Before Palworld’s Early Access debut in 2024, I remember eagerly wanting to review the completely unhinged-looking “Pokemon with guns” game, mostly as a joke. Hilariously, the joke was on me when it not only became one of the biggest games of the year, but also one of my all-time favorite survival games. Two years later, with more than 160 hours spent in its 1.0 update catching colorful Pals and battling massive endgame bosses, I’m happy to report that it’s improved in almost all of the ways I hoped it would. The worst of the technical rough edges have been smoothed over, progression has been smartly streamlined, and loads of missing bits and baubles have been added. There are still plenty of parts that feel like they never got the attention they deserved during Early Access – most areas are largely empty, settlements can feel downright lifeless, and base building is still fairly janky on its best day. But on the whole, Palworld is more compelling than it’s ever been, and something I’d highly recommend for those with a taste for both creature collectors and tree-punching survival games alike.
If you’ve never played Palworld before, there’s very little I can say to prepare you for this completely bizarre adventure. You’ll recruit a roster of colorful critters who make Nintendo’s legal team furious and use them to perform unpaid labor in your work camps as you explore an increasingly dangerous world filled with gun-toting maniacs. This mix of creature collecting, open-world exploration, RPG-adjacent leveling and questing, and survival mechanics that have you building up a base to store your pals and conquer the wilds probably shouldn’t work. But it really does. And if you did play Palworld during Early Access, know that the 1.0 update fleshes out this world and the kinds of activities you tackle within it, so this over-the-top adventure now feels a lot more complete than the proof-of-concept version from two years ago.
You might assume Palworld is just a straight Pokemon ripoff at a glance, but it actually has more in common with the likes of Valheim or Grounded. After inexplicably finding yourself dropped practically naked into a world filled with magical creatures called Pals, you’ll have to build up a base and craft gear before you starve to death or freeze out in the cold, then level your way through an irresistible upgrade tree that unlocks better equipment and amenities. That climb makes it extremely easy to lose a dozen hours without noticing, as my friends and I found ourselves doing numerous times. You’ll go from swinging a club like a caveman, to crafting leather clothes and hunting with a bow, to building literal guns and ammo. Compared to your humble start, you’ll be almost unrecognizable by the endgame, sporting sci-fi armor that looks like something out of Tron and firing laser cannons at enemies from atop the back of a giant dragon.
Palworld’s twist on the familiar survival formula is how it cleverly blends in components of a creature collector, as you’ll find yourself wholly unable to survive in these harsh lands without the invaluable assistance of the critters who occupy it. By capturing Pals and putting them to work, either at your side as battle companions or at your base where they use their specific powers to perform manual labor, you quickly raise up a legion of workhorses that allow you to turn your barren campsite into an epicenter of industry. For example, a plant-based Pal named Gumoss can use its green-thumbed abilities to plant crops, while the water-based Pengullet waters them, and the sharp-clawed Cattiva harvests the produce and stores it in a nearby chest.
That automation is incredibly well-thought out and works surprisingly well, even if your dumb Pals can be a bit imprecise at times, dropping valuable materials on the floor when it’s time for bed or walking as slowly as possible to come assist you… only to turn around when they suddenly realize they’re hungry instead. So it’s not as awe-inspiringly smooth as something like Satisfactory, but what it lacks in efficiency, it makes up for in silliness and charm. The more creatures you collect, the more things you can automate at your base – but the harder you push these poor creatures, the faster their sanity will drop, until they eventually crash out and refuse to work for you. Then again, if you ever want to make an example of a slacker, you can straight up butcher your Pals for parts, squeezing the last drop of useful resources out of them in the process. Like I said, this is a super weird game, and I mean that as a compliment.
That said, while growing your base is a ton of fun, the actual act of building it has plenty of room to improve. It’s ridiculous that Palworld still lacks the ability to move items around or snap them into alignment, so you have to completely dismantle and rebuild objects if you want to move them somewhere else or just don’t like the angle they are at. The rules for structural integrity are pretty opaque as well – sometimes you’ll be told a structure lacks support despite placing down a foundation and pillars for it, and on at least one occasion I made a minor slip up by deleting the wrong piece of wall and caused my entire base to disintegrate in front of my eyes, costing me hours of progress. I seem to complain about building limitations in practically every survival game I review, so this is par for the course in a way, but it’s still aggravatingly cumbersome at times.
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