Palworld Is More than Just Pokemon With Guns (Early Access Impressions)

Pocketpair’s Palworld has since become one of the most highly anticipated sandbox-style games to start 2024 off with, and a lot of that definitely has to do with the incredible public intrigue around its concept. From the first teaser trailer that hit the internet two years ago, the gaming community has affirmatively dubbed it “Pokemon with guns”, which is a conversation starter on its own.

From the variety of adorable creatures that are undeniably reminiscent of classic Pocket Monsters, to the fact that some of them are indeed capable of wielding firearms among other weirdly human skills, it almost seems like an eccentrically cute satirical take on the phenomenon many of us grew up with. It’s equal parts fascinating and perplexing, but more than anything by far too cute to ignore, so I took the plunge with gusto.

While I hadn’t necessarily played a lot of different Pokemon games through the years, my childhood was deeply ingrained in the prime of its culture in the late 90’s, and it’s as beloved as it ever was to me. Of course, that would end up being a big factor that inevitably and magnetically drew me to Palworld (as it surely will for many), and so far I am actually quite impressed at this daring and whimsically cheeky conceptual mish-mosh.

By that, I’m referring to this game being an open world, sandbox survival-of-the-fittest adventure that’s filled to the brim with a vast array of adorably animated creatures called Pals that are ripe for collecting in a place known as, you guessed it, Palpagos. Don’t worry, the silly and clever word play doesn’t stop there whatsoever.

When I booted up the game for the first time, I took notice of a ‘Survival Guide’ right in the Main Menu, and boy is it full of very helpful information. It was a clear, first-hand indicator that Palworld was going to be more complex than I initially anticipated, and that had me both excited and understandably nervous. Nonetheless, I commend the choice of putting this right at the start for new players.

In true sandbox fashion, the game has you create your own instanced ‘world’ to start your adventure in, either by yourself or with friends. I opted to be a solo… ex-pal-orer (sorry, I had to try), and there’s also the option to adjust the overall difficulty of your experience. I chose ‘Casual’ with no shame, because who wants to lose their precious Pals after an innocent stumble into the wrong area? If you want to sweat it out though, there is the ‘Normal’ and ‘Hard’ options that will have you essentially starting from square one if you slip up.

I then got to the character creator. Keeping in line with the anime-inspired aesthetic, the customizations are all varying degrees of cute-meets-cool. For an Early Access launch, the variety of options is pretty good, and for how certain physical aspects can be adjusted, let’s just say people are definitely going to hopefully not get too carried away.

The beginning sees your character mysteriously washed up onto the shores of Palpagos, clad in some prehistoric-looking garb and little else. Nearby in the sand is a tablet that beckons you with a cryptic message to seek out towers and a giant tree on the island. Despite the giant proverbial question mark over my head about how I ended up here and who happened to leave that tablet just for me, I ventured forth.

I soon came face-to-face with the game’s true open-world, and even at a first glimpse it honestly does not disappoint. The environmental diversity is vibrant and well-constructed, stretches literally as far as the eye can see, and after several hours of exploration I found myself just wanting to keep going and going. As integral as that is to this type of game, they definitely hit that nail on the head so far.

To backpedal a bit, Palworld starts you off with a practical tutorial that takes you through many of the game’s fundamentals, from learning how to build a base with tools, weapons, and shelter structures, to solving hunger issues, and of course figuring out how to find and collect Pals, the true endgame we all care about. They certainly aren’t hard to find starting out as they are literally everywhere.

To start building your collection, you’ll need plenty of Pal Spheres and at least something to bonk them on the head with. A Pal has to be sufficiently weakened before you can capture it, and the process is easy to pick up after just a few throws. A flashy, modern HUD depicts the percentage chance of a capture, and before I knew it I was knee-deep in Lamballs and Cattivas. You can have a party of 5 Pals at anytime with you, while the rest go to the aptly named Palbox, and categorized in your Paldex (yes yes, we know).

While the fluffy little creatures you encounter in the beginning don’t pose too much of a threat, the further you progress across Palpagos, the bigger and more formidable they get. Not only can they hurl natural attacks per their given element, they can follow it up with bullets, from an actual gun. Where they learned such a skill is perhaps the biggest, most glaring mystery I’ve found so far.

Thankfully, I’ve yet to see a Pal actually brandish a Glock at me, but the ability seems to be one primarily aimed at base defense. You can have a set number of Pals housed at your base, and some will actually embark on productive tasks like wood-chopping, stone-milling, tending to crops, and even helping you craft items. Not only that, they’ll also act as a line of defense against raids, which can include ambushes of predatory Pals that want you for lunch. Survival of the fittest after all.

From what I’ve played so far, the game honestly handles itself quite well. For such a huge open map full of active characters, I can’t recall a moment where I actually experienced any amount of lag, frame-rate drop, or bugs of any kind. The game never froze or crashed once, and for Early Access that’s a job well done in my opinion. Granted, I am on a well-furnished PC and running a solo excursion, so I can’t speak to the multiplayer experience just yet. That may yield its own challenges.

For quips I do have, things I feel could still be improved, the main one is probably the crafting mechanics. Given that it’s something absolutely integral to a day-to-day survival adventure, this particular aspect of the gameplay should be as polished as possible.

The mechanics themselves are not bad at all. They’re pretty easy to understand, the resources required are often in relative abundance, and all you need is the right workbench to get things going. However, most of the items have weirdly different crafting speeds, and some are agonizingly slow. Not only that, you have to sit and hold the same button nonstop until you’ve finished that slow craft. It feels cumbersome and inefficient, even at beginner levels. There is the ability to up your work speed in your stats as you level up, we’ll see how much that contributes to improvement.

Aside from that, my other quips are primarily exploration-related. Climbing is a thing in the game, but it’s surprisingly not covered in the otherwise fantastic Survival Guide, and it’s very, very finicky. There isn’t a button for you to press to do it, rather it’s automatic when you approach a climbable surface. However, there’s no indicated way to show what’s climbable and what’s not, so it can make for some awkward slips. Thankfully, fall damage in the game seems to surprisingly be at a minimum (in my experience, at least).

Your character can also swim through water, to great relief, but the action as a whole is… again, a bit awkward. The water physics unfortunately leave much to be desired, with my character sometimes just wading through a semi-transparent floor until a few very small ripples render on a delay. The audible feedback from it is also…egh. It could definitely be better, but I wouldn’t call it a game-breaking immersion issue. It’s Early Access so it’s certainly forgivable right now.

From my dozen or so hours into the game so far, the whole experience of Palworld has feverishly tickled my curiosity in some of the best ways. Pocketpair has brought forth a uniquely daring creature capture IP, given its rather obvious inspirations, and it fuses genres in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet players everywhere are beyond anxious and eager to see it for themselves.

It’s proven to be one of the most fascinating experimentations in gaming to observe, and as my journey across Palpagos continues, we’ll see if it survives the stigma and lives up to the hype.