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When Palworld first launched into early access two and a half years ago, I described it as a “breath of fresh air” for the survival-crafting genre, and in the time since then, the state of that genre hasn’t changed. I still find it to be one of the most stagnant genres out there, with a formula that I once found enjoyable when Minecraft and Terraria stumbled upon it, but has now been worn into the ground by every early access game on Steam.
That’s why I was so surprised how much creature collecting adds to that formula, but now the game has hit 1.0 and officially launched, I can see it goes a lot deeper than just slapping a couple hundred colorful creatures on top of the standard survival-crafting affair.
The Pals that roam the world aren’t just set dressing or collectibles; they’re integral to every single part of the core loop. Upon defeating or catching them, you get resources vital to progression that can’t be obtained through any other means; catching them is your main source of EXP, which is how you progress through the game’s tech tree; and most importantly, you can put the Pals to work at your base to complete tasks for you.
While the trailers for the game present this as a funny, edgy thing where they’re emphasizing the darker elements of the world that Pokémon likes to gloss over, putting Pals to work is a vital part of the game, and a surprisingly deep system.
There are 12 different work suitabilities that determine what tasks a Pal can perform. This includes things like planting, crafting, smelting, watering, and a bunch more, and each one has levels from 0 to 10 showing how quickly they’ll perform the task. This means that, as your base grows, finding the right balance of Pal proficiencies is vital to making meaningful progress, especially as, once you get out of the early game, there are many things that you won’t be able to do yourself.
Take smelting, for example. You can’t just slap some coal in a furnace and wait for everything to cook; you have to get a fire Pal to cook it for you, and as you go up each tier of material, you’re going to need to find Pals that are much better at that task to get it done in a reasonable time frame.
And that’s all without taking into account the passive and partner skill systems, where every species of Pal has a unique partner skill, and every single Pal you catch has a random selection of passives that either help or hinder their work. It makes you actually care deeply about your Pals, as you’re paying attention to their every detail. While in Pokémon, you only have to worry about breeding and traits if you want to play competitively, in Palworld, that stuff is baked into the foundation of the singleplayer experience.
Not to mention, it also helps build the world, the lore, and the characters of the Pals. While some partner skills will be passive boosts, there are some Pal duos, like Anubis and Sehkmet, that specifically boost each other when working together, giving you another layer of considerations to make when organizing your base.
If that all sounds complicated, it really isn’t, as the game makes it very easy to manage. Early on, you’ll unlock a podium that lets you assign Pals to specific tasks, as well as dictate which of their proficiencies they are and aren’t allowed to use when unassigned, to ensure that everyone focuses on the jobs you intend for them.
But all of these Pals don’t just wander in unannounced; you have to seek them out in the world, which is Palworld’s other great strength: the exploration.
With an impressive draw distance, as soon as you walk out into the world, you’ll spot all kinds of wondrous sights. Volcanoes, snow mountains, lush forests, and even oil rigs all litter the landscape, and if you can see it, you can go there. The only restriction is the World Tree, which is locked behind endgame progression, but even that makes for a tantalizing mystery constantly on the horizon that you’re working towards.
You settle into a well-paced loop where you work improving your base for a while, which in turn improves your gear so you can then go and explore further afield into higher-level areas with brand new Pals to catch, boosting your EXP and giving you new resources to help you progress even further when you return to base. It’s a simple loop, but one that so many survival-crafting games fail to implement satisfyingly; that’s the power of a creature collector.
So let’s talk about the Pals themselves, because with 204 unique designs and 278 total designs when you include hybrids – which are elemental variants on existing Pals that only vary in color – there are honestly very few misses among the pack. There are a handful of basic ones you probably won’t give much thought to, but the vast majority of Pals have a tangible charisma to their designs that makes them compelling.
I actually found the game’s five-Pal party quite restrictive considering how many cool designs there were that I wanted to use on my team, though this is where having many slots at your base for workers helps, as you do form relationships with those Pals too.
But since I’ve already mentioned it a couple of times, it’s worth drawing attention to the inevitable Pokémon comparisons. The game took a lot of flak when it first launched into early access for designs that were very clearly ripped off from Pokémon, and while those do still exist, Palworld has done a good job of pulling them in a different direction, so that even if you can see the similarities, they don’t actually feel the same.
Yes, Panthalus does just look like Kyogre wearing a hat, but you’re not thinking about that when you’re fighting for your life in an epic boss battle against a continent-sized whale that weaponizes the entire ocean against you. What’s more, as time went on during the early access period, those Pokémon similarities became fewer and further between. There are still some, don’t get me wrong, but the 72 new Pals added in 1.0 all feel unique. It seems like those two and a half years of development allowed the team at Pocketpair to really find their own style, and it works.
On top of that, when you consider the way Pals are built around being useful for the survival crafting gameplay loop, and use a real-time battling system for bosses and world encounters, there actually aren’t many mechanical comparisons to be made. As you can see, the few times I’ve brought it up throughout this review, it’s been to talk about how different it feels.
Another big tick in its favor is how you can completely customize how strict all of the survival crafting mechanics are. While I think the default settings are pretty well-tuned, with Palworld’s world customization settings, you can increase, reduce, or even completely disable things like hunger meters, carry weight, and penalties for dying.
The one setting that does still need some fine-tuning is the EXP rate, though. I remember when the game first launched into early access, late-game progression was much too slow, but in 1.0 I think they’ve overcorrected. By the time I was getting into the mid-game, I was 10-15 levels ahead of where I was on the tech tree, unlocking things that were way too advanced for the state my base was currently in. Currently, the advice in the community is to set the EXP rate to 0.5x or even 0.3x for the most well-paced experience, so the default rate could clearly do with some tweaking.
However, that’s arguably only a problem because the exploration side of the game is so compelling. Capturing new Pals is thrilling, and there are plenty of enemy bases, cave dungeons, and other points of interest that you’ll always have something to explore – and since doing those things is your main source of EXP, the drive to do so much of it can over-level you.
The game has clever ways to keep you engaged with it too. For example, you don’t just capture one of every Pal and call it a day. Aside from the fact that you may need copies to work in your base, you get EXP bonuses for the first five Pals of a species you catch, which will be enough to see a variety of passives and stats to pick out the one you want, and then you rank them up via the compression mechanics. These make it so that if you want to truly max out a Pal, you actually need to catch or breed 48 of the same species.
While there is technically a story to Palworld, it is as minimal as it gets. The ‘main questline’ is mostly there for a touch of flavour as the game guides you through all eight of the main tower bosses, but it does enough to give those bosses a bit of aura as they summon their massive boss Pals that will mess you up.
Those boss battles are pretty fun, with learnable attacks to dodge and unique arenas for each one. You can tackle them in different ways, too. You can build a team of powerful Pals that exploit the boss’ weakness and lean heavily on them to carry you through, or you can build a quad-rocket launcher and do the dirty work yourself.
It all comes together to make a unique-feeling game from two well-worn genres. Despite being embroiled in comparisons, Palworld steps further away from Pokémon than any creature collector has before, and the way it blends that side of the game seamlessly into the survival crafting loop makes endlessly compelling gameplay. With Pocketpair having already announced Palfarm, I’m looking forward to seeing what else this series can breathe new life into.
