Imagine this: You slowly open your sons bedroom door, and on the other side you catch him in the “act”. In this brief moment he quickly reaches over to his school notebook to pull it over his crotch, and simultaneously he grabs his pencil and proceeds to rest his fingers on his chin, as to ponder. You know he wasn’t doing his homework, but nonetheless you pretend you didn’t see anything, release a sigh and close the door. This is the Palworld experience.

The Pal’s are useless. You teleport into your base to watch them looking at walls, picking up the same stone over and over, woodcutting thin air, and taking the longest possible pathway to any destination. Like your son, these Pal’s aren’t doing their work, but they sure as hell like to pretend they are.

I can’t get over how useless they feel. If you need something, go get it yourself. The only Pal’s that actually serve a purpose are the ones you have in your party, like Digtoise with his signature item that allows him to tear through stone/ore/coal like it’s nothing. While your base will accumulate stuff passively, it’s nowhere near as quick as it needs to be. I set up two mining bases, one for ore, the other for coal. These bases would sometimes net around 160 ore, but most times only around 70 ore a day, and in one trip I can get more than an in-game days worth of passive mining. I don’t know if this is a bug, or what’s going wrong, but no matter how many ways I try to optimize these bases, they feel useless. To see if my theory was correct, I played a second character, and while it took me easily 20+ hours to get to level 30 on my first character – the one where I relied on my Pal’s – it took me just over 7 hours to make the same progress on my second character, where I rushed a Digtoise and primarily did all the mining myself. Now I know this is early access, but these Pal’s need serious work on their AI, and I’d say gameplay wise this is one of the primary issues I’ve experienced.

On top of this, servers have huge issues with lag and server memory leaks. There is an infinite load bug, and many ways to have your character stuck in an animation, with no way of switching weapons/firing and sometimes moving. You get these problems back to back, where the servers lagging, you get stuck in an animation, relog only to get stuck in an infinite load screen, restart game just to temporarily fix these issues only for them to happen an hour later.

If these major bugs/performance issues get fixed, as well as Pal AI, the game is actually really good.

The visuals, gunplay, and feeling of chucking a sphere and catching a Pal – this is the core of the games design, and they really nailed this part. The exploration, while simple in scope, really works, and even has some “wow” moments with massive landscapes unveiling themselves behind steep mountains/cliffs. The game isn’t just a joke or a bad clone of the games its heavily inspired by. It’s genuinely really good, and with enough time you’ll learn to appreciate the thought that went into Palworld’s progression, map layout, and spawn locations.

However, gameplay wise there are a few things I didn’t quite enjoy. Base building requires a tedious amount of steps and cursor placements to make things connect. You have a lack of parts to really make your dream building come to life, and most of the time it will come out looking like a stubby stone cube. Not only that, but good luck with raids, as future raids will setback your little condo completely, with fire that your Pal’s aren’t smart enough to put out. Pal’s also need a lot of stuff spaced out for their AI to work properly, as well as flat land with no steep drop-offs for them to get stuck in.

Another issue is climbing. Unlike Breath of the Wild, you cannot use jumping to grab onto the ledge at the last moment. Instead your character just slides down the cliff face.

Balancing in Palworld is weird. Grass types have practically instant animation attacks that shoot really fast, but pretty much every other type doesn’t. Making them super annoying to fight, regardless of level. Leveling up stats is super unbalanced. If you don’t focus on weight/health you’re going to slow the game down a lot, making multiple trips back due to being encumbered/dead. In fact, weight is so important because wood/stone/ore/coal is ridiculously scaled, where even at the start you’ll struggle after cutting down a few trees/rocks. Stamina and damage on the other hand feel useless to get up, because mounts remove stamina issues, and you never want to overkill enemies you’re trying to catch for leveling.

Last point is music/sound effects. While not an issue regarding bugs/gameplay, I feel like there needs to be more variety and less repetition to these sounds. I’m becoming increasingly more aggravated by the battle music/crackling fire sounds as I play. Also picking up multiple items will blast out your ears with 100 sound effects stacking on top of each other.

Overall, the game has a lot of issues, but it’s an early access title and the developer seems aware of a lot of these issues already. The game is good despite all of this, and I’d even go as far saying it’s better than any Pokémon game I’ve played in the past decade. While it doesn’t carry the same charm as the Pokémon series does, if you want something akin to a real time Legends Arceus or Scarlet/Violet, with better exploration, more gameplay loops, more fun to be had with friends, and in some cases better optimization (singleplayer definitely the case), Palworld provides that experience.

