Palworld: Anything But Original, But in the Best Ways

When it comes to Palworld, my ass is sitting on the bandwagon so hard my cheeks are sticking to the seat. I am part of the current gaming zeitgeist for good reason, too, because the game really is like the better bastard child of two other classic, very good games. I’m talking, of course, about Ark and Pokémon.

To be honest, I would not say I still find myself liking or caring about either of those two classics, today. Ark is fun but it becomes tedious after many hours and I did my time with it. Plus Ark 2, so far, kinda looks like sh*t. Maybe I’ll do a whole article about why I have bad vibes from that project, but suffice to say my interest has fallen off quite a bit over the many years we’ve been waiting for it. As for Pokémon, that one is more of a can of worms. The short version? It’s been like 30 years and they’re basically rehashing mostly the same bullsh*t in everything they make. It’s getting almost as old as I feel.

But in the wake of the staleness comes a new game. A game that greets you with a warm embrace, makes you smile with a joke, and quickly feels like a new, charismatic friend. My new Pal, if you will. A whole new world.

A Palworld.

Maybe you’ve heard of it?

Lately, I’ve been gallivanting around in Palworld with my partner and enjoying every second of it. She’s the one who introduced me to Ark as well as Minecraft, so it just feels like time-honored tradition that we embark on the hot new exploration-survival experience. Also there’s chimps with assault rifles... and I just think that’s neat.

Honestly, I’m a big fan of this kind of game and I can say wholeheartedly that while Palworld isn’t doing anything wildly differently—in fact, it kind of steals every single idea it has from something else— it just feels like it took all the things and polished them to a near perfect sheen. It isn’t breaking the mold but it has the highest quality material on the market to use for it. The finished product is something that you’ve seen before but never coming out looking quite this good.

Of course, I freakin’ love what this game has become and I freakin’ love playing it. Fully admitting I’ve been biased. However, recently I spoke to some friends who, uh, let’s just say really don’t like survival-craft exploration games. They spoke to me about Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation absolutely trashing the game (I ain’t gonna link him, you know where to find that if you want to). And you know what? I’m not here to defend it. I love this kind of game but I can definitely understand why some people might not.

This kind of game, to a different gamer, is boring and tedious and honestly I can imagine some people just feel like they’re watching paint dry to play these kinds of things. It’s not for everyone.

But one of the biggest criticisms I’ve heard from my buddies, Yahtzee and many other disembodied REEEEEing voices online about this game is that it’s quite derivative. Full disclosure, it f**cking is quite derivative. I just, personally, don’t care. Because in my opinion, it took most of the stuff it stole but made it better. It copied a lot of homework but it changed it a little and somehow got a slightly better grade than the person it stole answers from.

So before I explore the good and (I guess to some) bad things about this game, I’ll break it into contrasts. I’m gonna hit you with some bad-cop, good-cop(e). What’s derivative about Palworld vs. what I think makes it better than the things it was, uh, inspired by.

So let’s start with the aspects it just straight-up stole.

You already know how similar the game is to Pokémon. Everyone with eyes knew this since the game started its open Alpha build. You throw balls at creatures, you get increasingly rare and strong balls to capture the stronger Pals. They can be returned, and summoned from them etc. They all have a small set of moves and learn better ones as they go and fight one at a time alongside you.

And, well, just look at the Pals themselves...

Enough said. They’re basically Pokemon, and we all know some of them famously are barely palette swaps or combinations of literal Pokemon sprites. Even the naming conventions are similar.

It goes deeper than just that surface-level copying of appearances and vibes, though. The game seems to steal some mechanics from the now 30-year Pokémon series formula. For example, you can only have 6 Pals with you in a Party. Sound familiar? You also can basically EV-IV train the Pals via selective breeding (or full-blown eugenics) in this game, similar to daycare manipulation and selective stat grinding in Pokémon. You can also change their stats using rare items, again, just like Pokémon.

The basic storyline and gameplay loop also has similarities. You go around the map finding out about different “Towers” and fight the “leaders” within them and their special Pals. They then give you literal badges which you eventually need to unlock the main endgame. It’s just the same ole gym pilgrimage of literally every Pokémon game for the last three decades. They are stealing quite a bit from Pokémon both thematically and just straight-up literally.

