Palworld Review & Early Access Impressions - It's NOT What We Thought

You've probably seen the crazy clips or trailers out there for Palworld, a vibrant looking open world survival game, but with creature collecting, base building, battling, production lines of PAL's manufacturing items and well, of course the weapons. It's no surprise the game is sort of being memed on as Pokemon but with guns  in various comments out there online, but well, it really isn't that.

Or at least not just that. And a big thanks to Pocket Pair for providing us with an early copy of the game, so I've managed to play it, sink my teeth into it and get an understanding of what it's about  so I can share my impressions of the game with you guys. I'm gonna try and be fair and honest with my opinion on the game as a standalone thing rather than comparing it directly to something like Pokemon because as you'll find out soon enough, it really is something else  entirely. I'll start things off with my comments on its performance because this can be a massive deal breaker for me and I'm sure many of you guys, especially with it being early access. Honestly, this is one of those rare games that while it is in early access, it runs extremely  smoothly with my experience having none or very little performance issues.

Now I do have a very high end PC with an RTX 4080 but I get a consistent 120fps while exploring and the biggest drop that I've had so far was down to around 70fps while in a menu, which as long  as it stays above 60 is very good in my opinion and certainly rare for an early access game. Now the graphics definitely aren't groundbreaking but it is stylised and it's enjoyable to look at for a prolonged gaming session but I do wish there was more animations for things such as picking up resources, trees falling down after chopping them or just visual  representations of items like the PAL harnesses that you can craft, instead you just grab them and there's no visible harness even though you have to craft that before you can use them in this way. So overall the performance is very good and the graphics are just alright. It feels polished in terms of its FPS but everything else does feel very  early access-y with missing animations, odd cutscenes and some jank in the combat and gameplay. But let me say if you have a Steam Deck, this game is actually very easy to play on it, it's basically pick up and play, I downloaded it on my Steam Deck just for fun  to see if it would work and I found myself really enjoying it as a handheld experience, again the performance was very good on Steam Deck so that did kind of shock me. So with some technical talk out of the way, let's talk about what Palworld actually is because my  expectations were definitely way off compared to what the game actually is. If you're expecting this to be a creature collecting game where you simply go out, collect some monsters, train them up to get stronger and stronger with battling to then take on bigger and better creatures as you expand out your party, well it's not really that or at least that's only a  portion of what it is and it's not the full focus. This is really unlike any other creature collecting game that I've played before and it really threw me off to begin with. Initially I was ready to go out and collect some pals, battle them together and level up, when in reality the game is actually more so a survival game and so the survival game mechanics  and gameplay systems that you would expect come first and foremost. This means the first hours of gameplay won't be just collecting and fighting your creatures to level them up, it will be picking up rocks and wood, building crafting stations to make tools to then chop down trees and mine rocks to then build up more and more resources so that you can actually build a  base. At the beginning of the game, the creatures in the starting areas are a lot more smaller and basic, they're called pals in this game by the way so we'll refer to the creatures as pals from now on.

You can just walk up to the pals and start punching them or attacking them with  a weapon like a club that you can craft early on and if you completely off them, then you get some resources and items and even meat that you can cook because you will have to manage a hunger bar on yourself and your pals in your party.

Oddly enough, when defeated, the dead body kind  of ragdolls making for some, well, very interesting interactions which is not something I thought I would see in a creature collecting game. Of course, you're meant to get their health low so that you can capture them with the palspears that you can find or craft, which again feeds into the heavy need for resources just like any other survival game.  

So after a few hours of farming, building up and collecting a few of the basic pals, you really start to see that at least the beginning of the game is less so about collecting and battling and more so about the survival aspects of gathering resources and building. At least this is until you get later in the game where you have everything set up and  functional so you can start focusing on the boss fights and battling. You see the thing is the pals in this game are actually more so tied to the base building systems and having actual functionality to make self-sustaining bases. This is because all of the pals have different job roles with some helping out with building and crafting, others using their fire to cook,  some using water to feed plants or just hanging out and producing items like wool and eggs. So really the initial focus of the game is all about gathering, building and capturing pals to then put to work in your base so that you can...

get everything functional. It's only really after these hours of more generic survival game gameplay where you're going out and chopping trees down that you can finally then get geared up and ready to go out further into the world to actually start fighting and capturing cooler and bigger higher level pals.  My biggest advice is to temper expectations away from a pure creature collecting experience and more so into the survival genre with games like Ark Survival Evolved or even Rust really being more so similar.

Think of the pals more like your workforce even though it really does feel quite wrong to say it. That being said, once you get past those initial  building up stages, the game really does start to open up and shine in its own unique way. Using different pals in combat is fun with each of them having different elemental attacks, abilities and even interactions with your player like I mentioned earlier with this cute little fire guy being basically a literal flame thrower. Collecting new pals is really  fun as you figure out what they can do for your base or if they'll be a new member of your actual party for combat or traversal because you can ride and even fly them making map traversal so much better. There's also special bigger raid pals with higher stats, shiny pals to find  and different traits you get on them when you capture them. With systems like chain catching the same pals back to back giving you bonus XP, the actual systems of these pals are pretty fleshed out and again, they are more so like AI NPC buddies for your base than actual creatures  that you sort of care for and level up and travel through the game with. Your player character actually has a vital role in combat too and it's basically a third person shooter in that respect where you can shoot bows, guns, even RPGs, you can dodge and use melee weapons as well.

And you will need to use these weapons not just in PAL battles but also in  so you'll need to set up defences and protect your hard built up base. There's also co-op in the early access and I believe there isn't going to be PvP just yet so I'm not sure if that is coming and there will be PvP base raids, I don't really know  but for now it is single player or co-op which is still pretty fun. But is it all fun and games? Well, if you can get past the starting hours of pretty generic resource gathering then the game really does shine as you start getting more and more invested in  different PALs and collecting them. That being said, we do have to address the developers track record, particularly Craftopia which is another survival action game from Pocket Pair which released into early access in 2020 and well is still in early access. It's not a game that I've played for myself but looking at the overall reviews on Steam,  it is marked as mostly positive but there are a lot of reviews and upset comments online with people claiming the game is underwhelming for how long it's been in early access and that it will be a full game anytime soon. So I guess there is potential for PowerWorld to be another one of these infinitely stuck in early access games but we just don't know.  

There's always a risk in buying early access titles so while the game is real, it is a bunch of fun and it's one of the most unique titles that I think I've ever played, especially after initially hating it because my expectations were way off. It does still feel like an early access game even though a lot of the systems are fleshed out  and there is a lot of hours of content here for you if you enjoy the sort of gathering resources, building a base and capturing all of these different pals. But I do fear that without continued support, updates and improvements, it might be a passing bit of fun rather than a game that you'll play for years to come.  So let's hope that this does continue to get support because I can see it being fleshed out into something quite special but I'm reserving my expectations because from the track record, this could still be in early access in years to come. But with that being said, the game's also releasing onto Xbox Game Pass at the same  time as its early access release on the 19th of January so with Game Pass being a pretty good deal, it's very easy and cheap to just give it a go yourself. So yes, the game is real, it's super unique, a bunch of fun and has great performance, but it's not without its worries of being an early access title.  If you are interested in learning more about the game then make sure to subscribe down below because we'll have some follow up videos coming your way.