Palworld – Main Game Mechanics Explained

So this is mostly just a long-form review of the game. I felt like a lot of the opinions on the internet about Palworld boil down to manufactured controversy or trolling, so if you’re looking for a good creature collector and want to know more about the actual game as well as my very subjective and stream-of-consciousness take on it, here ya go.

Main Game Mechanics

General Gameplay

I found this game entertaining in the time that I played it, though my takes generally boil down to “this could/should have way more depth than it does.” Right off the bat you get a lot of freedom, and even a solo player is able to build a base, basic gear, and start catching low-level pals which immediately aid in combat and crafting. You can choose from many different locations to spawn in and set out from. Don’t like your choice? All of these locations are available as respawn points every time you die, which means quite a lot of the map is accessible immediately.

As is common in survival games death is only as punishing as you choose, with the default setting being the standard “drop your loot and naked-run back to it.” Dying will happen fairly regularly if you do a lot of exploring, as a pal with a much higher level than your gear can handle will easily kill you in a single hit, often with ranged attacks. While you can catch a pal and use it to fight, its level will be capped to yours and it can’t travel very far from you, so keeping your own gear and stats up is a must. This is where one of the most major changes to the creature collector formula comes in- Pals assist with fighting, but most of the actual combat will be done by the player.

Players have little ability to control the pal in combat or choose which moves it uses, so it acts as an autonomous companion. The player starts out with crude clubs and spears before eventually progressing to a stun baton and ranged weapons- bows, crossbows, and muskets all the way to military-style rifles. Weapon progression is fairly linear, stun batons are the only interesting melee weapon as they make it easier to capture pals without killing them- essential late-game as your other weapons and pals will be able to one-shot weaker pals.

One interesting thing this game does is allow you to use special combat abilities depending on the current pal you have out- some are mountable, some give passive buffs, some will take out a gun and begin firing at enemies while perched on your shoulder while others can be picked up and used as ranged weapons themselves. This was probably the feature of this game that I found the most interesting and creative.

Otherwise, combat is a simple matter of “have a good gun, lots of ammo, and a pal with higher stats.” It doesn’t vary much from one boss to the next, and even aquatic bosses that you have to fight while mounted feel very much the same. Dodge their ranged attacks, shoot them back, throw a ball when their health gets low. The gameplay loop encourages you to build a bigger and better base to allow better gear, which allows taking down stronger bosses. This rewards you with the ability to capture the bosses as well as special research points- more on both ahead.

Multiplayer

Functional and relatively glitch free in my experience. Tech progression is separate for each individual player, as is the pal storage system, though be aware that other players in your “guild” can move pals stationed at your base into their own storage where you can’t access them. There’s currently no ability to move pals between world files so little incentive for stealing from guildmates, at least. I have only played with friends so I don’t know how easy it is to grief or what the public servers are like- personally I recommend just playing in single player or with a few friends cooperatively.

Crafting

Crafting in palworld is extremely simple and straightforward. If you’ve played any survival game, you already know the basics. What’s different in palworld is the absolute requirement to have pals working the crafting tables. Each pal has different abilities allowing them to interact with different stations- smelting, for example, is only possible with a fire pal. Stronger pals found later in the game will have higher levels of these abilities, enabling them to do tasks faster.

Pals can be assigned to a specific crafting station or allowed to wander from task to task, and their working speed can be adjusted- there are three levels which provide increasing speed at the cost of penalties to each pal’s sanity meter. A pal with low sanity will often refuse to work or get injuries that slow it down. Frankly I have yet to find any need or benefit to increasing the speed beyond the default, as having the sanity of pals constantly dropping seems more hindrance than the initial speed increase actually helps and changes a largely automated process into one that needs to be micromanaged.

As far as crafting progression- unlocking each new recipe costs research points. There are two different types of research points, one gained by leveling up and the other by defeating a boss for the first time. The former is what the player uses for most recipes, and as levelling up happens rapidly there’s never a shortage of these. Each level up gives a new accessible research tier with weapons, armor, more crafting stations, building materials, etc and enough points to get a few things in that tier.

Personally I think a lot of what’s in the research tree doesn’t need to be; You can only use fire arrows with a fire bow, for example, and both are researched separately from each other and separately from regular bows and arrows (honestly needing to use a “fire bow” for fire arrows is kind of dumb in general). Things like nails for building have to be researched, which feels unnecessary. It didn’t really matter to me that each level up gives less than enough points to fill out its corresponding research tier, because many of the researchable items are cosmetic furniture for your base and I didn’t really delve into that.

I’m also disappointed with the special tech tree locked to bosses- some of the items are very useful and interesting, like egg incubators. But only one new “special” tech item is unlocked for every few player levels, and most of these items are inconsequential. The feed bag is unlocked this way and automates the process of eating for your character and equipped pals, which doesn’t make much difference in practice and feels like it should be in the regular tree.

The grappling gun looked interesting, yet it can only grapple onto trees for some reason and frequently doesn’t work as intended, requiring the player to reload after getting stuck in midair. While this tech tree is seemingly intended to be the main motivator for exploration and fighting bosses, it’s just not that enticing.

Cooking

There are a wealth of cooking ingredients and recipes in palworld, none of which matters because the very first thing you can produce in your base will feed you and all your pals forever with no consequence. Set up a berry farm, build a basic campfire, have your pals automate them both, and food stops being something to think about.