So, what does this game do better than Pokémon?

There’s a reason why you see so many videos and articles (I guess, like this one) that point to Palworld as an example of being a problem for Nintendo. There's one big reason: It’s showing the world how much Gamefreak is slacking with their IP. The reason I say this is because while playing Palworld, it kind of feels like Pokémon but just… more fun. Now we get to the neat part where I tell you why the game is just more engaging, in my opinion, than Nintendo’s cash crop darling.

For one thing, you are a key component of the battle system, especially in the early to mid game. You aren’t just someone giving orders and watching the Pals fight all turn-based and crap. You get out there and punch the sheep yourself. And later, you better have a good grasp of the dodge button and some armor because they WILL be targeting your anime-looking booty. Honestly, this feels more in-line with like, an adventure game. Something similar to modern Zelda titles, where you have some basic controls and weapon combos and you mix it up in an open world --alongside your Pals. The fighting is more dynamic and action RPG style, in that way. You have to do more than just stand around.

The game rewards and encourages you to collect massive amounts of each Pal, because you can essentially fuse them into energy and beef up one of the species using it. In other words, you grind out sheer numbers of a specific Pal and then put them all into your best one with the best natural abilities. This gives you a rpg stat grind aspect that exists in Pokémon, too, but it’s much more straightforward and RPG-y, here.

Breeding is as simple as realizing which 2 Pals make what new Pal, and they are set combos so you could just breed for whatever you want once you have what you need; no rng, like in Pokemon. These two things together make it a lot more straightforward to get exactly which Pal you want and make it the best it can be.

Another neat thing just absent in Pokémon is Pal interactions with YOU. Most of them have saddles you can make, and you can just jump on them mid-battle and control them directly, using their moves manually. Many can fly, or swim, or just let you ride them. If Pals don’t have saddles they typically have some other special item you can make instead, like literally guns or weapons or something that makes them do a special ability. Heck one of them just allows you to pick up the Pal itself and use it as a grenade (it explodes as a special ability), and it’s as wacky and fun as it sounds. Also pretty effective.

The speed and flow of things, both while exploring and fighting, make this feel like the Pokemon game we always wanted. The dynamic interactions in real-time and the infinite ways you can utilize your Pals in and out of battle just feels like the natural direction we’ve wanted the Pokémon series to go since we were kids on our Gameboys. Palworld might be stealing a lot of ideas from Gamefreak’s cash cow, but I’ll be damned if I don’t think they listen to that cow’s fans more than its breeders ever have. These people know what the Pokemon fans want and aim to deliver.

All of that is just half of the game, though.

The rest of the ideas were stolen from everyone’s favorite sci-fi dinosaur survival base builder, Ark. But much like with Pokémon, it feels like Palworld just kind of stole ideas from Ark and simplified them greatly as well as made them just more fun.

The base building mechanics themselves are similar to Ark’s. Heck even the blueprint system, where you level up to access more advanced recipes, is the same exact way Ark does it (even the menu is basically the same). The game also requires actual physics (yuck) to build foundations, where you can only build things if they are supported. I hate this, by the way, but it does add some immersion to both games, I guess.

Both of these games involve taming creatures, each with their own special “thing” they can do (a special ability), and both games involve you then enslav—I mean, training—these creatures to use that ability to help you obtain resources more efficiently than you can with you boring human body. In both Ark and Palworld, you want to go and find different Pals so they can do different jobs to amplify your base. They are tools for base building as well as adventuring/protection.

In Ark, there are also towers and supply drops you can find throughout the map, and, as you guessed, these things are present in Palworld, too. The “guild” system and the way you can lock your built structures is also pretty much the exact same system (and UI) as in Ark. They really didn’t do a whole lot to hide the ideas they stole from that game in terms of how everything looks.

The overall concept of the game, where you uncover the mystery of the how the world was created and how all the Pals became what they are, is directly reminiscent of Ark’s narrative. Both suck and are not that important though. We don’t play this for the story. They are very similar, though. I haven’t done it yet, but it also seems like the PVEVP aspects and the use of default setting global servers is something Palworld and Ark have exactly in common, as well. If you hate yourself, you can load into a multiplayer pvp-enabled server with only default settings and probably die upon spawn. : ) But I personally enjoy playing on a private server.

