Respawn Monday #8: Palworld has taken over my life
Last week was Palworld 1.0, all day, every day. While I did spend a few hours on other titles, Pocketpair's open world survival game, where you explore, build a base, and capture creatures called Pals, has taken over my life. And for good reason: this is such a solid title compared to what it was at its early access launch. Some thoughts.
Palworld is no fluke
I'm currently 60 hours into the game and still have a long laundry list of things I want to do. As I move up in material quality and unlock new items, the world continues to expand, and the more I explore each area, the more I find new Pals worth adding to my party or base.
Each of these creatures comes with its own unique set of passives and skills that can be useful to a player. I have a specific Pal I bring along to lessen the weight of all ores in my inventory by 80%, a perfect companion when I'm mining materials. There are even Pals that are best kept at the base to help craft items or cook food, Pals good for combat and traversal, Pals that cool your food ingredients, and Pals best used for herding to generate specific items.
There's a lot to manage, but it's not intimidating, it's actually addicting. I'm now sitting on two fully built bases, each with its own purpose and role, and I'm about to unlock the ability to build a third. Bases run more or less automated: I come back to drop off loot and make sure Pals are fed and ready to keep the fort running. It's a system I built myself, and it's satisfying to watch it run effectively. It's never boring either, even once you reach automation, there's always room to be more efficient.
Bosses can be tough when the difficulty is set to hard, and I love how each dungeon (despite slowly starting to look like it only has a handful of layouts) refreshes eventually and gives you a reason to come back. Each new area is filled with things to gather and capture, new schematics to unlock, and unique rewards. The longer I play, the more I keep getting rewarded. I haven't been this engrossed by a survival building game in a long time, and this is even just me playing solo on my own world.
I have yet to try the game from the start on an online server, living alongside other players. Will it be chaos? Or an opportunity to play together? Hopefully a mix of both.
You'll probably hear more about Palworld even next week, since I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. Technical issues and bugs are at a minimum, and I now fully understand how the building system works, which has sparked renovation plans for both of my bases. It's going really well.
When Palworld was first revealed, it was deemed "Pokémon but with guns." Given what Pocketpair has delivered, that's probably the worst way to describe the game, since it's so much more than that. If Pocketpair plays their cards right, in a couple of years we just might have a serious competitor in the business of catching them all.
About the Author - Carlos Hernandez
Carlos Hernandez is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Too Much Gaming, where he writes about video games, reviews, and industry news. A lifelong gamer, he would do anything to experience Final Fantasy Tactics for the first time again and has a love/hate relationship with games that require hunting for new gear to improve your character.
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