Preview: Palworld is a pop culture mishmash that shouldn’t work, but does

I try not to compare indie games to much larger, AAA games out there. However, at first glance, Palworld feels like a game trying to fall into the same Pokémon-esque category that Temtem falls into. Games have tried to recreate that same spark of Game Freak’s flagship series since the 1990s. However, I believe Palworld might actually be onto something with their particular version of mimicry.

I was sent an early access code for Palworld before it was set to launch on January 19th, 2024, and dove right into it. And, just wow, even though it has some clear inspirations, I think there’s something here that might be overlooked by most people.

Palworld wants to be Pokémon Legend: Arceus, but with its own twist

You can’t talk about the gameplay without first addressing the elephant in the room: Pokémon. While the gameplay itself is actually closer to modern survival games like Ark: Survival Evolved or the recent Lego Fortnite, Palworld clearly learned what it needed to do from Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus was technically a side game in the franchise that took everything good about Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield’s Wild Area and made it into the majority of gameplay. Personally, it’s among my favorites in the entire series, and for good reason. 

The basis for Palworld’s gameplay might be the Wild Area, but it really leans into the survival game tropes. I started my first world on “Normal” difficulty. Early on in the game, you start in basically nothing but a loincloth, not unlike RUST. Once that first night hits and you start getting both cold and hungry, it’s pretty apparent that you’re going to need to start building up a base of operations pretty quickly.

The game begins by having you wash ashore, very similar to Pokémon Legends: Arceus. There is an NPC that is sitting by a fire in the very first area that you walk through, but aside from saving you from the cold and giving you some crafting supplies, they’re useless from then on.

The first thing that the game does is teach you how to fight, personally. You use these techniques for both gathering supplies and taking down Pals (this game’s name for the creatures you encounter). While the creatures of the world are everything Pokémon is except by name, such as being kept in small capsule-like balls, battling, and even breeding, you also physically fight alongside your Pals. 

So, I was told to go punch trees to get more wood, that I could make tools out of to cut down trees and mine rocks or ore. Pretty familiar gameplay, if you’re into survival games. Once you get the right resources, you can try to catch Pals, Pokémon style.

Building your base and catching Pokém- I mean, Pals

Early on, I found a cute, round sheep Pal called a Lamball… and punched it as much as I could in the face to lower its HP down. I threw my not-Pokéball and caught it. However, somehow the ruckus had also aggroed a much larger, level 35, grass-type, mammoth-looking Pal that roams around the early area. My new Lamball was level 2. It took running pretty far away from the starting area to get it to de-spawn. 

The tutorial has you build some basic things quickly like a crafting table and a fire of your own. But, I thought it wanted me to set up my base near the early NPC. I was very wrong. 

I went down to where I had met the Lamball and the mammoth Pal and was forced to use that area to build an actual base. With the day and night cycle having a full day lasting around a half hour per full day, it took me two days to get a house set up, beds for Pals that I had caught by then, and the beginnings of an actual home base. 

The idea, gameplay-wise, is to get you to explore a little more each day. As you do, you slowly catch new Pals and progress through the islands that you’re on. I recommend trying the same area that you traveled to at daytime during the night, as the Pals that you can find will likely be different. I really like that mechanic for additional replayability in certain areas. 

I hope they can balance this game. It needs a lot of balancing.

This leads me to a problem that will likely be fixed in the future: the balancing is atrocious. So, after base-building and grinding for around six hours, my primary team of Pals is entirely around level 11. Based on the amount of grinding done, that should feel formidable. It isn‘t.

When I made the world, it offered a difficulty-setting option. But, setting it to “normal” is surprisingly frustrating. While there does seem to be an easy option, “normal” should not be this hard.

With that said, the opening area boss Pal on normal difficulty, as mentioned, is level 35, a level that you’d have to grind for a long time to even consider being anywhere near. You also run into a lot of wild Pals that are lower level than your currently equipped Pal and they can wreck your tamed Pal at times. This means you have to head back to your base to let them heal fairly often as you can’t make medicines until later on when you unlock it.

