Palworld Review: Little means, big ambitions
, by Enzo
Palworld is one of those games that generated a lot of buzz long before its release. Billed as an open-world survival adventure combining creature capture, crafting, exploration, and combat, Pocketpair’s title quickly sparked as much curiosity as it did debate, particularly due to its visual similarities to Pokémon. Yet behind this questionable first impression lies a far more ambitious experience, one that draws primarily on games like ARK: Survival Evolved or even Valheim to deliver a surprisingly effective mix.
With over two million players at launch and no fewer than 400,000 reviews on Steam to date, 94% of which are positive, it’s already one of the platform’s biggest hits. After an Early Access period marked by these stratospheric numbers and numerous updates, Palworld now stands as a much more polished game, enriched with new content and refined game balance. Does this official 1.0 release live up to all the promise it showed at launch? It’s time to set off on an adventure to find out if this phenomenon truly lives up to its reputation.
A rocky start
For those who’ve been stuck in a cave without internet since 2024, let’s briefly recap the Palworld phenomenon, from its early access launch in 2024 to its official release in July 2026. From the very first days, social media was flooded with comparisons between Pals and Pokémon creatures, with some users going so far as to accuse the studio of plagiarism.
The controversy took on a new dimension when Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed lawsuits against Pocketpair. Surprisingly, the legal actions, most of which would ultimately fail, did not center on artistic plagiarism, but rather on a series of patents related to certain game mechanics, particularly those involving the capture and use of creatures.
Reluctantly, and in order to limit risks, Pocketpair gradually modified certain features of its game, while continuing to expand its content. Two years after its launch, the studio finally succeeded in transforming a curiosity that had become a global phenomenon into a far more comprehensive game, whose official release in July 2026 marked the culmination of a development process marked by both successes and controversies.
Palworld is just a copy of Pokémon: a fair comparison or an exaggeration?
For someone who isn’t very familiar with the scene, it’s hard to argue: Palworld looks like Pokémon with guns. In reality, it’s much more complicated than that. So yes, there are very few games that feature creatures this sleek and colorful: the comparison to Pokémon is immediate, and it wouldn’t be honest to deny it. Now, if we really look at what the game Palworld is as a whole, give or take a mechanic or two, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Nintendo franchise. On the contrary, it bears a striking resemblance to ARK: Survival Evolved.
Reducing Palworld to just Pokémon with weapons is ultimately a comparison that’s as easy as it is reductive. While both franchises are (partly) based on capturing creatures, their gameplay philosophies are radically different. Whereas Pokémon is first and foremost a collection-focused RPG with turn-based battles and story-driven progression, Palworld is a true open-world survival game, where exploration, resource management, base building, crafting, automation, and cooperation take center stage. To understand this, let’s now take a look at Palworld’s game systems as a whole.
Pals: almost a game in their own right
Pals are the game’s central theme, its backbone. They’re used for… capturing, raising, trading, battling, breeding, exploring, providing passive bonuses, working, and let me check: sacrificing too?
With over 200 creatures to capture, there’s plenty to do. Each one has its own stats, as well as passive and active skills. These skills are useful in absolutely every aspect of the game, which all interlock with striking overall coherence.
Collecting them is fun, and showing off the rarest ones to your friends is great too, but using them is even better. In addition to an interesting combat system, though one that could be improved technically, Pals are useful in countless aspects of the game. Thanks to their passive abilities, dozens of creatures serve as mounts, whether on land, in water, or in the air.
Others allow you to improve your aim, reveal hidden resources, boost your stats, or even grant bonuses in activities like fishing and much more. If some players feel a sadistic streak within them, they can cut up absolutely all of them to cook them on the barbecue, or sacrifice them to fuse their corpses together, thereby improving the stats of the Pal that absorbs them. A form of cannibalism, so to speak.
PocketPair has thought of strategy enthusiasts too. It’s actually possible to train and create Pals with perfect stats using various items and mechanics, such as breeding. Here, a whole field of genetics comes into play, where you aim to breed parent Pals with specific traits so that those traits are passed on to a Pal child. These Pals will be used for endgame content or even PvP battles.
For those looking for fun above all else, try a flamethrower fox or a penguin that fires missiles. Thrills guaranteed. Finally, and most importantly, Pals also serve a vital function in the game: they’re used in players’ various bases. This aspect, like many others, is much more comprehensive than you might think, and we’ll cover it in more detail later.
Palworld and its incredible depth
Where to begin? That’s not only the question we’re asking ourselves here as we continue our review, but also what we’ve been thinking since the very first hours of gameplay. There’s so much to do and so much to talk about! Now that we’ve realized how important Pals are, let’s talk about the various systems and mechanics that make up the game.
Survival game fans won’t feel lost: at the start of the experience, after hunting down the Pals in the area and bragging about our best catches, we dive right into gathering wood and stone. These initial resources obviously allow us to build the game’s basic elements and set up our first camp, and that’s when we’ll begin to grasp the sheer scale of the game.
Once we reach the first experience level, we’ll discover the technology unlock tree. Equipment for players and Pals, a variety of weapons, a production workshop, food, ores, and many other extravagant items await. The list is very long and extensive, but it’s also incredibly clear, so you never feel lost. This is one of the game’s major strengths: its ease of understanding despite its palpable depth. The recipes aren’t hidden; you immediately understand what you have access to, what you’ll soon have access to, and how to craft it all.
