If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably dreamed at least once about a world where humans and magical creatures work, live and cooperate with one another. And for decades, Pokémon has almost exclusively been the video game that has allowed us to live that fantasy. Except that isn’t really the fantasy Pokémon games let you live, despite their insistence in each one’s opening text. They’re only really about battling said creatures. You really don’t get a great sense of what it’s like to live with these guys, or how society even functions with them around.
This is exactly the fantasy Palworld wants to let you live. Despite leaning heavily on its similarities with the Pokémon games – and the comparisons that subsequently invites – it actually has very little in common with them. Instead, Palworld offers an addictive combination of monster catching and survival crafting systems bolstered by a staggering amount of content to unlock as you level up and explore a giant open world. Your mileage may vary in how much value you’ll get out of each item when you’re constantly pushed towards newer, more powerful ones to unlock, but the core loop is strong enough to keep you invested nonetheless.
Palworld
$29.99 
$29.99 
$29.99 Let’s get the obvious out of the way: your main objective in Palworld is to capture Pals, battle alongside them and grow more powerful with them. Instead of doing that via random turn-based battles, though, you’ll be scavenging, crafting, shooting (yes, with guns) and everything else you would come to expect from a modern survival crafting game. And Palworld’s greatest strength is how it blends these two distinct identities to form one of the most addictive gameplay loops I’ve seen in either genre.
But this is still a survival game we’re talking about here. Expect to chop down trees, mine ore and craft all of your ammunition while managing not only your own hunger meter, but your Pals’ as well. Luckily for you, these industrious critters aren’t freeloaders! They’ll work for you if their abilities match up with an available task, but each has strengths and weaknesses for you to weigh just like when building out your roster for fighting.
Some Pals might be mining specialists, while others are better suited for cooking or farming. Some can be jack of all trades, and others entirely useless. Palworld doesn’t just ask you to think about your team composition in the context of combat, it asks you to do so for the mundane tasks in your base too. And like with every great survival crafting game, it shines once you’ve optimized your base layout and workflows to ensure a steady flow of supplies.
You’ll need plenty of supplies to craft your way through the many recipes for items and building structures you’ll unlock in order to arm your character and furnish your base. Palworld boasts hundreds of recipes: from new weapons and ammunition, to items that unlock powerful synergies with your Pals. There are even some that unlock entirely new gameplay systems like breeding, sending Pals on expeditions, and even butchering. Yes, you can butcher a Rushoar, use its meat to make hot dogs and feed it to any remaining Rushoar you may have.
My main issue with how Palworld introduces these unlocks and systems is that in a lot of cases, they’re completely unnecessary to engage with and aren’t particularly helpful. While it definitely would be entertaining to act out that forced cannibalism scenario with my Rushoar – and the game certainly would allow me to – I actually haven’t even crafted a butcher knife or butchered any of my Pals since starting a new save for the 1.0 release. Not only that, I’ve been perfectly fine surviving off of food that doesn’t require There are so many other items like the butcher knife, or structures like the Pal Expedition Station, that introduce entirely new systems you can totally ignore too. And for the few that you need to engage with in order to progress, you’re almost never too far from an upgrade you need to keep up with the difficulty curve.
The difficulty curve is an unfortunate side effect of just how many things you’ll be unlocking as you level up in Palworld. On one hand, it usually doesn’t take you too long to find a better, shinier thing than whatever you have equipped. On the other hand, it makes a lot of items irrelevant mere hours after producing all of the materials needed to craft them. And while it’s undeniably satisfying to progress from bows and spears to plasma rifles and tactical grenade launchers, Palworld never really asks you to do anything demonstrably different with each new item as you unlock it. You’ll simply have an Ancient Shield to absorb attacks from wild Pals instead of a Giga Shield.
To its credit, the game is well balanced: I never ran into any outrageous difficulty spikes. However, the spikes are just consistent enough to constantly push you toward the better thing despite it only feeling like a marginal upgrade once you get it. The proverbial damage counter may continually go up, but ultimately, you won’t feel too much of a difference between playing Palworld at level 30 versus playing it at level 80. Its open world design isn’t doing it any favors in that regard, either.
That I’ve made it this far without so much as mentioning Palworld’s open world structure and design should tell you everything you need to know – it’s fine. Think The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s scale and exploration with the added bonus of some cool unlockable items (looking at you, Grapple Gun). The size of the map is just as staggering as the number of unlockable items, and it’s genuinely fun to ride around on your Pals, stumble into dungeons and generally mess around in the open world. But just like with progression, the open world formula starts to wear thin once you recognize the elements that are simply repeated from one area to the next.
While the instanced dungeons you’ll stumble across can vary, with some being impressively labyrinthine, the open world itself is virtually empty. What stuff there is to do is decent at best, but is ultimately standard open world fare you’ve certainly played better versions of in other games. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy taking on contracts to kill high value targets, unlocking fast travel stations via watchtowers and finding not-so-well-hidden treasure chests as much as the next guy, but Palworld’s open world design never really delivers on its ambitious scope.
Even with all of those drawbacks, though, that core loop of catching Pals, upgrading your base and weapons and exploring the open world is still addictive enough in combination to keep me coming back for more. The Pal designs range from genuinely cool to charming, even if it can be off-putting to see their lifeless bodies ragdoll around after they’ve been killed. I’ve at least had a great time building a cozy base with the ones I haven’t brutally murdered, and the added layer of managing which Pals are assigned to which tasks adds a fun layer of strategy while also streamlining some of the more cumbersome elements of survival crafting games. It may not be the ultimate version of the fantasy I once had as a kid, but I can appreciate the ways in which Palworld gets it right.
