Palworld

Palworld delivers a dynamic and profound experience, exceeding expectations beyond its Pokémon with guns label. Despite minor imperfections like invisible map steps and an abundance of mechanics, the game's depth and Pocketpair's dedicated support warrant a perfect score. The game's genius lies in its complex Pal mechanics, passive abilities, and breeding systems, providing immense strategic freedom and replayability. With hundreds of hours of content and continuous discovery, Palworld offers a uniquely engaging and rewarding journey.

It all comes together to make a unique-feeling game from two well-worn genres. Despite being embroiled in comparisons, Palworld steps further away from Pokémon than any creature collector has before, and the way it blends that side of the game seamlessly into the survival crafting loop makes endlessly compelling gameplay. With Pocketpair having already announced Palfarm, I’m looking forward to seeing what else this series can breathe new life into.

Palworld is a fantastic game, and its journey from Early Access to 1.0 deserves to be studied. Pocketpair has maintained a steady stream of meaningful updates while consistently taking player feedback into account. Of course, the fact that the game is genuinely fun to play helps considerably.

Palworld skillfully blends genres, with the creature collecting and upgrading loop easily standing out as the highlight. The chase for the ultimate team to defeat end game bosses is enticing enough to keep you hooked for hundreds of hours. It’s a shame the rest of the game feels more like a supporting act and lacks the same depth or polish. It constantly tries to hide its flaws by pushing something to collect, catch, or upgrade onto your screen every single minute. Ultimately, that's enough to keep you entertained, even if these "Pokémon with guns" could have aimed higher.

Palworld is a wonderful surprise that will delight anyone who loves adventure-survival games where exploration, crafting, and grinding are at the heart of the gameplay. Surprisingly, the story tackles themes one would never expect in a game that might initially seem childish. In reality, it is anything but: it is a solid survival game dealing with serious themes, yet one where it is genuinely enjoyable to roam around and look after your creatures and your camp. A major downside, however, is the combat, which is far too frequent.

Palworld may not be an exceptional game in terms of presentation, but it certainly impresses with its substance. Admittedly, it is essentially a hodgepodge of elements from various genres; yet, despite its technical flaws and lackluster art direction, it manages to hook the player with its gameplay loop—because that loop works incredibly well. That is precisely its greatest strength: taking familiar ideas, combining them intelligently, and crafting a gameplay loop capable of keeping players glued to the screen for tens, if not hundreds, of hours.

The empty calories Palworld provides are at least moreish, by design. It's a nightmare of animal exploitation, rehashed game loops and meaningless engagement that we somehow struggle to put down. [Issue#427, p.112]

This game has been so enjoyable and addictive. I have spent endless hours on my bases and breeding the ultimate pals that when I finally get out to explore it feels like such a treat. I have been so hooked trying out a variety of the Pal partner skills in my party and base, and taking new mounts exploring is so much fun. I love the replayability and freedom of play style this game offers. It's so impressive to see a studio of this size produce a game like this.

Getting the obvious out of the way up front: Palworld has one of the most addictive gameplay loops I've ever had the pleasure of playing. I have lost count of the number of times I said to myself, "Just 15 more minutes until I get x done," only to find myself looking at the time 2 hours later, having done 15 other things that weren't x, and promptly facepalming and asking myself what's wrong with me. While it feels like this addicting loop was made specifically to tailor itself to people that need constant stimulation via shiny objects and plentiful upgrades, those shiny objects and upgrades just work. The chests you open and the pal spheres you find around the world are tailored to a specific region's difficulty level, so as long as you're progressing at a steady pace, they never feel useless. Slowly upgrading your items from a scrappy bow to an assault rifle, from barely any defense to armor made out of high-tech steel feels rewarding. And upgrading your base to a point where most of the tedious aspects of the game are being automated by your pals feels extra rewarding, as it allows you to focus on more important gameplay loops like exploration, boss fights, pal capturing, and all the goodies that come with those. There is a serious hit of dopamine every time you return to your base, just to see 2 new items that will drastically aid with exploration / combat waiting for you. To be fair, I still haven't even tried stuff like breeding, mutations, decorations, nor any of the post-endgame content, so I might actually be missing out on some large gameplay systems here. But with 80 hours under my belt and a defeated final boss, I consider my time with the game to be plentiful enough to leave this review. On the bad side of things, I sincerely think this game's late game just ****. Granted, I was part of an always online server with a bunch of friends, so I couldn't just change the game settings all willy-nilly like I could if I was in a single player game, but I still think the late game ****. At about the time you start making computers, my interest in the game just plummeted. Items take forever to craft. You're already at your fifth furnace built with 3 more different furnaces to go, a new pal sphere assembly line gives you one new recipe instead of like three, pals become impossible to catch unless you have the turbo mega ultra ancient pal spheres, an assault rifle needs 25 headshots to kill a level 50 human that's wearing a bandana, in order to find "metal x" you need to bring "item z" to "location s" at "time b" and then twerk to the Palworld gods in the hopes of a favourable drop, and so on... Like, I understand the need for a late game grind in these sorts of games. But the way it's handled in this game it actively makes much of what you did in the early to mid game feel irrelevant. What's the point in getting most of the effigies that help with capture rate, if I am basically required to use the last tier of pal sphere to capture late game pals. What's the point in having +40% running speed, when even most early game pals run and fly faster than that. You get the point.I'd ultimately still recommend this game. But I'd be lying if I said that the late game didn't sour my experience quite a bit.