Resources are being gathered: it’s time to build a base and put the Pals to work to make the most of their skills. In addition to their combat stats and passive abilities, these magnificent creatures have natural aptitudes for work. Some can craft items, others can plant seeds, carry loot, generate electricity, or even stoke the fireplace for various cooking tasks, and much more.
Behind their cute appearance lies a complex optimization puzzle. While it doesn’t require the level of strategic thinking found in Satisfactort playing in the middle of the night after a 10-hour session, Palworld lets you manage your colony of Pals like a small army. Activating, deactivating, and upgrading abilities; Pals working in pairs; optimizing space in camps; assigning them to specific tasks; managing troop morale and hunger it’s practically a mini-management game in its own right unfolding right within our bases. Everything fits together surprisingly well, and best of all, it’s genuinely fun to optimize all our camps.
Progression and pacing
All of the mechanics and systems discussed above provide experience for the player and/or their active team of Pals. While this aspect may seem terribly conventional, it actually offers an impressive degree of freedom: no matter what you do, you make progress. Thus, a player who doesn’t particularly want to focus on breeding, boss arenas, or even fishing can easily concentrate on capturing the Pals they see to advance through the game. The game offers relatively little guidance and doesn’t confine the player to specific tasks, allowing you to truly do whatever appeals to you most. This aspect contributes greatly to the game’s addictive nature.
Want to completely set the story aside? By all means, go ahead. A sudden urge to explore an area that’s too high-level for you and die over and over again while trying to capture Pals that are too strong? It’s entirely possible, though the savviest players will have already noticed that you can easily acquire more powerful Pals through fishing. Yes, that mechanic that lets you catch (more or less successfully) creatures without having to fight them directly through a mini-game.
Here again, the game has cleverly laid the groundwork. Having a Pal that’s too powerful would ruin the game and progression, which is why a system that scales the Pal’s level to match the player’s has been built into the game, allowing you to enjoy your new acquisition without disrupting the game’s balance. The skill tree levels up fairly quickly, offering players a sense of discovery and tangible new features throughout the adventure.
The overall pacing in Palworld is excellent and well thought out. The map is well-designed, featuring varied biomes and plenty of opportunities for exploration. If we really had to nitpick, we’d say that once you reach high levels, more specifically between ranks 70 and 80, it can take a while to earn experience for your favorite creatures. You’ll need to choose your team wisely, as it can quickly become discouraging to try to level up dozens of creatures to the maximum level.
Multiplayer content
One aspect we haven’t discussed yet is multiplayer content. While it’s perfectly playable solo, Palworld takes a whole new dimension when played with (or against) friends. Whether it’s working together through guilds in private matches or playing directly online via PvP battles or online servers, there’s plenty to do here.
This collaborative approach works particularly well thanks to the Pals’ various specializations, with each one able to contribute to the camp’s economy while players divide roles among exploration, gathering, building, or combat. Battles against powerful bosses, dungeon expeditions, and raids also become more intense when undertaken as a group, enhancing the strategic aspect of each encounter.
It’s not perfect (not by a long shot!)
Despite the significant progress made since its early access launch, Palworld still has several flaws that prevent it from reaching excellence… But to be honest, these are largely overshadowed by the game’s overall experience, which itself borders on excellence.
The fishing mechanic, for example, struggles to win you over: while enjoyable early in the game, its mechanics eventually lack consistency, and its appeal is quickly overshadowed by automated fishing at camp, which is far more profitable and passive. The high tiers of crafting seem to slow down progression, something that may sound great on paper, but that sometimes results in an accumulation of constraints that are more frustrating than truly stimulating. Having increasingly demanding crafting recipes is fine, but constraints of gathering resources? Not so much.
As for the game’s map, while the new regions impress with their visual richness and level design, the contrast with certain historic areas highlights uneven artistic quality. Similarly, battles against new bosses and the end-game narrative gain in spectacle and dynamism, even if the technical execution remains somewhat rough at times, with erratic hitboxes or lackluster AI.
Tested on PC. See our rating policy here.
9/10
All in all, Palworld is a pleasant surprise and offers an experience that, while not perfect, is well-rounded, addictive, and deeply fun to explore. While at first glance it might seem like a very standard survival game with a few colorful creatures, the game’s depth and substantial amount of content manage to win over those who give it a try.
Despite a messy launch fraught with pitfalls and plenty of trouble along the way, Pocketpair has supported the game and followed its evolution closely, to the point where it now offers an experience that ranks among the must-plays of the year in the survival-craft genre. Working with the resources at its disposal, Palworld demonstrated real ambition from the very beginning, and it has been able to live up to it. Despite occasional technical shortcomings and some inconsistencies in terms of execution, all the game’s elements are well-crafted and fit together seamlessly, making for a memorable adventure. Absolutely nothing is perfect in Palworld, but the game as a whole is.
- + Highly addictive right from the start
- + Plenty of content
- + Lots of options and customization
- + Interesting and rewarding exploration
- + Well-designed co-op
- + Great endgame content and Pal optimization
- + Really intuitive despite its depth
- + Reasonable price
- - Technically clunky in some areas
- - Execution is uneven at times
- - The endgame lacks a bit of polish
- - Story takes a back seat