Palworld Review: An Open-World Game You Can't Miss
We had the privilege of experiencing the highly imaginative survival and base-building game Palworld in recent days, where you can capture Pals and make them work like slaves. When we first introduced this game, the array of bizarre gameplay elements and the fearsome atmosphere where Pals are dismembered for food initially earned it a low score of 7. However, after actually playing it, we found it to be more fun than expected and quite an enjoyable experience.
Built with Unreal Engine 5, the world is not stunningly beautiful, but decent, and the overall color scheme is quite vibrant and comfortable. The water effects also look quite good. There are survival elements such as satiety and temperature that one needs to keep an eye on. As usual, we started by felling trees and mining, but soon these tedious tasks were handed over to the Pals.
To survive in this world, you must first find a place to establish your Pal Terminal, which serves as the center of your base. The Pal Terminal is essentially your Pal storage, where you can keep many Pals you've captured. You can choose up to 5 Pals to join your team for adventures, while assigning a few others as workers for tasks within your base. Initially, you can only deploy one Pal as a worker, but upgrading your Pal Terminal increases the number of Pals you can deploy.
To upgrade the Pal Terminal, you need to complete upgrade missions issued by the terminal. These missions act as a guide, leading you to build essential facilities for progression to ensure a good gaming experience. These are unlocked by spending Technology Points as your character reaches the required level and are not too difficult to complete.
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Work with Pal
Having Pals work for you is a core feature of the game, and it's much more fun and interesting than you'd expect. Building and crafting at your base requires labor, which takes time to complete. Once you've progressed a bit, you simply can't keep up on your own and need to entrust your Pals with managing the daily building and operation of the base.
All tasks at the base are divided into 12 categories, such as Kindling, Cooling, Ranching, and Lumbering. For example, to operate a wheat field, you first need Pals with crafting skills to build it, then those with planting skills to sow the seeds, and those with watering skills to water the plants. Once the wheat is ripe, those capable of transportation will move the wheat to nearby chests for use in the mill. You forgot the hardest part! Oh yeah..? It needs to be harvested before it can be transported. The wheat is processed into flour in the mill by watering, and then baked into bread by Pals skilled in Kindling, either in ovens or over campfires.
The produced bread can be placed in feed baskets for the Pals to eat and increase their work efficiency, while some goes into the refrigerator for me to enjoy, which in turn requires Pals with "Cooling skills" to maintain. This series of tasks alone would take forever if done by humans alone, not to mention countless other tasks like tree felling, stone mining, and smelting.
Different Pals have different work skills, and each type of work skill has innate proficiency levels specific to each species. For example, the Blazing Dragon is not only excellent at kindling fires but also has a Level 3 Transporting capability. In addition, each Pal has various passive traits that further affect their combat and work abilities, and these are randomly assigned. Even Pals of the same species will have different passive traits. Those with traits like Artisan, Workaholic, or Diet Lover are worth cultivating. While those with Sloth, Clumsy,
or Bottomless Stomach are best used as raw materials to enhance other Pals, unless they have excellent combat traits.
To make identification easier, you can also rename your Pals. Furthermore, Pals have Hunger and SAN values; working or fighting slowly decreases SAN. Low SAN leads to frequent breaks or lethargy, so it's important to ensure they rest and eat well. Building facilities like hot springs can effectively restore SAN, while actions such as treating them with medicine to speed up their work will cause a sharp decline in SAN. Pals with the "Positive Thinker" trait can last a little longer.
As you progress through the game and your level increases, you will gradually unlock countless facilities and items that require a large workforce to operate. Therefore, you need to attract various Pals from all over the world to enrich your Pal pool and strategically allocate and optimize your Pal workforce based on your base's current situation to ensure it runs efficiently. This is quite an interesting aspect, so you can't just let a Pal work because it looks cute, you know? No, I can! Pleasing the eye is also a task. You can't replace the only penguin who can water with a handsome Pal and leave the watering to me. Yes, there you are. In a way, you are a Pal too. In this regard, you can either exploit your Pals with arduous labor or treat them well and make your base a paradise for Pals, which I always argue about.
