I’ll cut straight to the chase, I had a lot of fun with the game. Now, in my opinion, the fun does run out and the game does have what I perceive to be an inherent flaw but I’ll get to that later. The game may not be for everyone but Palworld is this delightful amalgamation of many different genres cobbled together into a Frankenstein’s monster of delight.
When it works, it feels amazing. It’s not just a straight up survival crafting game. It’s not just a production line design game. It’s not just a monster hunting and taming sim. It’s not just an action adventure game. It’s all of that combined and it somehow works.
I’ll have to be honest. I’ll come clean, I hecking love survival crafting games, especially ones set in space. If a game lets me punch rocks and trees and build things I’m pretty happy.
I have 895.9 hours in Astroneer, and 662.7 hours in No Man’s Sky. These are my most played survival crafting games, and I actually spent most of that time designing production lines. Survival crafting is probably my most played genre at this point. We wont speak of the dark times spent playing Apex and Dota2. Just ignore the playtime on my Steam profile, it never happened.
The great thing is, even if you don’t like survival crafting games, Palworld’s genius design lets you bypass most of the survival crafting elements if you so desire. This is done by enslaving, I mean befriending Pals, and assigning them to do work for you. If you abstract it, it’s simply a means of automation.
These handy dandy Pals can do almost any task the player needs to do, as long as they don’t get stuck. This lets the player spend a minimal amount of time catching Pals to set up a simple work base and then spend the rest of their time doing whatever they want to focus on.
This is fantastic design. The most important element in these sandbox type video games is the ability for the player to play the way they want to. That level of freedom is unfortunately not found in most modern games anymore because developers don’t believe in fun. This is beating a dead horse but I still can’t believe actual developers came out to speak poorly of games like Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. Sorry man, I don’t want half assed, live service, always online, monetization first, seventy to a hundred dollar dopamine generators designed to sink all my time and all my money. I just want to have some fun and escape reality for just a brief moment and Palworld delivers on that front for me.
The action and adventure portion of the game is lighthearted fun as well. It’s not complex or mechanically deep but it definitely is fun exploring a new area. You’ll find new pals to catch, new dungeons to explore, new boss pals to fight and finally end with the tower bosses. There are so many fast travel points and once you get a pal that can fly, traveling the map becomes a breeze. You may even run across an enemy camp holding a pal in a cage for some reason. You can free them…to work in perpetuity for you now. Out of the frying pan and into slavery. What a great game.
There are also little optional doodads spread throughout the world like pal eggs to hatch, random treasure chests that may drop blueprints for higher tier gear, and skill fruit trees that look like it came from One Piece. And the notorious Lifmunk statues. These were supposed to increase your catch rate but it had the unfortunate side effect of doing the opposite. That’s early access for you. Thankfully it should be fixed now.
Fighting the bosses is pretty fun as well. Now the game’s pathing and AI is pretty darn…how do we put it in a nice way, neurodivergent. Facing the enemy and making sure your attacks land? That’s so 2024. In Palworld 2077 the new method is to stand behind a pillar and make sure none of your attacks land. This the way.
Jokes aside, even with the early access levels of jank, it’s just plain, simple fun. You can use your pals to fight for you or you can use guns like a true American or you can do both. The process of selecting pals with the proper elemental attacks the boss is weak to and leveling them up, the process of harvesting and then crafting the proper ammunition, and then gearing up almost feels like preparing for an overly simplified MMO raid boss, especially if you’re playing with your friends. If you’re a mad genius like Let’s Game It Out, you can even just slowly roast them to death with campfires.
If you’re a massive Pokemon fan, being able to see the pals is pretty darn neat. If you like building massive bases and decorating, the game has that in spades too. Palworld offers a little bit of something that appeals to almost any gamer and that’s why I personally think it did so well and resonated with so many people.
And while the genius of palworld is due to the level of freedom it allows players in terms of engaging with the game, the flaws come from when the game seemingly contradicts itself and places arbitrary limitations on you. The arbitrary limitations seem even more distinguished in comparison to the great design choices the developers made. I’ll give some examples.
One amazing quality of life addition in Palworld is the ability to craft using any material in any storage container within the range of the Palbox. This is something that is amazingly convenient and unfortunately not found in may survival crafting games.
Now, I personally love doing inventory management. I have that OCD gamer base design if you look at any of the games I’ve played. The great thing about this system is that if you want to create a very organized storage system, you totally can. If you don’t want to, you can just place storage everywhere and dump things into it. That’s the beauty of it, freedom to play how you want to.
But then why not let me use all my storage containers from all three bases you’re allowed to build? That would be incredibly convenient. Why do I have to take my ingots from my ore farm, and fast travel over to my production base? Why not take that level of freedom all the way?
It could simply be an oversight and maybe the devs didn’t know how to implement it. This is just a small nitpick but it does become more noticeable because of just how convenient it is to craft without having to worry about grabbing the right amount and type of materials. It reduces the unnecessary amount of tedium and lets me focus on more enjoyable things.
Speaking of small nitpicks, I do find the inventory weight system and design to be incredibly annoying. Why does food have a timer? And why is food so heavy? It doesn’t seem to make sense or fit in with any other design elements present in the game. You start with so little inventory space and food takes up so much weight. When you finally defeat a boss and it drops some meat, people may want to keep it around as a trophy. Some people just like hoarding everything they can get. I know the fridge exists, but let’s be real, the freezey pals will have to go to sleep eventually and also they don’t always do their assigned jobs.
This leads into another point of frustration. Pals don’t always work properly. I know the devs are working hard to fix any bugs and quirks but the main source of my frustration is that I need the pals to work in order for me to get access to most things in the game. The game is designed in this way. You can’t smelt ingots on your own. When everything works, the game feels great but when it doesn’t…the flaws start to show up and the fun starts to dry up.
Thankfully, the problems aren’t enough to be more than a nuisance at times. It’s not enough to kill my enjoyment of the game but it definitely irks me. In my opinion, these flaws show the one inherent flaw in the game, the lack of cohesive design and vision. It definitely feels like all these different mechanics were just thrown into a pot and stirred around and Palworld just happened to come out, by what Bob Ross would call, a happy little accident.
Everything in the game feels like it was stitched together, much like Frankenstein’s monster. Everything from the Pal designs, to the decorative furniture, to the NPC villages, to even the mechanics. There’s just this lack of cohesion and intentional design. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring are the complete opposite where you can feel that the brush strokes of the creators were very much intentional, to the point where you start to appreciate how much care and consideration went into these games even if it’s not your cup of tea.
This sums up Palworld. It’s a happy little accident. It’s janky, it’s frustrating at times, it feels undercooked, but something magical exists here. Most importantly, it’s just fun. AND it’s only thirty dollars. I have sixty three hours in the game so far and I can confidently say I got my money’s worth even if they never update the game again.
Did you guys enjoy or the game or was it a bore? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks for reading and as always, hope you guys are staying safe and sane out there…and catch you guys next time.
Ducky Obrien 