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Palworld utterly misses the point of being a good Pokémon-likeAs soulless and cynical as they come
As soulless and cynical as they come
Image credit:Pocketpair
Image credit:Pocketpair
For a game that’s beenrepeatedlydescribedas “Pokémon with machineguns”, the first thing that strikes me aboutPalworldis just howun-Pokémon-like it actually is. To its credit, it does do quite a good Pokémon Legends: Arceus impression when you first step out on its big, Breath Of The Wild-style hilltop and take in theopen worldvista of its monster-stuffed starting continent. But if the opening moments of washing up on the island in nothing but your very scantily clad undies hadn’t already given it away (seriously, why do shipwrecks always destroy the clothes you had on, but not your smalls underneath?), then the ream of tutorial prompts about punching trees to get more wood, building bases, putting pals to work on said bases, and the endless parade of crafting technologies you’ll need to unlock to actually do anything on this godforsaken rock will quickly pull the wool clear away from your hopeful little face.
For underneath the cute round eyes of its cover stars,Palworldis really asurvival gamewearing the dead skin suits of Game Freak’s catch ‘em all monster friends. In a lot of cases, those skin suits are quite literal, such are the blatant palette swaps and so-close-to-copyright-infringement-I-can’t-believe-Nintendo’s-lawyers-haven’t-shut-this-down-years-agorip-off creatureson display here. For that reason alone, Palworld can feel about as soulless and cynical as it comes. But that’s not the worst of it. Even aside from all the survival gubbins, base building and sweatshop automation practices shoved down your throat, Palworld is just an awful example of monster-catching games in general. If it’s a Pokémon game on PC you’re after, go and playCassette Beasts. Go and playCoromon,TemTem, orMonster Sanctuary.Anythingbut this.
Steady on there, mate. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
I have, admittedly, only played a handful of hours of Palworld so far, so these impressions are mostly focused on the earlier moments in the game, and how it goes about introducing its pals and your relationship to them. I fully intend to put more time into Palworld over the coming days and weeks to give it a proper shake, but given how jarring its messaging is around these so-called ‘pals’, I’m not sure I’ll find much success with it.
Indeed, your instincts are immediately proven correct as soon as you come within spitting distance of them. If they don’t instantly run away, these pals mostly straight up ignore you, even if you walk right up to them and start running circles around them. Even the honking great alpha pal that roams the starting continent - a Lv.38 leaf mammoth - doesn’t give you the time of day either. These are wholly benign creatures at the end of the day, which makes their inevitable enslavement all the more gruesome and unpleasant.
Man-eating monsers, my arse - these chaps wouldn’t hurt a fly. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
And look, I know Pokémon itself isn’t entirely innocent. That, too, is a game about pitting animals against each other in deathmatch combat scenarios (sorry, faint-match?), and sticking them in tiny balls until the end of their earthly lives. But Pokémon also doesn’t encourage you to beat these things with your own fists, clubs, spears and torches to wear them down, nor does it ever ask you to hand those weaponsbackto them so they can then go and attack other monsters - such as the case with Electabuzz’s machinegun-wielding cousin up in the header there.
Pokémon and other good Poké-likes are ultimately about unlocking innate skills and abilities foundwithintheir given monsters, building on cultural philosophies seen in thousands of other Japanese games and anime series. It’s always the hero (and in this case, the monster) who’s digging deep to win the day, unlocking new levels of power (Dragon Ball) or awareness (Gundam) within themselves rather than simply relying on external tools and gadgets. They are stories that champion the power of the heart and soul. But unfortunately, Palworld doesn’t even have the faintest concept of what these things are.
Once you’ve beaten your pal into submission with your own fists, it’s time to capture them. You need to be careful not to kill them completely, of course, as the only thing you’ll gain if their health bar drops to zero is a fully physics-enabled corpse you can boot around the map (as seen below). Honestly, if you thought Shadow Of The Colossus made you feel bad for slaughtering its monsters, you ain’t seen nothing yet, my friend. You can have up to five pals accompany you at any one time, but the focus is still squarely on you, the human, when it comes to combat. You can call one out to fight alongside you (though your command options are limit to “attack aggressively”, “attack one enemy at a time”, and “don’t attack at all”), but they’re essentially an automated companion, much like Atreus in God Of War, or your dog Torgal inFinal Fantasy16. You have no control over what attacks they dole out. They’re just there, in the background, helping to divert attention away from your club/spear/torch batterings.
I am ashamed to say this chicken corpse did not remain on this plain for long, and instead quickly roll all the way down a cliffside, bouncing along every surface possible until it reached the sea. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Some have special combat abilities you can call on occasionally to give you more direct control of what they’re doing, but these powers are framed in such an exploitative fashion that I actively don’t want to use them. The fluffy sheep cloud I mentioned earlier, for example, can be taken hostage and used as an impromptu shield like one of those blokes you can collar inTrepang2, and their cute, smiling faces will soak up damage for you until you hurl them back into the field. The stunt double stand-in for fire fox Vulpix can also be squeezed like a bagpipe flamethrower, once you’ve crafted the appropriate harness to hold it in your arms without burning yourself, that is. Most pal abilities lie outside the world of combat, though, such as the entirely natural sounding “ah yes, I can now carry 50 extra weight because my pink cat’s with me”, or, “of course, with my big green slug I can now harvest wood that bit faster”. They’re so entirely gameified that you can’t help but start to see them as nothing more than mindless tools, ready to be used and manipulated for maximum exploitation.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Good thing pals seem to have goldfish memories, because you’ll be skewering them with a stick one minute and then giving them brief, seconds-long cuddles the next. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
It’s an utterly miserable-looking existence, and the tutorial dings that tell me I can get an EXP bonus when I capture ten of the same pal type just leave me feeling increasingly hollow. Sure, Legends: Arceus took a similar route with its catching, but there the approach to catching multiple monsters was purely in the pursuit of understanding them better, and studying what makes them so unique and purposeful. You’re also encouraged to release them when your boxes start getting too full as well, but there’s no such hope of escape over in Palworld. Here, an early objective to catch five sheep clouds is entirely so you have a ready-made workforce available once you start levelling it up and getting more worker pal slots to fill it with. It’s all take-take-take in Palworld, and never about giving anything back.
All of it fills me with a kind of despair that only gets worse when you see it having such a rip-roaring start in early access, too. At time of writing, Palworld is both thetop-selling game on Steamright now in the entire world, and thethird-most played game today, with over 340,000 people punching pals in the face right this very second - so many, in fact, that itsservers are struggling to copewith them all. I hope Palworld gets its just desserts and fades into obscurity once the novelty of “Pokémon with machineguns” starts to wear off a bit. But it’s also the kind of game I can see having an extraordinarily long life ahead of it regardless. The desire for a Pokémon game on PC isthatstrong, even if the end result is the polar opposite of everything Pokémon actually stands for.
