I'm aware that I already sold all my credibility down the river by going to bat (hehe) for Honkai Star Rail, and if you somehow still trust me, I'm here to write a cheque for the rest of my credibility.

I enjoyed Palworld. I’m not crazy about it, it doesn’t consume my every thought like Honkai Star Rail still does a month later and it’s not got me ruminating on the merits of nostalgia and the pitfalls of longrunning franchises the way Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has, but it’s kept my interest and I don’t hate it.

Unfortunately this means I’m now honorbound to write a fair review of it. Tsk.

I like Open World Survival Craft games. You might know OWSCs by their biggest examples: Ark Survival Devolved, The Forest, Rust, DayZ, Subnautica, Lego Fortnite, and Breath of the Wild. I like them so much that I am just a pernicky miserable cunt about the entire genre. Oh god. I am so miserable about these games. I love them so much, but they are so painfully derivative. They are so painfully samey. They all want to be one of the games I listed up above.

And Palworld is no exception. It is perhaps the worst offender. Breath of the Elden Fort is horrifically derivative. It yoinks from, in order of noticing: Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, ARK: Survival Devolved, Elden Ring, Jump Force, Fortnite, Factorio, Xenoblade, and probably a ton of other games I missed due to simple human error.
It is a game where the first NPC you meet wears copyright-safe Monster Hunter armour while holding an M1014 shotgun, while a tower from ARK lights up the skyline alongside the tree Yggdrasil.
The opening moments are set in an environment I can only describe as "Nintendo hired that man", and the first boss looks like a Vtuber concept that was left stillborn on the marketing floor.
On the way to this boss, you will almost assuredly run into a Xenoblade World Boss that's 30 levels higher than you, and be greeted by numerous Xenoblade area prompts that’re then accompanied by DMCA-dodging versions of the BOTW discovery jingle.

It is, in nearly every sense of the phrase, a 'fake game'. Something one would see for 15-20 seconds during a Law & Order episode, an animation kitbashed by underpaid new-hires whose only animation credit will be that episode. By all rights, under every star and every law and every creed and every culture, this game should be terrible.

And it's not. It should be, but the matrix glitched and instead it's... I try not to make snap judgments about early access games, but I'm gonna make an exception here:

Assuming the development doesn't fuck up massively like what happened to Starbound or MASS Builder, this will probably be the greatest OWSC game ever made.

Much like with Honkai Star Rail, I need to gripe about other OWSC games to really illustrate what Palworld does well, though fortunately it's easier here.

The opening hours of most OWSC games are what I call the "copper phase". Whether it's copper or some other resource, the overarching goal of the copper phase in each OWSC is to, after starting with literally nothing, build up a base and acquire the resource which allows you to progress on the technology tree - often while acquiring millions of wood and stone in the process.
This is a remarkably simple part of the OWSC, and the vast majority of them fuck it up. Seriously, my Steam library is a wasteland of games I binned for fucking up the copper phase.
This might seem harsh, but there's a good reason for this: The copper phase is essentially the game's cover letter. It's fine to not play the entire hand here, but in those opening hours an OWSC NEEDS to show off what it's all about here. It's why I left Valheim to die, but V Rising gets a pass. There might be a conversation to be had about intentionally slowing the pacing, yes, but we’re so long into this genre’s history that fumbling this part is unforgivable.

Palworld’s copper phase is obscenely difficult to quantify, and… I don’t think it even has one.

Rather uniquely for the genre, Palworld acknowledges that automation games are just OWSC titles but for autistic people (me), and cribs a few elements from them. As a result, you’ll get access to wood/stone/ingots/not-Pokemon materials relatively early. You can get acceptable weapons within about an hour or two of play depending on how much you explore, and there’s not much in the way of shortages.

The roadblock, then, is not the resources. It’s processing the resources. In other automation games, you use machines and conveyor belts. In Palworld, you use not-Pokemon. And there are not-Pokemon everywhere. Capturing them is almost always a net plus, because it gives the same resources as a kill and is one more cog for your machine.

Immediately, within an hour of play, it’s obvious this solves an incredible amount of OWSC issues. Other players aren’t explicitly needed to facilitate a smooth gameplay experience because not-Pokemon fill a lot of the boring downtime that comes from creating a ton of resources.
You’ll have to cook some berries manually very early on, but once you get a not-Pokemon capable of cooking it’s fire and forget. Pun not intended.
I mentioned wood and stone in passing here and it’s clear the developers are experienced in OWSC games, because two of the earliest facility unlocks are an endless supply of each resource that’re best harvested by - you guessed it - not-Pokemon.
Some things, primarily player-centric upgrades, are best made by the player, but even on this front most of the not-Pokemon capable of work will come over to speed it up.
And hey, for some not-Pokemon there’s not even any need to hunt them - they can be ranched, and will be handled by not-Pokemon capable of farming.

A lot of other OWSC games, even the good ones, often can’t decide whether they’re meant to be a base maintenance simulator or an exploration game. I’d go out on a limb and say that this is one of the few OWSC games where the Open World, the Survival and the Crafting feel congruous.

Now, you may be thinking that these observations based on an hour’s play may fall apart later, and so did I. Even other OWSC games that nail the first hour drop off later.

Palworld doesn’t.

It’s… almost scary in how much the devs have done their homework.