How about killing this one? How can you think of killing those in our house? Apart from the rich and fascinating settings, the design of Pal movements in the game is also quite excellent. Pals move adorably and are equipped with various animation modules. For example, different Pals have unique carrying postures, bathing movements, and reactions to petting. While felling trees and mining,
some small Pals swing axes and pickaxes, while others, like boars, dig stones with their tusks, Crown Dragons knock down trees with their tails, and Purple Mist Deer fell trees with their antlers.
This lifelike portrayal of Pals, as if they are endowed with souls, significantly enhances the immersive experience and gives even a single-player game the impression that your base is full of life. As for the gameplay of survival and building with Pals, the experience already available in the early access version is quite impressive. I think it is very well done.
Fight with Pal
Next, let's look at the combat aspect of Pals, which is also quite fun. Firstly, Pals can level up like players and gain experience through combat and work. There are nine attributes such as Fire, Ground, Dragon, etc., and some Pals can have two attributes, for example, the small penguin possesses both Water and Ice attributes. Then each Pal has a "Partner Skill," which is a unique ability inherent to each Pal type, highlighting the distinctive characteristics of the species. For example, the small sheep can be used as a shield, the chicken lays eggs, the fire fox can act as a flamethrower, some can be used as flying mounts, and others can increase the attack power of specific attribute Pals in the team, and so on.
Currently, there are 111 types of Pals in the game, meaning 111 Partner Skills are available, offering a great variety. You can choose up to 5 Pals to join your team for adventures. While only one Pal can be summoned at a time, the passive Partner Skills of all five are simultaneously active. So you can choose 5 Pals to create different builds depending on the situation.
For example, if you're going to a gathering, you can include a mischievous cat in the team to increase backpack carrying capacity, or a Mud Slinger to increase logging damage. If you're going on an exploration and treasure hunt, you could bring a Punk Duck that reveals the locations of nearby dungeons, and for fighting bosses and elite monsters, you'd assemble the five strongest Pals you have for the strongest combat squad. Each Pal can learn three attack skills, which are gradually unlocked as the Pal levels up.
Attack skills not only come with attribute judgments, but many also have effects like knocking back, freezing, or paralyzing, which makes the battles between Pals quite impressive; even the battles between the weakest Pals like chickens and sheep are world-shaking and moving. Besides these three attack skills, many Pal Partner Skills offer additional combat options, such as the electric hedgehog that can be thrown to unleash thunderstorms, but you first need to craft special gloves. The Jade Leaf Mouse can jump on your head and attack your target, but you need to craft a special machine gun for that, and so on. The Partner Skills of some Pals allow them to be used as mounts. When you ride a Pal, not only does your movement speed increase, but you can also use the Pal's abilities for mounted combat. Here you also learn the cooldown for each Pal's abilities. Furthermore, the mounted state does not prevent you from performing activities such as opening treasure chests, shooting arrows, or even throwing Pal Balls to catch Pals. This design is very user-friendly.
Additionally, by observing, you can discover various hidden traits in Pals. For example, if I walk with a large Pal in the wild, small Pals are afraid from a distance, but they are not as afraid if I am alone. These chickens have question marks over their heads that say, "
Huh?" What happened? That's what you get for being curious! For that, you get...
Large animals like the Purple Mist Deer can injure small animals just by walking over them. While the Wolf cannot double jump like the Deer, its riding speed is higher, and so on. From time to time, a siege event occurs in the game, where a horde of creatures attacks your base, which everyone probably enjoys. Unlike battles in the wild, where you can only summon one Pal to fight, the base is full of working laborers, and when it's attacked, a massive brawl ensues, which is quite thrilling. As technology advances, you can also build sandbags, assign a Pal to constantly guard, or fence off the base with large fences, but we left the base open to preserve the beautiful scenery.
