Palworld 1.0, “An Avalanche of Quality Systems”

Like most, Palworld was not a game I took seriously when it first fell onto my radar. As funny as the trailers were, I struggled to imagine such a silly and satirical game concept being taken seriously, both by the developers and eventual players.

“Pokémon with guns” was the meme that first launched Palworld into the public hemisphere, and although it served as amazing publicity for the company, it also unfortunately reinforces their connection to the Pokémon brand. Although I personally welcome such mockery, especially against a company with the authoritative grasp of Nintendo, it meant that for some gamers, Pocketpair (the developers of Palworld) piggy-backed a little too much off the brand and image of Pokémon. For me, it meant that I wasn’t confident the game would be imbued with enough originality to justify taking the story and world seriously.

Boy, was I wrong. Like most players, I realised this during the game’s original release, when the world first fell in love with Palworld during what was one of the most mind-blowing games launches I’ve ever seen. Despite reaching its’ insane all-time peak of “2,101,535 concurrent players on Steam”, there still remained many critics adamant that the game borrowed too much from other titles and lacked the polish they provide.

I personally loved the game even back during its’ early days, amassing a respectable 200+ hours within its’ first year – yet I never reached the endgame. Each playthrough would eventually collapse during the midgame, and although there is no obvious single reason, I remember it being due to a mixture of systems fatigue, bugs and inconveniences. Still, even with its’ flaws, Palworld was enough fun to breach my top 10 favourite survival games. Seeing that Palworld was once again the most popular game on Steam, I couldn’t resist the prospect of bringing my friend group back to the Palpagos Islands.

Palworld 1.0 erased almost all of my points of criticism and had me immediately re-evaluating why I ranked the original early access version of this game so highly when it’s now obvious it had so much to improve. Credit where credit is due, the developers of this game must have identified all of their weaknesses and worked their asses off to improve every single one, because the game I play now today is almost the perfect survival game.

I do not say that lightly, survival games are my favourite genre of video game by a landslide. Like many kids of my generation, I sunk thousands of hours into Minecraft. Across multiple accounts and devices, I’m also sat at close to a thousand hours in Terraria. Valheim, a personal favourite of mine which I previously ranked ahead of Palworld, has 600+ hrs invested to compete with, yet Palworld 1.0 has in my opinion surpassed even that massive love letter to the genre.

Speaking of Valheim, I really want to emphasise just how impressive and rare it is that Palworld’s early access was so short-lived and that Pocketpair managed to launch the game not only so soon, but with so much more content. Although I never experienced the original endgame, I would guess that there’s probably 2.5-3x as much content in the game today with Palworld 1.0. Even after being so impressed by the game’s original launch, I still doubted that the game would deliver on its’ early access promises, given how much damage games like Valheim have done to my perception of what constitutes “early access”. While Palworld’s early access lasted only two and a half years, Valheim more than doubles that. As a result, I now see Valheim and Palworld as the antithesis of each other, both brilliant and massive survival games, except one has over-delivered against high fan expectations while the other has quite brutally under-delivered against steadily declining expectations.

I titled this review “An Avalanche of Quality Systems” despite complaining about feeling “system fatigue” in the early access because above all else, that is what impresses me most about this game, especially as a fan of MMORPGs and an obsessed World of Warcraft player who is used to dealing with “system fatigue” and never expects companies to deliver quite as effectively as Pocketpair have with their systems. They are all compatible, you can play this game in a ton of different ways and yet all of them feel rewarding.

Some days I will wake up and decide to go fish – in most games fishing is a ruthlessly inefficient chore simply incapable of competing with rivalling systems, but not in Palworld. In Palworld there is an entire midgame ore locked behind fishing (until endgame), you can catch Pals with brilliant stats throughout every region, there is a crafted fishing pole progression system – you get the idea. That level of love and respect is delivered to every system.

Another stellar example is the “effigies” system, one to promote player exploration. Small, glowing statues of various Pals are sprinkled across the entire map, with each Pal signifying a different effect. After gathering one or a few depending on the variant of effigy, you’re able to spend them as a point in a skill tree featuring various character upgrades and conveniences. Originally, there was only one kind of effigy, the “Lifmunk Effigy”, which upgraded your capture power and could be found in vast excess. I already enjoyed the original version of this system, it was already enough to incentivise me to explore the entire map, yet coming back to Palworld 1.0 I have fallen even deeper in love with exploration thanks to the tremendous improvements they made to a system which already worked and was already perceived well, proving that Pocketpair care not only to improve their flaws, but also consistently raise their strengths.

One of my other concerns before I started playing this game was regarding the character designs. Many borrow heavily from existing Pokémon designs (most of which have been retroactively modified to appear more original with the release of 1.0), and frankly, I’ve grown to distrust the character designing skills of the companies behind games inspired by Pokémon. Which is why for me, the character designers are one of the teams behind this game I wish to thank the most. I was blown away by so many of the character designs and concepts behind Pals in Palworld. I actually struggle to pick favourites and a team because of how many I wish to regularly use.

I could rant on and on for days about how polished and impressive this game has become, but at this point I feel like a shill. If you’re a hater of this game, please try it, because there’s a good chance you’ll swallow your words.