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Palworld early access review: base building junk foodPoke the legally distinct monster nest
Poke the legally distinct monster nest
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
The greatest compliment I can give toPalworldis that it lights up my brain in the same way a modern Assassin’s Creed game does. It taps into the same checklist clearing compulsion that saw me spend over 100 hours in both Odyssey’s Ancient Greek archipelago and the Vikingopen worldof Valhalla - only instead of chasing map icons that take you down weird sidequest rabbit holes that riff on Fenton the (sheep)dog, or gobbling up story events just so you can makegoogly eyesat every warm-blooded human in a ten mile radius,Palworldhooks you in with its enormous catalogue of base building tasks. Not catching the 100+ Pal monsters roaming around its mysterious islands, but crafting the perfect sweatshop to put them to work in. It’s one of those, “I’ll just add this furnace so I can craft some ingots that will let me make a cooking pot to level up my base, but wait, now I need some ore to make those ingots, and oh god, I’ve just spent seven hours doing not very much at all, have I?”
To be clear, I’ve had those same dread-filled, “What the heck have I just spent my entire weekend on?”, epiphanies when I’ve played those aforementioned AssCreed games, too. I know full well that there’s no real reason why I spend such vast stretches of time with them, and that much of their map-clearing has considerably less nutritional value, say, than pursuing their core story quests and calling it a day. They’re tasks for the sake of having a task a lot of the time, a breadcrumb trail of dopamine dings that make it feel like you’re accomplishing something, when really all you’re doing is pointless busywork. And yet. There I go, doing it all anyway, despite myself.
Bloodthirsty, man-eating Pals, they tell you at the start. Terrors of the night. Evil demons that must be stopped, with their big googly eyes and innocent smiles… |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
This is the core of what Palworld actually is. Despite its cuddly-looking (andjust about legally distinct) Pokémon-esque creatures being plastered front and centre in both the title, art and general hubbub about the game, Palworldisn’t really that interestedin being an actual Pokémon-like, or at least not in the same way as games likeCassette Beasts,CoromonorTemTemare. Sure, you can call upon Pals in battle to fight alongside you, and you can, via special pinecone doodads, teach them specific moves to add to their very limited skill set. Eventually, you can also set aboutbreeding them, but the focus is never on the Pals themselves. Rather, it’s mostly about what those Pals can do for you and your base, and how they can best service those needs via their stats, abilities and traits.
Pals will automatically go and complete tasks they’re suited for, and will frequently come rushing over to help you craft a bench, say, if they’re good at Handiwork. You can also ‘lift’ Pals and chuck them at specific machines if you want to spread the load of who does what. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
It’s a small, but important distinction, and one that puts Palworld in better company with the likes ofMonster HunterandWild Hearts. Well, sort of. In battle, for example, the attention remains centred on you as a player, giving encounters the same kind of frenzied pace and ‘anything can happen anywhere’ action as Capcom’s premier beast slayer. But even then, Palworld still feels like a poor imitation. Despite an array of craftable weapons at your disposal, they all boil down to the same single mouse or button press. There are no attack combos to use or classes to master, and the only real ‘move’ you have is a dodge roll.
Thus, battles end up following the same repetitive pattern as its base building. Each fight feels exactly the same as the last, and even boss battles become dreary slogs to grind those HP bars down to zero. There’s no escalation in the sense of drama or excitement, and no slathering jawlines or stumbles of exhaustion as your quarry gets beaten into submission. More often than not, fights descend into such a hectic bombardment of conflicting health bars and Pal attack effects, that joining the fray quickly becomes a madman’s game. Instead, you’re much better off sticking to the sidelines, either sitting them out entirely while your Pals do the hard work for you, or, if you’re feeling generous, pelting your opponents' spongey bodies with arrow after arrow (and later bullet after bullet) from afar.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Night-time battles are especially hard to read, but even during the day it can be hard to parse exactly who’s attacking what. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
The only way to fully control the battlefield is to ride one of your (again, select few)mount Palsinto the fray, as that puts a whopping three (3) attack commands at your fingertips, and thus finally some variation in how you tackle enemies. But just as your pulse starts racing with excitement, Palworld manages to kill that feeling almost straight away thanks to its unwieldy controls. Aiming and manoeuvring your Pal’s attacks is a maddening affair when swarms of creatures half your size are coming at you from all angles, and yet again, it’s simply more efficient (and better for your health) to get off your Pal, head for the hills and let them do their thing. That’s because death in Palworld means you’ll drop all your stuff on the spot, then respawn in nothing but your pants at one of few pre-ordained checkpoints.
