Palworld (2026 Review)

The short version of this Palworld review is simply, "This is Pokémon with survival-crafting elements." It's so much like Pokémon the real Pokémon company filed trademark infringement lawsuits over elements of the game. The Pokémon Company did, broadly, lose those lawsuits, but nobody was surprised they tried.

On the surface Palworld's "pals" share a lot of visual similarities with their more famous cousins. The first pal you're likely to see is a Lamball, which is a spherical sheep that looks a lot like the Wooloo from Pokémon. Not the same, and how else do you make a cute sheep but have them be a fluffy ball of wool? But the inspiration seems obvious.

And, yes, you weaken these pals and then toss a ball (sphere) at them to capture them. Thanks to the lawsuit you no longer call them to battle using a sphere, they simply appear with a gesture.

There are other similarities, but what makes Palworld interesting is where it differs. For one, Palworld has guns. Lots of guns. And fighting all is completely real time, with your Pal Trainer taking part in the fight themselves, often with the aforementioned guns.

When you're first thrown into the world you know very little of what is happening, but through NPCs and journal entries you start to piece together that there's an ancient being who has been trapped for a millennia who is now waking up and must be dealt with decisively. By you, obviously. It's by no means an original story, but it's an adequate background to your adventure.

At its heart, Palworld is a survival crafting game. Claim a piece of land, construct some mining and farming plots, set up some crafting tables and you're ready to go!

Unlike other survival-crafters, you needn't work at all these stations yourself. Those pals you've been catching? They can dig up rocks, farm berries and craft things for you. Later they can even generate electricity for much more advanced machinery, or even head off on their own expeditions to bring back valuable crafting materials.

As you kill or capture pals, explore the world and unlock fast travel points you gain experience points to level up to a maximum level of 80. At each level you gain skill points to assign to Health, Stamina, Attack, Work Speed or Carry Weight. You can cap all these eventually, but most people advise increasing Stamina, Carry Weight and Work Speed first. Stamina to run and glide further, carry weight to hoard more materials while exploring and work speed for handcrafting everything until your pals get good.

Each level also grants some Technology Points, these are how you learn new schematics for weaponry, spheres and even saddles to ride some of your pals. You won't get enough points to unlock all of these from levelling alone, but there are many sources of books that grant extra points. Your statistics can similarly be improved with potions that drop randomly from chests, particularly at the end of the dungeons.

The dungeons are somewhat randomly generated, in that they're clearly a collection of premade rooms connected with short tunnels, and most of them are fairly short. Each has a boss at the end, which can be a good source of strong pals to capture, but there's also treasure chests and boulders full of ore scattered throughout. Occasionally you'll also see rarer pals, variants or ones you just won't see in the outside biome usually.

A better, or at least more fun, way to find rare pals or gain pals with desirable special skills and stat boosts, is breeding! Build a breeding pen in one of your camps, assign a male and female pal to it and provide them with cake and wait for the magic to happen. Eventually there'll be eggs to collect and stick in an incubator and, some time later, a new pal will be ready to hatch. Depending on the species of pals you breed, their statistics, and how fancy the provided cake is, you'll get different results. If you breed two Fuacks together you'll probably get a new Fuack with some mixture of the two parents skills. But sometimes it'll have a new skill, or be a Fuack Ignis, or the egg will spawn as a mutated egg, which could hatch into a species you've not seen before.

You could also intensively breed the same pals together to get additional pals to merge into your favourite pal to make it stronger. Or simply feed them all into the pal butchering machine to extract resources. Up to you!

Eventually you'll run into one of the big bosses, complete with a special introductory cinematic. The first you'll come across, Zoe, will likely be something of a wakeup call for you, as up to that point most pals and NPC enemies you face are not particularly challenging. Zoe might be, depending on how much farming you've been doing. It's always worth going in with more ammunition and your strongest pals as the difficulty tuning can be somewhat wonky at times. Towards the end of the game there are three boss encounters you'll probably do in short succession. Two of them are pretty standard difficulty, one is insanely tough.

That's a recurring problem. While much of the game is tuned fairly well, you'll occasionally run into massive difficulty spikes, leaving you to die from a single hit, from enemies you can't even see. You could disable dropping loot on death to have a much easier time of things, or you could play on a server with other people who do not have that disabled and be sad every time.

Fortunately you never lose everything permanently. Deaths in the open world force you to drop your gear and equipped pals to recover manually. Deaths in boss rooms result in your loot being dropped just outside, usually right near a fast travel point. Ironically, dying to bosses is far less annoying than dying to random attacks or tumbles in the open world and having to walk back.

Late in the game you will have 3 or 4 camps, all harvesting vast quantities of assorted ores, trees and foodstuffs. Later tiers of gear require staggering amounts of materials, most of which must be crafted into subcomponents first, and all of which take increasingly longer times to craft. The final energy shield I crafted took more than a day to collect everything I needed. With careful planning and boosting your pals levels it could certainly be done quicker, but I was well past 100 hours invested by then and just wanted to see the end of the game.

Overall Palworld is a fantastic game. Play with friends if you can, share the work and reduce some of the grind involved. If playing by yourself, take your time. Build your camps up, learn how to make them more efficient. Hoard everything! Some of it you won't need, but you can always fit more storage chests in your base.

And open your inventory, check the lower right for the Bulk Storage button, use it every time you return to base. You're welcome. :)

Special thanks to Can It Co-Op?, whose server I exclusively played on for this review. Be sure to check out their review too, coming soon to YouTube.