Impressions | Palworld (Early Access on Game Pass)

Palworld has taken the internet by storm.  Launching into Early Access on Xbox & PC via the Microsoft Store & Steam, this Day One Game Pass launch is crazy as shit.  Ark meets Pokémon visuals meets human trafficking, enslaving wild creatures to do your bidding, some of the Pals are sex pests…. It’s a lot.  I’ve been playing it non-stop all weekend, and as someone who A: doesn’t like survival games, and B: doesn’t enjoy Pokémon, I am having a freaking blast.

The Weird-Assed Premise

You’ll start by creating a world, one where up to 3 friends can join in on Xbox and the Microsoft Store.  The Steam version is a patch or two ahead and has dedicated servers of up to 32 players available.  Full crossplay/feature parity is planned for the future, but for now, it’s either Xbox/MS Store or Steam only.  After finishing your uWu anime character, who can also look like a damned monster if you want, you’ll awaken on an island as cute little creatures hover over your head.  Quickly you’ll learn that nothing is as it appears, because it’s all super cutesy and rips off shamelessly from Pokémon and Breath of the Wild.

You are in a land inhabited by the Pals, cute cuddly creatures that you can enslave with your magic ball and force to farm, fight, or f*ck as you please.  There is a syndicate of evil humans whom you can also capture, though the only options for them are to either force them into work or butcher them with a knife to steal all their belongings.  This game is really god damned weird and has no shame in letting you use its base mechanics seemingly however you please.

I’ve put roughly 15 hours into it over the last few days and I’m hooked.  It’s obviously quite early but for one of these (early-access survival games) it’s relatively polished.  There are a set of tutorial objectives you’ll attempt to check the list off as you slowly but surely build your slave army.  Building mechanics, automated farm tasks, crafting, and combat are all familiar.  None of them break the mold, instead opting to attempt to mix a wide variety of gameplay mechanics and genres together to create something uniquely charming and horrifying.

Gameplay

Things start out in Palworld as your typical punching trees and rocks to get resources survival game.  Where it succeeds for me is in how quickly you’ll feel more powerful and the options you have in the risk/reward style of gameplay.  There are a swath of options that allow you to tailor the gameplay loop to your liking.  I hate losing my gear if I die in these games, so I opted to only drop my inventory on death.  At standard settings the game feels challenging but fair, and you can make it as easy or difficult as you’d like.

I mostly played on PC while using a mouse & keyboard, but found the controls on console to work well too.  Performance isn’t the best right now on Series X or S, with the framerate fluctuating quite a bit.  I have a pretty beefy PC that handled 4k Ultra at a locked 120fps relatively easily so I’m hoping with time they can get the console versions up to snuff.

Early on most of your combat and interactions will be at melee range.  Punching trees, then chopping them, pickaxing rock, and using a club or spear on Pals to either weaken them for capture or knocking them out for resources.  It feels fine, nothing special but it looks good and controls well enough to be a relatively pleasant experience.  Where Palworld is different is when you start leveling your Pals, crafting gear for them to unlock abilities, and getting ranged weaponry for yourself.  Building an Assault Rifle for your monkey, or Submachine Gun for a squirrel is weird in a way that I love.

Each Pal comes with randomized attributes making them suitable for various tasks.  Watering your farm, chopping down wood, gathering stone, and helping craft make whom you choose to stay at your base matter.  You’ll have a 2^nd checklist of objectives to empower your base(s) and this system is matched by various random attributes that can make your Pals better suited to accompany you into the open world.  You’ll be capturing hundreds if not thousands of cuddly creatures, leveling them, butchering them for meat/resources, having them fight with you, and riding them across the open plains.  This is a game that is a fantastic sum of a number of good to great parts.

For now, in this first version of early access, the goal is to constantly level up, everything you do gets you experience.  As you get stronger and have properly kitted out Pals in your party you’ll face other Paltamers in battles inside of Tower Dungeons.  There are also various massive cave dungeons that I constantly get lost in full of rare Pals and human thugs to fight for resources.  The game seems big, though I’m sure the more ardent survival game players will blast through its content in a few weeks at the most.

The Looks & Sounds

Palworld looks fantastic on PC and good on console.  Performance can really struggle on Series X & S at times but I still found it playable.  As I have a solid PC I spent most of my time there, and with how well this game is selling I would hope that developer PocketPair will have things running better & with feature parity sooner than later.  If you’re looking to run a 32-player private server with friends right now you’ll need the Steam version which is $26 at the time of writing this.

Graphically you’ll get a vibrant color palette, full of cute rip-off Pokémon creatures and decent animation work.  I had a lot of bugs with enemies going into walls when inside the cave dungeons, and AI logic breaking whenever they did.  Hey, it got me some easy kills so I won’t complain, but it happened a lot.  The music is decent when it plays, though that is rare outside of combat.  It can be a very quiet game, and the sound effects sound really old.  Like they were bought from a library of stock effects from the early 00’s.

I’ve seen a lot of reports of people having to uninstall and reinstall the game to fix issues like being unable to craft or having the game constantly crash on them.  I’ve been lucky with no crashes or gameplay effecting issues.  It is Early Access and Craftopia, their earlier Game Pass EA title never fully launched.  This one seems like a hit though, having one of the biggest concurrent player counts in Steam’s history, so chances are it’ll get better support over time.

Wrapping Things Up

Palworld is a solid survival game, with Pokémon-lite mechanics, tied to a beautiful world that happily rips off sound effects, looks, and UI’s from other titles.  It’s a weird mix of good and great parts that is an excellent Early-Access whole.  It’s available on Game Pass on console and PC and I think it is definitely worth a download