapacitation for no reason.
3. You Can’t Bring Your Character To A Friend’s Instance
While you can freely switch your own instance between solo and multiplayer, your character is stuck to your instance. If you want to join a friend in their playthrough, or if they want to join yours, then the player that is not the host will have to start from scratch, including create a brand new character. This means having to play two or more separate save files – one of your own, and one that you play with your friend, both with completely different progressions.
This was the biggest shock for me, coming from Terraria to Palworld. While in progression in the former game’s world was mostly still separate, I could bring some of my gear from my friend’s multiplayer instance to my own, and power level myself to an approximate progression point. And if there was a period of time when one of us could not play for extended periods of time, the other could still progress, with even the client able to bring tech from later in the game to the host instance to help both players reach parity.
This is, unfortunately, not yet possible in Palworld. One can only hope that this is in the cards as the game goes through its early access phase. Otherwise, it could be a deal-breaker for those who plan to play with friends while also being able to continue their progress alone every once in awhile.
4. UX Needs Work
To put it very mildly, the UX of Palworld in its current early access state is painful to deal with. There are small issues like not being able to rearrange your party while out in the field. Then there are bigger problems like not being able to precisely target a specific chest to open and store things in when you have a few lined up alongside each other.
Of the two, the former is a smaller issue, and more of an inconvenience that you can sidestep with additional button presses. On the other hand, the latter can be quite frustrating when you’re early in your base building, and you need to make multiple wooden chests to store all of the various materials that you need to research new tech, including chests with more slots. And considering the weight behind some of these raw materials, shifting them around can be a massive pain until you finally unlock the largest storage container.
5. Miscellaneous
There are the smaller issues with Palworld like bosses only having a handful of themes between them, and most of the player model options and animations look like store-bought assets without much tweaking. Not inherently bad things which can be improved on with time. That being said, these will definitely have to take a back seat compared to the issues mentioned above.
And that concludes the unconventional review of Palworld. Though because this is an early access title, some of the jank may not be here depending on when you’re reading this. Case in point, the stairs mentioned at the pathing section above was patched as this list was being written. Stay tuned for part two where I talk more about the reception of the game and what it may mean for the future of gaming, coming soon.
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