The only exception is breeding requires cake, which is the singular argument for crafting a cooking pot or farming non-berry foods. Food refills the hunger and sanity meter, and two berry farms has allowed me to build a stockpile in the thousands. Food decays, but very slowly and only one item at a time in a stack, so refrigerators are functionally pointless as generally your pals will produce food much faster than they can deplete it.

For as much as people and media have made a fuss about the ability to butcher and eat pals, I truly don’t see a gameplay point to doing so. It’s far more beneficial to sell them or fuse them to make stronger pals, and farming crops is much more efficient for food production. Like many aspects of this game, it feels like it was included for comedic purposes and only loosely incorporated into gameplay.

Creature Collector Aspects/ the Pals

So first off: I’m not going to talk about alleged “plagiarism” or whether Palworld did or did not copy art because as many have said much more eloquently, it’s a pointless and sensationalized argument. Nintendo is very obviously not going to sue palworld. Neither game developer cares what the other does as long as there’s no direct copyright infringement, but I’m sure both are loving the free publicity from this fake controversy.

Yes, the designs of the pals very obviously take massive and intentional inspiration from pokemon and in most cases are essentially traced (not stolen, but copied) from pokemon designs. It is objectively not illegal to do so, and whether this is an example of laziness or parody is up to personal interpretation. I will also touch on aesthetics in its own category. That aside-

The differing abilities of each pal do offer a compelling reason to catch new ones. The pokemon go-esque ability to throw 100 sheep into the proverbial woodchipper and produce one super-sheep means you’ll want to catch a lot of pals in general. Which is easy to do, because virtually none of the pals are actually that rare. Every boss has smaller wild versions roaming around, making the only argument for catching bosses that they are cosmetically larger and have better stats.

There are also “lucky” pals, this game’s answer to shiny pokemon. They’re sparkly, but in general also just larger with better stats. They might have a rare move which doesn’t match their elemental type, but honestly you can find items all over the map which teach these moves to any pal regardless of type anyway. There are no learnsets or rules limiting what can be taught. There are also versions of certain pals that have a different element and colour palette which can be obtained through breeding- these, too, can be caught in the wild.

Breeding isn’t very interesting in general, giving you a chance to pass down passive traits to offspring to hopefully get a pal with a better combination of stats. I’ve only barely utilized the breeding mechanic myself, so what follows is what I’ve gathered from others who have used it. This whole system feels unfinished- several pals have a single alternate elemental version that can be produced by breeding a specific parent pal with any pal of a specific element.

Most of the time, breeding two different pals produces a third species not connected to either. This appears to not be randomized and a given pair will produce the same result every time. Certain traits do not appear to be able to be passed on, like whether a pal is lucky/shiny or a boss/alpha, which also reduces the usefulness of this feature as breeding is resource intensive and the best pals will exclusively be found in the wild. I also want to touch on the whole “rare pals in sanctuaries” thing- all these are is areas of the map with wild versions of boss or alternate element pals guarded by NPCs.

Entering a sanctuary throws up a flashing sign that says “illegal activity underway,” but outside of the hostile NPCs there’s no punishment for catching pals in these zones, and given that there’s hostile NPCs all over the map anyway, there’s no real deterrent. It feels like the game wants to sell a point that what you’re doing is somehow wrong, but doesn’t represent this mechanically or believably.

Bit of an afterthought, but there’s also no “evolution” feature in the game. Many pals look like evolved forms of other pals, giving the impression that this feature was planned and cut at some point in development.

NPCs

This connects to the next paragraph about aesthetics, but the NPCs in this game just do not feel like they fit. There are multiple enemy groups distinguishable only by their names and clothing, but identical mechanically. They walk around the map in groups and shoot at you if they see you, but generally are easily knocked out by your pal. There are enemy camps, with the sole purpose of containing a caged pal you can save to add to your own collection.

There are merchants, which so far are generally the same everywhere with the exception of those that buy and sell pals, whose stock varies. Dialogue is… bad. And pointless. Most of the NPCs you run into will tell you that they’ve become stuck in palworld and talk about how horrible and vicious the pals are, despite even the most hostile pals being dopey cartoon characters. They never have anything interesting to say, which makes me wonder why most of them exist in the first place.

Also, yes, you can capture NPCs- but like all of the other shock-value content in this game, it’s clearly just included for comedy purposes and has no significant benefit or consequence. NPCs have terrible abilities and stats compared to pals and take up a pal slot when placed at a base. Capturing merchants doesn’t prevent you from interacting with them, so I guess some people might want to have easy access to them? It makes certain NPCs hostile (again, most NPCs already are) and it’s difficult to do as the catch rate is low.

Aesthetics

This game looks great- for the first few minutes. The pals themselves are, again, blatantly based on pokemon, but they also look cool in their own right and are well animated. I find it bizarre that everyone has focused on the pals when the most aesthetically jarring part of this game is… literally everything else. This game just screams “stock assets.” The landscape is fine and actually kind of pretty, but in general there’s no consistent art direction or style and it feels like assets from several different games have been hastily slapped together.

While I get the humour appeal of having cartoon characters with realistic military-style weapons, long-term it just looks incongruous and lazy. The furniture for basebuilding is the same, and none of the cosmetic furniture is enticing enough to justify each piece having its own entry in the tech tree. There’s nothing original here to leave an impression, no sense of atmosphere or uniqueness at all. The same can be said of the music and sound effects. I’m not mad that this game copies elements of other games- I’m disappointed that it does so in a mediocre, half-hearted way.