8/10 for the early and mid game 2/10 for the late game It's a good game. Put on your favorite playlist, make some tea, and kick off your shoes to explore, capture pals, build a nice base... The endgame is very lacking though, with some very questionable decisions. The final raid bosses are very messy and unenjoyable. Why can't we build a base in the World Tree? Why is the sacred water only farmable by killing pals? Why change the rules of the game at the end? It really feels like the devs want to artificially inflate the endgame by intentionally slowing you down. The best part of this game is the pals themselves. They are fun, well-designed, original, and useful. I reached the max level during the Beta, so I was worried that the new patch would not have enough content. It was recommended to start from the beginning, and that's what I did. In no time I was back to planning my next base, checking out the new pals, and playing until late. It is one of those 'I will play 5 more minutes' type of games, where it's past midnight the next time you look at the clock. Pocketpair really goes out of its way not to railroad you into one playstyle. You can fish, but it's optional. You can do dungeons, but they're optional. There are lots of recipes, but you can just cook Jam-filled Buns for the rest of the game and that'll be enough. They have melee weapons, ranged weapons, pal weapons, grenades, traps... The only problem is that it all goes down the drain in the endgame. The game is highly customizable. Don't like durability of equipment? You can disable it. You want to carry more stuff? Just adjust the settings of the server. From my point of view, this is the kind of game we need more of. Multiplayer gaming is terminally ill from cheaters, bm, microtransactions, and low-effort content. The future of such games is bright, and I am looking forward to seeing more titles like this one. Some areas of improvement: - The game is still buggy There is some rubberbanding when climbing/moving; some pals in the base get stuck, randomly won't eat, or will mine a rock from 50 meters away. Nothing game-breaking, but the game still needs some polishing. - Enemies shooting you through walls A classic of buggy games: getting hit through walls. What looks like cover actually isn't. It is across the board. All Pals and enemies will often laser you off through walls, pillars, hills, etc... It destroys any real strategizing and movement in favor of brainless brute force during the encounters. - Moving objects in the base To move something, you need to destroy and rebuild it. In Dune Awakening, it's possible to move them instead. So it's definitely something that could be implemented in Palworld. In particular, chests are really annoying to move. You need to remove all the contents, so you end up overencumbered and can't move. - Insane late-game grinding The late-game items like the Ancient Hatchery require thousands of components. Not hundreds, thousands. Also, the ammo required for the endgame weapons requires you to manually farm their components. As mentioned before, it is not possible to build a base in the last region. That means that after each encounter with the final boss, you need to go grind again for the ammo. The grind increases exponentially as you reach the late game, and crafting anything becomes daunting. - Terrible raid boss fights Sorry, but Astralym and Phantalus are objectively not good fights. - CC to no end - Abilities that track too hard to be avoided - Requires you to change your whole playstyle just for these fights - Buggy/confusing visuals - Phantalus: Has a weak point, but does not give opportunities to shoot it - Long, stalling animations in timed fights - Gigantic HP pools - Makes most pals irrelevant It's terrible. I understand that they tried to make something different, but it completely misses the mark.

AI slop of the year: a game that throws Pokémon, ARK: Survival Evolved, guns, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style traversal into one giant blender, then tops it off with creature designs that often look like obvious AI mashups of existing Pokémon. All of that is wrapped in gameplay that, beneath the novelty, feels surprisingly bland and hollow. People still insist Palworld was not made with AI? Shortly before Palworld was developed and released, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe posted the following on Twitter/X: a) “Left: Pokémon-style monsters generated by AI ➔ Right: Real Pokémon (Illumise, Wormadam, Qwilfish, Fomantis).” b) “I thought, ‘If you run it through an AI filter, it’s often no longer a specific image, so maybe the copyright issue is resolved?’ And I’m surprised that the world is actually moving in that direction. In about 30 years, the general public’s understanding of copyright may have changed considerably.” These quotes do not, by themselves, prove that Palworld’s assets were generated with AI. But they do make skepticism about the game’s design process entirely reasonable. Especially given how closely several Pals resemble combinations of existing Pokémon designs. Which i can't say for other 3-4 Pokémon-like games which i saw recently.

Jeu dégueulasse. La DA est sans âme et donne l’impression d’un mélange copié-collé de plusieurs jeux. L’utilisation évidente de l’IA pour certains éléments rend le tout encore plus générique. L’IA des Pals est catastrophique, les animations sont rigides et le gameplay devient vite répétitif. Beaucoup de potentiel gâché par un manque flagrant d’identité et de finition. Une grosse déception.