Game info

• Title Palworld
• Developer Pocketpair
• Publisher Pocketpair
• Year 2024
• Platforms MacOS, Playstation 5
• Genre Action

In this game, you can peacefully live alongside mysterious creatures known as Pals or risk your life to drive off a ruthless poaching syndicate. Pals can be used to fight and breed, or they can be made to work on farms or factories. Collect all kinds of exciting Pals to fight, farm, build, and work for you in this completely new multiplayer, open world survival and crafting game!

Player Select

I’m not sure if this game would have particularly jumped out at me as a must-play but it was released on the Mac in February and I want to support such endeavours, so gave it a go. I didn’t know anything about it going in and thought it was going to be a bit more hardcore than it initially was - the cover makes it look quite aggressive, but maybe I just didn’t get that far.

It’s in the Game

The game is designed, I think, to be multiplayer and that’s not something that interests me, so potentially I was already on the back foot being fully focused on the single player experience. But I kicked off an started exploring the world, and I was surprised by how good it looked and how cute the Pals were. At this early stage in the game it was mainly lambs and chickens but they are cute.

I found the controls quite difficult, it’s not always obvious how to make something happen and I spent quite a long time figuring out how to throw a PalSphere, only to waste them by pressing the right button unexpectedly. When I was playing on the Mac, I tried using a controller but it ended up being a weird mix of controller and trackpad to make things happen, so I thought I’d switch to the Playstation and see if it helped focus the mind a little.

It did help controller-wise, still a bit of confusion when doing something for the first time, but I do think I was making progress on that front. Where I really fell down is just not wanting to engage the Pals in the way the game wants. Attack them, capture them, put them to work, but they’re so cute, why would I want to do that? It reminds me a lot of Pokemon, and that’s one that never really did appeal to me either.

I think there’s a lot to explore and the world is quite fun to run around and discover. I barely scratched the surface, but I also know that it was plenty enough for me.

Thoughts

Overall, I think you have to like a specific collection style game to get into this, and even with that I think you have to be in quite a dedicated and concentrating mood to focus on what you need to do and where you’re going. At the early stage I was playing, the tasks and instructions were quite detailed so you were never wandering around aimlessly, but equally you have the freedom to explore as you like. It’s not for me, but I can totally see how it appeals for those multiplayer, world-building kind of players.

Rating: 2 / 5