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Palworld Review

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Palworld is a monster taming survival game by Japanese developer Pocketpair. Choose whether to be in a team or go solo to build a base. The pals you catch can then perform various duties, as well as fight alongside their players.

I’ll start with the obvious, this game is a basically a more adult version of Pokemon. The game allows you to catch and fight alongside your pals but there’s also the option to butcher them and then have their friends cook/eat their remains. You can even capture/butcher/cook/consume fellow NPCs although the game does punish this with a GTA style heat feature where you have to run from the authorities until your notoriety dies down. I’ll be honest, the lack of originality in this game is probably the most disappointing part. In general, I don’t mind a rehash of a classic concept but Palworld seems to be trying to blend two very different franchises and not quite hitting the mark on either. They’ve gone with the cutesy designs, they’ve added a gimmick but they’ve not followed through. Let me pimp out my cutest pals or make it a PG, this middle of the road option feels slightly unsatisfying.

At only 17 hours gameplay, I’ve barely scratched the surface. The map for this game is immense and the difficulty ramps up as you progress, making exploration a bit risky early on but keeping the open world in manageable chunks. This means Palworld has the potential for hundreds of hours worth of content and players are unlikely to explore all of it without serious dedication. It also means a lot of significant travelling to reach certain areas, even with the towers that allow teleportation. I don’t mind this as the world is quite rich but the lack of new pals did become frustrating after a while. If you make the world 10x bigger than a traditional map, it really needs the numbers of pals to scale with it or risk being repetitive.

The base building is, thankfully, easy to understand and maintain. None of the raids on my base made any significant damages and I don’t feel worried about rushing back to protect it. It’s easy to keep resources balanced, pals that can work the different roles are easy to come by and personally, I find it the most satisfying area of play, alongside the excellent selection of mounts.

At present, the game still feel limited. In other games of this type, we see more mechanics for improving our monster friends – better breeding systems and evolutions, for example. There are special fruits you can use to give your pals better moves but there’s only 2-3 very good ones and they come with large cooldown penalties.

My other gripe is that single player is wildly unbalanced. This game is definitely best played in a group! The bosses are near impossible early on and then suddenly the difficulty drops to near zero once your pals are strong enough to defend the huge hits. Single player feels like an oversight, bolted on at the last minute to try and expand their audience.

On the plus side, it’s not expensive. Full price on CDKeys is £24.99 and I’d say that’s not a terrible price if you have a good group to play with.

Overall, I didn’t hate it. I’m not going to trade my Pokemon games in any time soon though.

CriteriaScoresOur Score
Storyline1 – 54
Gameplay1 – 53
Value/Cost1 – 53
Controls1 – 53
Length1 – 55

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