Imagine this: You slowly open your sons bedroom door, and on the other side you catch him in the “act”. In this brief moment he quickly reaches over to his school notebook to pull it over his crotch, and simultaneously he grabs his pencil and proceeds to rest his fingers on his chin, as to ponder. You know he wasn’t doing his homework, but nonetheless you pretend you didn’t see anything, release a sigh and close the door. This is the Palworld experience. The Pal’s are useless. You teleport into your base to watch them looking at walls, picking up the same stone over and over, woodcutting thin air, and taking the longest possible pathway to any destination. Like your son, these Pal’s aren’t doing their work, but they sure as hell like to pretend they are. I can’t get over how useless they feel. If you need something, go get it yourself. The only Pal’s that actually serve a purpose are the ones you have in your party, like Digtoise with his signature item that allows him to tear through stone/ore/coal like it’s nothing. While your base will accumulate stuff passively, it’s nowhere near as quick as it needs to be. I set up two mining bases, one for ore, the other for coal. These bases would sometimes net around 160 ore, but most times only around 70 ore a day, and in one trip I can get more than an in-game days worth of passive mining. I don’t know if this is a bug, or what’s going wrong, but no matter how many ways I try to optimize these bases, they feel useless. To see if my theory was correct, I played a second character, and while it took me easily 20+ hours to get to level 30 on my first character – the one where I relied on my Pal’s – it took me just over 7 hours to make the same progress on my second character, where I rushed a Digtoise and primarily did all the mining myself. Now I know this is early access, but these Pal’s need serious work on their AI, and I’d say gameplay wise this is one of the primary issues I’ve experienced. On top of this, servers have huge issues with lag and server memory leaks. There is an infinite load bug, and many ways to have your character stuck in an animation, with no way of switching weapons/firing and sometimes moving. You get these problems back to back, where the servers lagging, you get stuck in an animation, relog only to get stuck in an infinite load screen, restart game just to temporarily fix these issues only for them to happen an hour later. If these major bugs/performance issues get fixed, as well as Pal AI, the game is actually really good. The visuals, gunplay, and feeling of chucking a sphere and catching a Pal – this is the core of the games design, and they really nailed this part. The exploration, while simple in scope, really works, and even has some “wow” moments with massive landscapes unveiling themselves behind steep mountains/cliffs. The game isn’t just a joke or a bad clone of the games its heavily inspired by. It’s genuinely really good, and with enough time you’ll learn to appreciate the thought that went into Palworld’s progression, map layout, and spawn locations. However, gameplay wise there are a few things I didn’t quite enjoy. Base building requires a tedious amount of steps and cursor placements to make things connect. You have a lack of parts to really make your dream building come to life, and most of the time it will come out looking like a stubby stone cube. Not only that, but good luck with raids, as future raids will setback your little condo completely, with fire that your Pal’s aren’t smart enough to put out. Pal’s also need a lot of stuff spaced out for their AI to work properly, as well as flat land with no steep drop-offs for them to get stuck in. Another issue is climbing. Unlike Breath of the Wild, you cannot use jumping to grab onto the ledge at the last moment. Instead your character just slides down the cliff face. Balancing in Palworld is weird. Grass types have practically instant animation attacks that shoot really fast, but pretty much every other type doesn’t. Making them super annoying to fight, regardless of level. Leveling up stats is super unbalanced. If you don’t focus on weight/health you’re going to slow the game down a lot, making multiple trips back due to being encumbered/dead. In fact, weight is so important because wood/stone/ore/coal is ridiculously scaled, where even at the start you’ll struggle after cutting down a few trees/rocks. Stamina and damage on the other hand feel useless to get up, because mounts remove stamina issues, and you never want to overkill enemies you’re trying to catch for leveling. Last point is music/sound effects. While not an issue regarding bugs/gameplay, I feel like there needs to be more variety and less repetition to these sounds. I’m becoming increasingly more aggravated by the battle music/crackling fire sounds as I play. Also picking up multiple items will blast out your ears with 100 sound effects stacking on top of each other. Overall, the game has a lot of issues, but it’s an early access title and the developer seems aware of a lot of these issues already. The game is good despite all of this, and I’d even go as far saying it’s better than any Pokémon game I’ve played in the past decade. While it doesn’t carry the same charm as the Pokémon series does, if you want something akin to a real time Legends Arceus or Scarlet/Violet, with better exploration, more gameplay loops, more fun to be had with friends, and in some cases better optimization (singleplayer definitely the case), Palworld provides that experience.