Palworld 1.0 review: A patently pleasing adventure held back by busywork

It’s been a long road for Palworld. The game launched into early access back in January 2024, meaning it’s been a full two and a half years since we first saw the absurdity that is a legally distinct Pokémon-with-guns.

That also means it’s been more than long enough for the novelty to wear off. I distinctly remember laughing with a friend at the revelation that human characters could be captured, despite the horrific implications. I remember discovering the “butcher” mechanic, which allows you to disassemble captured Pals for parts. It was weird, it was subversive, and that’s just part of what made it so engaging.

At its core, Palworld is a pretty standard survival-crafting affair that will be familiar to Steam players who enjoy whatever the latest viral hit is. You have to chop down trees, break apart rocks, and forage for food in order to continue exploring the massive open world. What sets Palworld apart from other games in the genre is, of course, the Pals.

Pals thrive in almost every corner of the land of Palpagos, and they come with a variety of unique powers and abilities that will help you to thrive in this hostile world. Yes, you can carry several Pals around with you in Pal Spheres and have them battle with the various monsters of the world, but that’s not their primary function.

Instead of spending hours at your base, crafting every item you need and keeping every piece of machinery functioning, moving items from one place to another, you can have your Pals do all of that. If there’s one thing that this legally distinct monster-collecting game does better than its inspirations, it’s giving every creature a use beyond a checklist.

Yes, you’re encouraged to catch ‘em all in Palworld, but that’s not where things end. Each creature has a suitability rating, making it better at certain tasks. For example, early Fire creature Foxparks can generate heat required to keep Furnaces going. Cattiva has hands, for some reason, and therefore can help craft items and buildings within your base. Grass types are often better at handling plantations, and you’ll definitely want some Pals that are able to tidy materials away into storage.

Each time you encounter a new creature, it has value beyond either battling or simply collecting them all. Even if it’s not suited for your party, it might be a great worker. Likewise, some Pals might not be ideal at keeping your base operating, but they might be fantastic mounts to ferry you around the world, once you craft a saddle. It makes the process of actually going to new locations and discovering new creatures that much more exciting, because they could potentially aid you in a variety of ways.

The base building mechanics allow for a great deal of flexibility and creativity, too. Many players – myself included – will likely just position whatever items are necessary around the base to keep things going. Yes, my bases are a mess. But the game gives you the tools to create towering structures, fortified walls, and a huge variety of furniture, both functional and decorative. If you want to spend hours designing a perfect home for your cute Pals, you’re free to do so. You can also put them to work in a dungeon-like environment, if you so wish.

“If you want to spend hours designing a perfect home for your cute Pals, you’re free to do so. You can also put them to work in a dungeon-like environment, if you so wish.”

When you’re not building and crafting back at the base, you’ll be exploring the world, moving between boss encounters and fast travel points that litter the environment. On foot, the world is truly massive and imposing, but once you acquire mounts – especially flying mounts – the world starts to feel a fair bit smaller. The game never quite manages to tug at your curiosity and drag you around the world for hours; instead, each time I left my base I was going to one place, for one thing – probably some kind of Ore – and flying over every obstacle on the way. Suddenly the world of Palworld felt less like a living, breathing world of mysterious creatures, and more like a series of POIs on an open world map.

Palworld 1.0 does a lot to remedy that. There’s a more defined main questline along with settlements and NPCs to visit and complete quests for, and it adds context to mysterious Tower Bosses and enemy factions. There’s also a finale that takes place on an absurdly large scale, and makes full use of Palworld’s huge open world for some stunning spectacle. Instead of endlessly crafting a long list of materials and resources so you can craft more materials and resources, there’s a narrative thread that better leads you through the game’s best moments towards its climax.

It’s not a cure-all, though. Yes, the world and story of Palworld feel better realized, and smart adjustments have been made in almost all aspects of the game since its early access launch to make for better, smoother game progression.

But Palworld can still feel rough. The devil is in the details, and the closer you look at Palworld, the worse it appears. Look too close at a tree, and you’ll see a surprisingly angular cylinder coated in what appears to be a realistic tree bark texture, not at all in keeping with the game’s aesthetic. Even with PC settings at their highest, distant cliff faces can be seen morphing into less-blobby, higher-detail versions of themselves. The UI is almost entirely unchanged since early access, and it still feels a bit too much like a generic template rather than something that is, aesthetically, Palworld.

And Palworld does have a defined aesthetic, one that comes to life with the game’s Tower Bosses. When going against a Tower Boss, you’re fighting both a Pal Tamer and their lead Pal at the same time, and the character designs look genuinely fantastic, especially when paired with the cinematic introduction each Tower Boss receives. These brim with a sense of style and personality that most of the game just doesn’t have.

Once the illusion is shattered, it can’t be rebuilt. As satisfying as building production lines and fancy weapons is, I can’t help but be aware of how much time I’ve spent chopping down trees, breaking rocks, automating those tasks, and then moving on to gathering rarer resources that are harder to automate. It feels like a treadmill – or maybe a hamster wheel – where progress is made, but feels potentially endless. With new Pal breeding techniques, mutations, and more, it feels as if there could be no end to upgrading your base, your Pals, your equipment.

There is something undeniably satisfying about building your character, base, and team of Pals, but it doesn’t last. As much fun as it is to collect powerful Pals and have them chop wood, the novelty wore off long ago. The further you make it into the game, the more difficult it is to progress, the more time you need to invest, and the more you see Palworld’s gameplay loop laid bare. The endgame goal of this survival-crafting game is to automate as much of the survival-crafting as possible. In a sense, it’s a detailed, multi-layered version of Cookie Clicker.