{"id":71608,"date":"2026-07-25T19:29:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T11:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=71608"},"modified":"2026-07-25T19:29:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T11:29:05","slug":"palworld-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=71608","title":{"rendered":"Palworld Review"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Before Palworld\u2019s Early Access debut in 2024, I remember eagerly wanting to review the completely unhinged-looking \u201cPokemon with guns\u201d 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<\/u>. Two years later, with more than 160 hours spent in its 1.0 update catching colorful Pals and battling massive endgame bosses, I\u2019m happy to report that it\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019s ever been, and something I\u2019d highly recommend for those with a taste for both creature collectors and tree-punching survival games alike.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve never played Palworld before, there\u2019s very little I can say to prepare you for this completely bizarre adventure. You\u2019ll recruit a roster of colorful critters who make Nintendo\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019ll 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\u2019ll 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

Palworld\u2019s twist on the familiar survival formula is how it cleverly blends in components of a creature collector, as you\u2019ll 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. <\/p>\n

You may assume Palworld is a Pokemon ripoff, but it actually has more in common with Valheim or Grounded. \u201c<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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\u2019s time for bed or walking as slowly as possible to come assist you\u2026 only to turn around when they suddenly realize they\u2019re hungry instead. So it\u2019s 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

That said, while growing your base is a ton of fun, the actual act of building it has plenty of room to improve. It\u2019s 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\u2019t like the angle they are at. The rules for structural integrity are pretty opaque as well \u2013 sometimes you\u2019ll 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\u2019s still aggravatingly cumbersome at times.<\/p>\n

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When you\u2019re not putting Pals to work at your base and evolving your headquarters from a wooden shack to a high-tech factory, you\u2019ll be venturing out into the world to capture new Pals, brave increasingly dangerous regions, and hunt for loot as you contend with psychotic human factions who often attack you on sight. Instead of just letting your party do all the fighting for you, you\u2019re able fire pistols and stab spears into hostile Pals and human NPCs alike while your team blasts them with fireballs. It\u2019s surprisingly fun to dodge magical blasts and then grab one of your fire-based Pals to use as a living flamethrower, especially when your friends are doing the same alongside you in co-op. It\u2019s also a fair bit more challenging than you might think, as hostiles (especially bosses) pack a serious punch, which gives you yet another reason to excited about that new shield or piece of armor you\u2019ve been saving all your crafting material up for.<\/p>\n

The storyline that accompanies your climb from \u201cnaked barbarian with a stick\u201d to \u201cindustrial sweatshop proprietor with godlike power\u201d adds some appreciated context to what you\u2019re doing: You\u2019ve gotta defeat the most powerful Pal tamers in each region, then battle a vague, unspeakable evil within the center of the world tree. Sadly, this setup is mostly just used as set dressing \u2013 a stream of generic and entirely forgettable characters who direct you toward your next quest or ask you to go tick some errand off a checklist. It\u2019s truly the bare minimum needed to string a questline together, giving you amusing tasks to complete but never actually making you feel like a part of this world. Unless you bring some friends along for the ride, you\u2019re in for a pretty isolating adventure.<\/p>\n

This is a huge campaign that took me over 150 hours to complete.\u201c<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

It certainly doesn\u2019t help that Palworld has a tendency to feel fairly barren while exploring. The handful of NPC villages you\u2019ll find are little more than small camps with a few samey merchants and quest givers hanging around, and you only really have cause to visit them either during specific quests or to buy supplies before rushing back out. The absolutely massive wild areas suffer from this same issue \u2013 although they are always filled with Pals to catch, eggs and treasure chests to hunt, and materials to collect, they otherwise feel like entirely unsettled landscapes. You\u2019ll only rarely find NPC Pal tamers exploring the islands, aside from the generic enemy camps where poachers shoot you for no discernable reason. It\u2019s especially weird that some vast islands exist without any clear purpose, covered with low level Pals but no real reason to explore them aside from filling out your map, which can make that process a bit of a slog at times.<\/p>\n

But while the story and exploration can\u2019t carry Palworld on their own, the actual action and the progression systems that drive it more than pull their weight to make up for that. This is a huge campaign that took me over 150 hours to complete (with plenty more left to do), and that marathon is paced brilliantly. It gets you into the action fast and points you toward clear objectives that push you out of your base to explore, fight bosses, and capture pals. You\u2019re given loads of XP and access to better equipment by simply following the path in front of you, and I always felt like I was just a tiny bit ahead of the difficulty curve without needing to do much grinding. Occasionally I\u2019d run into a high level boss that\u2019d kick my teeth in, forcing me to regroup and work on my build, but this was a pretty rare occurrence, and one I was never annoyed by since crafting new items to overcome those hurdles was usually a fun challenge.<\/p>\n