So far, all monsters that come to siege have met a sad end. Besides Pals, you are also a force to be reckoned with. You can equip various armor and weapons and distribute skill points. In combat, you can dodge, the movements are agile, and the feeling of impact is also quite satisfying, so the combat experience alongside Pals is also quite good. I want to add something! You can craft clothes here, right?
If you get your hands on a better blueprint, you could even craft clothes of rare, higher quality. Uh. Are there even blueprints? Yes! You can obtain blueprints by opening treasure chests, or you can buy them from this merchant. Make the clothes you made for me... Yes, they are made from a blueprint.
The World
The game world is quite vast. You can explore it in various ways, including walking, swimming, climbing, gliding, and riding. Different Pals inhabit different areas, and you can check the habitat for each type of Pal in the Paldex. The game also features a day-night cycle. At night, many small Pals simply lie down and sleep in the wild. If you attack them during this time, critical hits are guaranteed, and they are easier to capture.
Some Pals only appear at night. When using a Pal to catch a Pal,
aiming at the Pal and holding down to charge will show the capture success rate in advance, which
depends on factors such as the target Pal's level, its remaining health, and whether it is facing the player. If your Pal team is full, all captured Pals automatically go into the Pal Box in the Pal Terminal, which is very convenient. Also, when capturing, you still receive resources from the Pal, just as if you would kill it. So you don't have to worry about not getting high-level resources when capturing boss Pals.
Another thoughtful design. Sometimes you come across rare versions of common Pals; these rare Pals will glow brightly and always have the "Rare" trait, which increases attack power and work speed. Their size will also be particularly large~!
Furthermore, their combination of three attack skills differs from their usual counterparts, and they are larger. I like to hire elite Pals as workers, which often seriously endangers the operation of our base. Throughout the world, you will occasionally encounter NPCs or notes from which you can learn the backstory of this world. While exploring, you might stumble upon the Pal Hunter Caves, where villains and Pals fight against each other. After eliminating the enemies, you can recruit the Pals from cages for your Pal Box. There are also scattered NPC villages, but we were too busy traveling to experience this content.
According to the official introduction, there are several factions in the world of Pal, each with corresponding gameplay. We only know that you can also attack these NPCs. Near our first base was a Pal Defence Force camp. We mistook the NPCs
for monsters or bandits due to their health bars and accidentally attacked them, which got out of hand and eventually led to us being wanted. But our Palus fought with them, our sheep, and so on to a draw.
Around the world, there are various dungeons for you to delve into. Intricate paths, treasure chests, monsters, and bosses await at the end of dungeons. But be careful not to bump your head while walking underground. In addition to dungeons, you’ll encounter boss nests, and the bosses within are impressive. Fortunately, there is usually a teleportation point near the boss’s lair, and it’s recommended to teleport back to your base, switch to your strongest Pal lineup, and then return to the fight.
Bosses are valuable assets, once conquered, they can be entrusted with important tasks. For example, our first captured boss, the Wave Blade Warrior, boasts the Partner Skill “Ultimate Iai Slash” and features fire, ice, and grass attribute skills, with level 2 kindling and carrying skills, and a level 3 lumbering skill, making it extremely fast at chopping wood, with cool actions even while sleeping and bathing. Finally, there are towers scattered throughout the world, and your ultimate goal is to defeat the bosses in all the towers. Each time you defeat them, you’ll gain ancient technology points, allowing you to unlock powerful ancient technologies. This feels somewhat familiar.
While exploring the world, we can enjoy the content mentioned above, but we feel that the world is a bit hollow. Although we occasionally encounter beautiful flower fields and different terrains such as green forests, maple forests, and yellow-leaf forests, both visually and in terms of content, it feels a bit sparse. Of course, we only explored a small portion of the entire map, and we hope that the areas we couldn't explore still hold many more surprises for us. Constructions Apart from interacting with friends, similar to other survival construction games, the game boasts a complete housing and building system.