One reason for that, both in this game and Ark, is that you can customize settings. From how hard it is to gain exp to how fast things breed from eggs, to how many bases you can have, to if you even have to stay within the boundaries of a base are all there. Both games give you a ton of options to change game settings, to make things easier or harder. I try not to mess with them much, but I can tell you I personally lower the exp gained. I find it’s far to easy to level up, especially in Palworld, and I like a slow burn approach to these games.

So what does Palworld do with Ark’s ideas that make it better than the source material?

Well, for one thing… MORE TO DO. Palworld has actual cave dungeons where you can run through a zone with some usually stronger Pals for the area. But at the end is a randomly spawned, sometimes rare, Pal and a bunch of rare items in treasure chests. This is not a thing in Ark at all.

Furthermore, there are kind of unofficial raid bosses in Ark, giant creatures you can work with a guild to tame, but in Palworld Raids are a major mechanic. As a matter of fact, you have to defend your bases from invading factions periodically in Palworld. You can also even build anti-raid defenses to deal with it so you don’t have to (or let the Pals themselves go get them). But it’s a thing you need to worry about, even in PVE private servers.

There are also boss Pals you can only obtain using a summoning device, essentially giving you access to instanced raids in Palworld. You could instead summon it to your base, but that’s an insane thing to do and you really shouldn’t. Unless you make a base specifically for killing bosses…hmmm… Okay maybe there is a use-case for that and I have new ideas. Regardless, that’s not a thing in Ark.

I think the specific thing most improved on from Ark is the base management. Assigning Pals can be done from the Palbox the base is built around, and you have a Pokémon-esque PC storage type list to select them from. From there you can directly assign the Pals to do tasks, basically choosing a loadout for the base. In Ark, you have to physically micromanage all of this process and it is significantly more tedious than just selecting a few things and hitting a few buttons.

Another thing is that in Palworld there is entirely new mechanics for managing the base and Pals. There is a sanity system and an affection system, both of which affect Pal performance around your base (or in battle, in the case of the latter). Ark and Palworld both have a hunger system, but Palworld expands it so you need to care for your Pals’ mental health as well. It’s easy to feel like you’re enslaving these poor guys, but these systems make me feel more like they’re pets or friends than just slaves. I mean, play how you want, but I much prefer feeling like a caretaker than a slaver.

The last thing I like a lot more in Palworld is the crafting system. In both Ark and Palworld you have the recipe system and you need more sophisticated stations to make more sophisticated items. But in Palworld, you have more nuanced things to craft. The food items require different materials but you can make food that alters you or your Pals’ stats. You can make accessories that enhance many things, including your own work speed. You can also make more specialized stations like weapon conveyor belts, or factories for Pal Spheres, and these sorts of specialized stations are notably absent from Ark. It just feels…better. Simpler. More straightforward and more versatile.

At the end of the day, the game just takes what I like most from both sources and makes them even better for me. From Pokémon, the RPG aspects and adventuring around the world. From Ark, the base building and management and overall creation using resources I scrounge myself. And from both, a collection of unique and fun creatures that all do different things for me. Palworld just does all this at once simpler and better than the other two. It doesn’t do anything that really feels super new or different, but honestly, I don’t mind that at all when it can deliver a simpler and more engaging version of the things I’ve seen before.

Something about the vibes here are just better. Ark feels too serious. Pokémon feels too… kidsglovey. Palworld is a nice blend of cartoonish and whimsical with weirdly dark and gruesome at times. Honestly, it just works for me. It can make laugh. It can make me say “that’s f**cked up,” and, perhaps most importantly, it makes me say “yo, that’s sick!” I think what a game makes you say without thinking reveals a lot about it, and in the case of Palworld, it’s usually good things from me. I know that survival builders are not for everyone, but I think if there was ever an entry point into the genre, few if any will have the Palworld experience beat. My recommendation? Grab a Pal or a few, load up a World of your own, and just experience it for yourself—after all, it’s cheaper than other games that deliver less.