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Pokemon + Guns? Not really, it’s more of a Pokemon + Ark Survival + more | Early Access - Palworld

13K View2024-01-21

Palworld

8.8

Open World Survival CraftSandboxSurvivalActionCreature CollectorCraftingRPGPvE

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✨Overview

Palworld, a game that boldly introduces itself as "Pokémon with guns," the features elements of creature “Pal” collecting, base building, and survival crafting mechanics. Developed by Pocket Pair, the game draws inspiration from popular open-world titles like Pokemon, Ark: Survival, Factorio, Zelda: Breath of Wild and more, creating a hybrid experience that feels both familiar but in some respect silly innovative.

📖Story and Premise

The game is set on the familiar sounding Palpagos Island (although you can rename the Island), players are thrown into a world — Isekai style — where they must balance survival instincts, creature taming, and ethical choices. Yes ETHICAL choices. DO you want to abuse your Pokemon? Pals? Get them depressed? Hungry? More on that later. There isn’t a really story or campaign mode in this game because this is basically a multiplayer oriented survival crafting game in its core, although it’s a lot more singleplayer friendly.

🎨Visuals and Art
Palworld is powered by Unreal Engine 5 and it looks already amazing for an Early Access title, the visuals are characterized by a unique blend of lighthearted and cartoonish designs, reminiscent of traditional Pokémon aesthetics. The creatures, or ‘Pals’, feature vibrant colors and imaginative designs that bear a resemblance to the iconic creatures from the Pokemon franchise. The game's visual style exudes a playful and whimsical atmosphere, but with a touch of violence and mayhem.

☝️First Impressions

As usual with how I approach these kinds of crafting survival games, I almost always aim for weight capacity for the first few levels to get things going and avoid running out of inventory space so often. At first, the gameplay plays like a typical survival crafting experience—gathering resources, constructing structures, and following item recipes and in-game tutorial/guides, but I promise you, the game gets better later.

🎮Gameplay

The ‘Pokémon with guns’ tagline couldn’t be more further than the truth, because the game is actually way more than that. Guns aren’t even in most Pals and you won’t see them as often as you would expect, coming from the tagline.

For starters, Palworld introduces survival mechanics that offers customizable difficulty options, and allows you to play at your own pace in your own save file; as well as create and join servers to play with other people. As far as singleplayer experience goes, it’s very friendly.

Players navigate a technology tree by leveling up, unlocking new structures and items, with later tiers granting access to features like Pal breeding farms and assembly lines. The open-world exploration is filled with encounters with both wild Pals — bosses, regular, and rare pals alike, hostile human factions, and friendly traders and settlements. There are dungeons you can visit, boss fights you can challenge (and capture), and new frontiers to explore and build bases on.

The gameplay loop involves attending to basic needs, capturing Pals, attending to their basic needs and building a base. The game is basically open-ended and has no clear goal aside from capturing more powerful Pals, further progressing in the technology tree, improving your base, and getting better items.

⚔️Combat

The combat is a basic third person setup with dodge maneuvers and features both melee and ranged weapons, similar to the style of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Combat in Palworld is a blend of weapon-based engagements from wooden bows to powerful automatic rifles; and the unique elemental and powerful abilities of Pals. Encounters with powerful Boss-level Pals and poachers makes the game very emergent, dynamic and provides challenging combat scenarios.

🔨Building Mechanics

The way the game is played is different from the usual building mechanics, now you need to be hands-on the thing that you are crafting or building, no waiting for it to be done in the background. It’s a little more tedious that most survival games, but on the upside, you Pal can craft and build for you and help you with your tasks!

Throughout your playthrough, you get to capture an ever grow stronger roster of Pals at your disposal, and the game starts to gets interesting. Many of the tediousness in the game gets automated with your Pals helping you with your tasks. If you have set things going in motion, they will gather resources alone, store them automatically, prepare food, craft pending items you leave at your workbench, defense the base, and more.

This is actually one of the only survival crafting sandbox games for me where its actually fun playing alone and its not really a soft requirement to need friends to play with. Because the Pals essentially make your base lively and populates it with living, breathing creatures, and you’ll usually only get in pure multiplayer games.

🐲Pals

You can take up to five pals in your party, but unfortunately only one at a time summoned following you. This is different from your base Pals where they are all summoned, doing tasks, and defending the base.

While the design of the creatures called Pals are a little too close to Pokemon-style with its lighthearted and cartoonish designs, the actual interaction with them is anything but and is borderline violent and morbid. You will actually hurt, abuse, and kill these creatures, and the survival of the fittest applies.

Further on in the game, you get to establishing factories, assigning tasks to Pals, and implementing supply lines. The automation system not only streamlines resource management but also adds a strategic Factorio-like dimension. The intriguing twist lies in the option to potentially exploit Pals for enhanced output, they can be abused, they can be depressed, and underfed and subject to extreme labor conditions.

📊Technical Performance

Palworld is a tale of two platforms at the moment. I played on both Xbox and PC back and forth (with the same save thanks to cross progression). On Xbox, I found the experience to be very clunky and stuttery, with visuals of significantly inferior quality. I've encountered constant crashing, black screen, and saving issues,

Meanwhile, the PC version of Palworld is much more optimized. It ran at a locked 60FPS with max graphics on my i7-8700k system and an RTX 3080 (which was more than I expected). This is a surprising reversal from the usual PC = bad, console = optimized. While it still crashes, it happens much less often to the point where it's not even a concern. Fast travel and loading times are super quick, almost taking just 1 second.

⚖️Conclusion

While the 'Pokémon with guns' tagline may set certain expectations, in actuality, depending on your preferences, Palworld either goes beyond that tagline, or misleadingly underdelivers. What’s However, what Palworld truly is — is a dynamic open-world survival crafting game, filled with exploration, creatures, combat, and emergent gratifying encounters. On PC I would highly recommend this game for Ark: Survival and Pokemon Fans; on Xbox, it’s only a mild recommendation until they can make the game more stable.

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Palworld

8.8

Open World Survival CraftSandboxSurvivalActionCreature CollectorCraftingRPGPvE

Get