What’s The Deal With Palworld?

Palworld, when it launched in early access back in January 2024, reached over 2 million concurrent players on steam. This made it the second highest played game of all time on steam. As of February 22nd, it has sold over 15 million units. 

While I was interested in the game, more as a surprise cultural phenomenon than anything, I didn’t have any easy way to access it. It was available on PC and Xbox, the two platforms I don’t play on. However, in a playstation state of play, it was announced that Palworld would be coming to Playstation that very same day!

I resisted for a while, but last weekend I gave in and decided to check out the game. I wanted to understand what all the original hype was about. Since the original hype died off, I’ve heard shockingly little about the game. It had a booth at Tokyo Game Show, but I found it tough to gauge the interest in it. 

So what exactly is the deal with the “Pokemon with guns” game? Well, I’ll do my best to tell you, but this is a weird game to quantify, and has had a lot of controversy. It’s also the target of a recently filed lawsuit from Nintendo against Pocketpair (the Palworld developers) over patent rights infringement. Let’s dive in shall we? 

As many pointed out, Pokemon with guns is not an apt description. In terms of an easy comparison, this game is largely a survival game in the vein of something like Ark Survival Evolved. Honestly, the survival genre is not one I’m familiar with, so apologies if there are better parallels out there. 

Though, after I finished making a fairly generic character, one of the first things I did was start punching a tree to start collecting resources. From my knowledge this fits the survival genre pretty well. I collected a few resources, before eventually picking an area and building a terminal that would designate this area my base. 

At first, it feels like a pretty standard survival/base building game. You collect resources, set an area as a base, and start building things like a workstation to help you build tools, or a small house to sleep in. This makes your collection of resources easier, which lets you build more things, and the cycle continues. 

The wrinkle here is the creatures running around the world, the titular Pals. Now, one of the major controversies was the design of these creatures and how strikingly similar they are to various Pokemon. Personally, each creature usually just reminded me of a Pokemon that I had more fond feelings for. In terms of making me care about these creatures, I think this game largely fails. 

You can fight each creature in combat, either awkwardly throwing punches, or using clubs, bows, and eventually, guns. The combat is not terribly compelling, and might be one of the weakest areas of the game. Melee combat, which is what you start with, in particular feels terribly awkward. You hold down the right trigger to swing your weapon at set intervals and occasionally dodge roll out of the way. 

This is all governed by a stamina meter, which depletes as you do actions both in and out of combat, swinging your weapon or tool, climbing, sprinting, swimming, or hang gliding. I suppose it adds a bit of a management layer, but once you get bows and moved to ranged combat, stamina becomes less of a factor in combat, since ranged combat doesn’t use stamina. Stamina management almost feels like it was added out of obligation rather than being a meaningful aspect of the game. 

You can either kill the Pal you face in combat, if their HP reaches zero their model will ragdoll around, and Xs form over their eyes, and the in-game language does use the term kill, or you can catch them. At any time you can throw a “Pal sphere” at them, and try to catch them. This is easier if you lower their HP or apply a status ailment, fairly standard. 

It’s speculated that the catching mechanic is possibly going to be the target of Nintendo’s patent lawsuit. The sphere shakes up to 3 times before catching the target Pal, and this could be specific enough that Nintendo was able to patent the “spherical catching device that shakes before capture of a monster”. 

I don’t know a ton about patent law, but I feel like making game mechanics available to be patented is rather dangerous. Especially since patents may not be publicly available to game developers making future games. If I can’t easily look up every patent held by a company as litigious as Nintendo, how will I know what to avoid on the off chance that my game becomes popular and a target for their company? 

Granted, Palworld is rather blatantly “borrowing” from Pokemon, and it was long suspected that Nintendo would eventually go after the game, especially given its popularity. How that legal battle shakes out will be extremely interesting, and will set a precedent for the games industry more broadly. 

Digressions aside, once you actually capture a Pal, how you use them is rather different than something like Pokemon. Since combat is real time, and the player is an active participant, your Pal acts more like an NPC party member. You can throw them into the world, and if you begin attacking another Pal, they will aid you by using one of 3 possible moves they know. 

Typically, they go to a set position, then unleash each known move in succession. Enemy Pals tend to do this too, and it makes combat feel quite stilted. I attack for as long as I want, then when they begin attacking I dodge for a few seconds, then go back to attacking. If it wasn’t obvious, I think the combat in this game is bad. 

Where the fun is for me, is in base building and management. Your captured Pals can also be deployed to your base, and given a variety of tasks to undertake. Each Pal has a set of tasks they can perform at your base, from cutting down trees, to mining, to transporting resources. Finding the right combination of Pals to create a steady income of resources, while maintaining their food supply and happiness is a fun balancing act. 

Granted, the execution can be somewhat frustrating, as the AI pathing will often cause Pals to get stuck on objects. Assigning a Pal to a task involves picking them up and throwing them at the desired task, which is awkward. They can often refuse to eat food, or use facilities to relax, which causes them to quit working all together. 

Still, setting up your base, then taking a group of Pals on an adventure into the world, then returning to your base to collect the spoils collected in your absence is a fun loop. You continue to upgrade your base, requiring new resources, which require new facilities, which need different kinds of pals to operate. It’s a solid gameplay loop, but it takes a while to get going, and its execution has a lot of room for improvement. 

This game is still in early access. From what I can tell, this might be one of the first instances of a game launching on consoles while still being in early access. Early access is a much bigger topic than this article, but this game does feel like a rough draft that has potential if it was iterated upon. 

For me, I think this game ends up in a similar place to Dragon’s Dogma 2, I think it’s more interesting than I really seem to like it. Though, the friction in Dragon's Dogma felt intentional, whereas here it feels like either poor game design, or simply needs various refinements. 

I’m not sure exactly what the future roadmap for this game is, and some of the changes that I would like probably go beyond the scope of what they will add. If all that’s added is more content, like Pals or bosses, I doubt I’ll be coming back. If they change up the combat and sand off some of the rough edges, there’s a pretty fun game in here. 

I’m glad I checked out Palworld, but I think the hype died off quickly because outside of a genre blending novelty, this game doesn’t have much staying power. After a few hours the rough edges begin to grate, and you feel like the game is simply going to be more of the same. It lacks the charm of Pokemon that makes you invested, and the gameplay lacks depth to make the repetition interesting.