Capturing Pals is worse still. On the rare occasion that I manage to identify which of the many red health bars belongs to the monster I actually want to catch, 90% of the time my Pal companion will simply wallop them into the afterlife before I’ve even whipped out my Pal Sphere (and in the other 10%, I’ll throw the damn ball, the Pal will break out and then get walloped before I can throw another one). Did I also mention that you lose every ball you throw, regardless of whether it hits something or not? That’s minutes of crafting work down the drain in a simple mis-tap, and unless you’ve got the wherewithal to recall your Pal at critical moments (which is tricky when you’ve got ten turtles all dosing you with bubble beams), or are ultra-quick with finicky keyboard commands (hitting 4 to bring up the Pal’s menu dial and selecting ‘DO NOT ATTACK, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD’ - a nigh on impossible task in the heat of battle), even trying to play it like a regular Pokémon-like is often fraught with frustration.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Riding a Pal as a mount gives you more options in battle, but they’re so hard to control that they’re really best suited to helping you get around the environment a bit faster. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
You can quite easily leave your base to hum along in your absence, too, as your Pals will continue beavering away headbutting logs, punching rocks, farming your berry plots and keeping themselves fed and watered all without your supervision. Although I find it depressing that their core stat in worker bee mode is simply “Sanity”, as if nothing else matters or is even vaguely important in maintaining a healthy worklife balance. Naturally, you don’t want their sanity levels to drop too low from overwork, but while there are buildings you can construct to keep them vaguely happy, the smoothest path to dealing with terminal grumps and slackers (or Pals who repeatedly manage to clip through the environment and almost starve themselves in the process) is to simply whack them back in the Palbox and swap them out for another. Because that’s what these dumb creatures are at the end of the day: entirely replaceable, and more fodder for the base building machine.
For instance, the world of Palpagos Islands is, frankly, an empty hodgepodge of assets thrown together in a blender. Autumnal forests will butt up against beaches, mountains and grassy plateaus in what feels like the same 100m radius, and the Pals themselves never feel like they belong to particular habitats. It all routinely fails to ignite any sense of wonder or curiosity about what lies beyond the next hill, mostly because there are either too many trees blocking the view, or there’s just… nothing tempting you further toward the horizon. And on the few occasions you do make it to a vaguely unusual-looking landmark or mountaintop, there’s seldom anything there to make it worth the effort - not even a knock-off Breath Of The Wild Korok seed for your trouble.
You’ll need to craft special armour pelts to push into some of Palworld’s higher level and more extreme temperature regions, but honestly? I’m good, mate. What’s worth coming back for? |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
It’s all aimless, because once you take away the muscle of Palworld’s base building, you’re left with a skeleton that can barely prop itself up, let alone provide any forward momentum. Sure, there’s that mysterious tablet from the start of the game spouting some cryptic nonsense about how ‘the towers hold the key’ or some such (the towers effectively being Palworld’s version of Pokémon’s gym leader battles), but once you complete the first tower to round off the tutorial, they’re barely mentioned ever again. There’s no wider story beats chivvying you along to tackle this tower or that one, and when the world’s so bland and uninviting, the desire to explore for the sake of adventure is practically non-existent.