I’ve died. A lot. And as with any survival game out there, it leaves all of your carried items exactly where you died. This means that if you made it pretty far out into the world, you need a spare set of weapons and clothing for all the times you will die and have to retrieve your stuff.

Weapons can be spears, baseball bats, bows, all the way up to guns and rocket launchers. Evil NPCs will often have guns, making them hard to take down at melee range, so a bow and arrow set is good to have on hand, early on. Luckily, some specific species of Pals can also have guns. Yeah, I know that sounds crazy.

Near the end of the tutorial quests, you have to take down the leader of a battle tower. It’s similar to the gyms in Pokémon, but only has a single fight in an arena as a boss battle. The boss, Zoe, rides around on and uses a pretty giant Pal, Grizzbolt, that resembles an Electivire mixed with My Neighbor Tororo on steroids and comes, surprisingly, packing 30,000 HP. At the current levels, my Pals were at, they each had around 1000 HP. I got it down to around 24,000 HP before I was toast. Luckily, there was a fast-travel statue nearby, so I didn’t need to hoof it nearly as much as some prior deaths.

Honestly, I know that the game is in Early Access and these problems will likely be cleaned up down the line. But, as it sits, it’s harder to justify going beyond the first 6 hours when you know you have another 10 to 20, just in grinding without talking about base upkeep.

The game does offer multiplayer, which I assume makes these tasks much less monotonous. But, we only received a single preview code, so we have to judge it as a single–player game. The developers also announced that they’re looking into making PVP work in the future, which would allow players to battle others with their Pal team.

Automation is a great addition to Palworld

Speaking of your home camp and base, your stored Pals are kept in a computer, very similar to Pokémon. But, as you grow levels of the computer, it allows more Pals to be outside of the computer to handle tasks around your base. 

Each Pal is randomized to have certain skills, attributes, and focus. One might be great at mining rocks, while the same species of Pal may be more of a tree cutter, or even have the capability to make items, cook, or build structures for you. Or it may have no good skills at all and are only there to lay eggs or help move cultivated supplies to your storage boxes.

Keep that in mind, as well as their battle prowess, when you choose which Pals are out and about. Especially when you know that the Syndicate, a knock-off Team Skull (seemingly, the minions of the first boss from what I can tell, but they don’t really explain that early on) may have raiding parties on your base occasionally. 

But, all in all, I like the basis for the automation part of the game. It makes it feel like your Pals are helping out instead of just collecting dust in a box somewhere.

The art and design in Palworld feel super familiar for some reason

The aesthetics, visuals, and creature designs wear their inspiration not only on its sleeve but as a full-sleeve tattoo. If you’re looking for a game that looks and feels like Pokémon, but you’re not a fan of the typical Pokémon RPG gameplay, Palworld may scratch that itch.

The Pal creature designs are, uh, Pokémon. We’re not talking about a “Simpsons did it” South Park scenario where it’s hard to make anything original. Like, I can’t even pretend that Lamball isn’t just an alternate Wooloo. I went through my Pal Deck (or the Pokédex, for those looking for Pokémon terms) after playing as long as I did and found clear inspirations for every single Pal I had encountered.

If you’re familiar with websites dedicated to Pokémon fusions, which take two Pokémon and merge their looks into a new creature, Palworld often feels like they did exactly that, with some slight redraws. There is a green dinosaur, Dinossom, that is in the shape of a Goodra, with Lilligant’s headpiece, and Serperior’s tail. And I’m not even exaggerating. 

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s comforting and familiar to someone like me who played Pokémon Blue when it was new and has been a fan of that franchise the majority of my life. But, seriously, that’s just a discolored tinified Gigantamaxed Eevee over there.

Similarly to shinies, you can find special rare versions of Pals. I’m unsure if there are other variations, like alternate colors. But, the Gumoss that I caught was gigantic and roams around my base, versus the smaller-sized ones that you can usually catch. For reference, Gumoss is Quagsire’s face, Seedot’s hat, and Ditto’s body.

