Personally, I’ve got mixed feelings playing version 1.0 of Palworld. Despite being greatly addictive and engaging, this game still feels somewhat lacking and unfinished. To substantiate my point of view, I’ll put it this way: Pros of the game are indisputable, since it’s packed with multiple solid mechanics that will make you forget about any other titles for hours to come. Base construction is fun, catching pals and using them as workforce is even more fun, because the shrewd system of traits combined with limited number of pals that can be assigned to the base makes you think strategically at higher level of difficulty, especially when exploring mid- and late-game content. Also, it goes without saying that the overall design of the pals, aside from certain obviously inspired-by-some-particular-Nintendo-games elements, are superb (with few exceptions). Moreover, the world feels much more alive than in previous versions, and packed with ester eggs, secrets, references to other games and real-world cultures and so on. Thus, overall exploration, battles, base management, visible and feasible progression with every unlocked piece of tech feels extremely satisfying.
Nonetheless, there’s a couple of downsides that may spoil the impression and make you keep wondering why such a great game still feels raw and unfinished. The first and most vivid one is the story, lore and their presentation. Players keep comparing Palworld with Pokemon series due to obvious reasons, and it’s quite understandable. But the approach to the presentation of the story in these two titles differs like a forest hut and a Disney castle: the Pokemon series has always been good at presenting characters, plot-important events, foes, legendary Pokemon and so on with cutscenes, well-directed dialogs (despite intentionally being stripped of any VA/VO), camera angles and so on; Palworld in this regard is a lackluster in more than one way: the story here – the main plot – exists, and that’s it. It’s hardly explained, most of the dialog is just poorly translated walls of text, and all the cutscenes in the game consist of intro/ending sequences, 8 presentations of the tower bosses (yeah, they look cool, but its senseless since this is the first and, probably, the last time players will ever see them, and their backgrounds, personalities and features are being buried under bland NPC responses, some text notes here and there, and that’s it). Main plot seems mostly like an afterthought than a driving force of progression, which means this very progression looks like this: players are not inspired by “I’m so thrilled! What’s gonna happen next! I want the continuation of the story!!! More cool characters and cutscenes!” emotional response but are mechanically pushed forward by inability to eliminate enemies in certain arears “Okay, Tower 3 Boss, here we go! Oh my, they trashed us good. We must unlock next tech tier level and craft new gun, armor and ammo. Let’s grind and roll! Once we gear up, we can go challenge Tower Boss 4 as well” and that’s it. As for the bosses, their difficulty varies greatly, but it’s obvious they’ve been designed to withstand assault of 2-3 players at least, which means there will be a huge problem to fight them solo. And this difficulty spikes will be getting more and more vivid, especially while exploring endgame content. Some Pals will get oneshot, and some will oneshot the player. Local balance still requires polishing for months, if not for years.
Thus, as a conclusion, I must say that PalWorld is a combination of great ideas, solid gameplay core mechanics, fun sandbox gameplay, flexible multiplayer settings and extremely poor execution of everting plot-related, except for the presentation of Tower Bosses. At some point, the game gets grindy and boring and even entering endgame content stage won’t bring you enough satisfaction and motivation to progress further due to the lack of feasible story progression and plot mysteries to unveil. However, it still can give you hundreds (if not thousands) hours of fun sandbox gameplay and multiplayer shenanigans, where you can explore the overwhelmingly gigantic world of PalWorld to your heart’s content.