Not-Pokemon drops aside, there aren’t actually that many overworld resources, and they’re leveraged in such a way that there’s always a need for more. The facilities and craftables soon scale up, meaning you’ll always need something. You’ll always need not-Pokemon to process things. Frequently, you’ll unlock a facility and think “Why would I ever need this?” only to stumble on something in the overworld that benefits from it. Trust me, you’ll need heaters and coolers.

I’ve mentioned the not-Pokemon a lot, and if it isn’t obvious yet: They’re scarily well integrated into the gameplay loop. Like in actual Pokemon you have a limit to how many can fit in your team, and each base you construct has an ever-growing limit of workers, but owing to what I said above there’s an eternal need to keep some not-Pokemon around, even if they’re seemingly awful.
Even when my level was reaching the 30s, I still made it a point to catch the low level deer not-Pokemon because my orbiter bases absolutely needed woodcutters. My boxes are full of the generic sheep, cat and chicken not-Pokemon because there is an omnipresent need for wool, versatile labour and eggs to cook food. When my friends and I make expeditions across the map, we frequently take detours just to catch a few not-Pokemon we could use back at base.

More importantly, though, the not-Pokemon solve a lot of issues endemic to the OWSC genre.

Like crafting.

Oh my goodness, I don’t think I can play this genre anymore. Palworld ruined me with crafting alone.

Perhaps my biggest grievance about this genre is how even many of the greatest titles will see you sitting at a bench holding E or Space for about an hour while listening to an endless series of TING-TING as metal bars/tools/torches/whatever are crafted.
Palworld has this too… For about 20 minutes? After that, the not-Pokemon can take over for you. The option is there to do it yourself, if you’re insane, but the game clearly wants you to just queue up the 500 arrows/berries/whatever you need and then go play the fucking game, and it’s mercifully not as indepth as automation games. Again, the game is pushing you to play it.

I find it telling that later unlocks on the tech tree do indeed turn the game into a lite version of the automation genre, though how far you lean into it depends on how cruel you’re willing to be.

That said, there is a pretty prominent issue with regards to not-Pokemon distribution. The default starting point has everything one could ever want within trebuchet-firing distance, but many of the alternate start points are lacking. Which sucks, because many of those alternate starts are absolutely phenomenal for base construction thanks to flat planes and open spaces. They’re useful for satellite bases I guess.

That said, while I do admire Palworld pushing you to play the game, there is a part of the game that I just view with utter scorn:

Boss battles.

For most of Palworld’s runtime, the combat is sufficient. Incredibly basic third person shooter shit with a pet summon on hand, but nothing more. It doesn’t have to be, because overworld encounters are fairly brief kill-or-be-killed affairs that end as quickly as they began.
Boss battles, however, are long. They have beefy health pools, deadly attacks and weak spots that only marginally increase the damage taken.
They’re unfortunately required for progression, and while in most games I often put off boss battles for the sake of enjoying what’s in front of me, in this game I only beelined for them to get them out of the way. Now, the game is EA, that could change, but I think it betrays how little I expect it to change that I’m even griping about it in the first place.

As for the game world… On a mechanical level it’s fine enough, the distribution of not-Pokemon means exploration rarely feels wasted and there’s enough chests/statues/whatever dotted around that I don’t think I ever felt like I was just walking through dead air.
On a geographical and visual level though, it’s utterly banal. I’m very much an “exploration is its own reward” type person, I don’t think an open world needs to have tons of trinkets and loot for it to be meaningful. It’s why, despite hating the game to its core, I liked Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule.

Palworld, for as much as it wants to be Hyrule, is nowhere near it. It’s a series of bog standard environments with the occasional eyebrow raising piece of geometry lying around. The snowy regions look nice, sure, but that’s my inherent bias towards arctic/winter regions coming out in full force. It’s a visually sterile game that meets a bare minimum of beauty but never goes above it.
Even the not-Pokemon abide by this, being decently okay designs that at least have the benefit of having distinct silhouettes, but aren’t really inspiring. I don’t think a machine made these designs, but if they did there’d probably be more creative sauce on display.

Now, I told myself I wouldn’t gripe about anything that’s likely to get changed later on, and until now I’ve held to that fairly well. This once, though, I’m going to let myself kvetch:

Base building in Palworld is predicated upon Palboxes, placeable constructions that erect a large circular AoE around them which facilitates the management of not-Pokemon and their labour.

This is fine conceptually, but the AoEs are too small even on flatter areas with no obstructions and likewise many of the structures are too large. Ostensibly this is to facilitate satellite bases, but limit increases on base count aren’t given out freely and they’re best used for things like mineral processing or batch cooking. There’s a strange gap between smaller things like furnaces, cooking stations and egg incubators and absolutely monolithic facilities like ranches and uh… ‘daycares’.

All in all, Palworld is… Fine.

That might seem anticlimactic after the mostly glowing praise it just got, but it’s still an OWSC. ‘Fine’ within that genre makes it one of the best, but genres don’t exist in a vacuum compared to other games. This isn’t going to make anyone’s GOTY list and to be entirely honest I’ll be surprised if it even meets the honourable mentions for my 2024 top 10.

Food metaphors in reviews are old hat, overdone like crazy, but considering the nature of this game, I consider the next lines to be acceptable:

Palworld is fast food gaming.

And sometimes, I don’t really want a home cooked meal with meat from my local premium butcher, I just want a Big Mac.