For the character designs, it’s somewhere between Fortnite and straight-up Ken Sugimori-era Pokémon. Again, it’s familiar and nostalgic, but you aren’t fooling anyone. At least the open world has more foliage and creatures roaming than the Wild Area in more recent Pokémon games.

I need more than generic music if I’m going to put dozens of hours into an open-world game

The music is something I had higher hopes for. As Pokémon is its clear inspiration, music is such an important component of those games. Each town, event, battle type, you name it, all have iconic tunes that become such earworms that you can’t help but remember even small details from them.

Palworld, on the other hand, felt more generic when it comes to music. Nearly nothing I’ve heard thus far is memorable. The only tune that caught my attention was the jingle that plays when you level up your character. I’m not kidding that it made me think of the very end of the theme song from The Amazing World of Gumball. 

I hope they can get some better music in future builds. Right now, it almost feels like placeholder tracks.

Coziness

The coziness of Palworld depends on how you want to play it. For my second world, I opted to choose the Casual difficulty. The interesting part about it all was that it doesn’t necessarily make the game much easier, but it does make life a little quicker and better organized. I got to the same place that took me around six hours on Normal in only three on Casual.

However, that doesn’t mean that the game is a breeze. That same mammoth pal that was level 35 in my Normal playthrough was level 38 on Casual. I also checked the first boss and, yes, she’s still the exact same amount of hardness on any difficulty. I got much further on Casual in only four hours of play, total, than I ever did in my original world.

One thing that helped was the prior knowledge going into the game. But, at this point, I’ve not defeated the first boss tower in either playthrough due to the need for a lot of grinding in my future.

If you’re more into just keeping to yourself, building up your base of operations, and getting the automation going, Palworld, in any mode, has coziness out the wazoo. 

But, if you’re looking to play the game as intended, following the story and path along to keep exploring, you’re going to die a lot, even on Casual (which will let you keep your stuff in that mode). On Normal, you’re likely going to get frustrated from lack of progress. If you’re looking for a challenge, by all means, get that grind going. You’re going to have to be in it for the long haul, though, to get even past the last mission of the tutorial.

In multiplayer, I feel like players would have the option to work together to suit their needs a little bit better. However, as a single-player game, you’re forced to do it all and that can get frustrating at times.

As a coziness score (an arbitrary number we give to games that is only based on how cozy that game is), I’d give it a solid 5 in its current state as it has a lot of elements that should come together nicely in future builds. I hope by the time it hits 1.0, that score could easily be a 7 or 8 if they solve the primary issues in Early Access. It really helps that casual mode is pretty chill by comparison.

Final Verdict

Honestly, I may have quite a few gripes about Palworld, but I really like this game and what it’s trying to do. I went into this knowing full well that it’s in early access and likely very rough. The constant T-posing, absolutely devastating balancing issues, and often glitched tasks make that pretty obvious from the get-go.

But, I believe there’s something about this game that they’re doing right, too. Pokémon fans often say they’d buy an open-world game set in that world that doesn’t focus as much on the story. Palworld takes those ideas, as well as inspiration from some unlikely sources, and makes for an actually fun game.

It’s not perfect. Even when all of the current issues are resolved, it still won’t be. But, I have a weird respect for what it’s going for. They learned from Pokémon’s past and present, what worked and what didn’t, as well as offering that within a new genre. 

Once they tighten up the balancing, controls, and automation, I can easily see Palworld being seen as more than “Pokémon with guns”, as the internet has been calling it since the first trailer came out two years ago.

In fact, rewatching that initial trailer, I don’t believe I’ve seen 95% of what was initially shown. So, either that’s coming in a later build, or I have a lot of work ahead of me to get there. Either way, I’m going to keep playing Palworld and see how it grows and gets better.

Palworld will hit Steam Early Access officially and Game Pass on January 19th, 2024. It’ll be $29.99. You’ll definitely get your money out of it. But, I do recommend playing with some friends. 

If you’re into open-world games with “Pal” in the name, the free MMO Palia is a solid option to look into as well. While you’re here, check out all the reviews we did in December as well!