In this regard, the game features another thoughtful design: within the range of the Pal Terminal, items placed in chests can be used globally and anywhere. There's no need to carry a pile of wood in your backpack just to construct building modules. Crafting Pal items also consumes resources globally. It seems that global resource access and de-gendering character creation are becoming trends in recent game development.
Global resource access not only greatly facilitates the building and crafting processes but also eliminates the need to remember which items are in which chest. So you can build chests anywhere and just throw things into the nearest one. This is very convenient, and in Palworld, many decorative items have a built-in box function, so the boxes are placed around the base to make it look more natural and lively. For house construction, the game uses a weak load-bearing mechanism, meaning that as long as there is roughly a wall below, you can build upwards without needing to design a load-bearing structure. As for building materials, in addition to wood constructions, you can also unlock stone and metal buildings as your character levels up. The game provides a limited number of building modules, but they are enough to build a decent house.
Perhaps because it's an Early Access version, there are some construction flaws, such as the difficult positioning and alignment of roofs, the inability to extend stairs downwards, and difficulty extending from higher to lower levels because the stairs don't align with the foundation. We hope these issues will be addressed in the future version. One advantage of construction is the variety of decorations, which are finely modeled and distinctive. Various types of cabinets and furniture like wardrobes provide space for storing items. However, strangely, you can't sit on chairs. What you see now is the indoor scene we decorated at character level 22. Later, you can unlock more unique decorations such as showers and pianos. You can also unlock an electrical system powered by electric Pals to utilize electric lights and other power facilities, which is expected to make the interior decoration more attractive.
The houses you build also offer protective effects. At night, the temperature drops sharply, and if you don't wear warm clothes, you will lose health outdoors. However, it's not a problem if you enter a house with a roof. In addition to houses, as your level increases, you can build various quirky facilities, such as a Pal Compressor to strengthen Pals, and even a breeding farm to crossbreed different Pals.
Multiplayer
During the two days I played online, there were no connection drops. However, there seems to be an issue with player synchronization; the connected player's movement was noticeably jerky rather than smooth, and sometimes the other player temporarily disappeared. When you go down in online play, you can be revived by a teammate. This happened when we were fighting a boss. The dungeons around the world can be entered by multiple players together, but the tower boss battles are for solo players only.
At the Pal Terminal, each connected player has their own independent Pal pool, and each person can only see the Pals they have captured. However, the deployed worker Pals are shared and synchronized among connected players. So if I take a Pal from my pool and deploy it as a base worker, another player can recall that worker Pal to their pool.
Regarding building and crafting: Since all work tasks in the game take time, having a partner cooperate in the early stages, when there are few Pals, can significantly improve efficiency. How was this undone?
Don’t you think it’s backward? A single player can only summon one Pal at a time, but two connected players can have two Pals out at the same time. Having two people, each with two Pals, can be quite fun as you can outnumber many other creatures, and with more players, it would likely be more lively. Also, each player can bring five Pals, so you can also experiment with coordinating Pal builds. For example, I might have an attack-oriented squad of Pals, while another player could have a build of five creatures focused on healing and support.
Conclusion
Overall, Palworld is much more fun than expected and surprisingly brilliant. This is thanks to the development team's efforts on the core mechanism of the game, the Pal system. They have put extensive work into a rich variety of Pals, occupation types, characteristics, and skills.
By providing a generous quantity and enriching the Pals with a variety of random characteristics, they have increased the fun and replayability of collecting Pals. Coupled with the charming and varied Pal behavior modules, as well as all sorts of thoughtful and convenient designs, the overall experience is quite good. However, the somewhat sparse world makes me wonder if it can sustain the post-novelty phase of gameplay. If it's well-managed after its release, I believe this game
could be a dark horse in the survival-building genre, adding more excitement to the already competitive landscape of 2024.
Of course, there is still much room for improvement, such as the lack of a mini-map and some glitches. It all depends on the developers after launch.
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