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As a child of the ’90s-era pocket monster craze, I had what I suspect historians will call Monster-Taming Madness. A not-so-terrible, but sort of annoying affliction that meant I always had a Tamagotchi in my pocket, a handful of Pokémon cards, and the entire Spice Girls discography on standby for summoning creatures from discs in Monster Rancher.
Need to Know
What it is: Pokémon: Survival Evolved, a few of them open carry
Release date: July 10, 2026
Developer: Pocketpair
Publisher: Pocketpair
Reviewed on RTX 4080, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB RAM
Steam Deck: Verified
Link: Steam
To say I was obsessed is putting it mildly, but in all that time I spent collecting little guys and preparing them to duke it out, I never once considered the obvious: What if I gave one of these guys a gun?
When it launched in early access, that’s what Palworld was known as: Pokémon with guns. It’s not an entirely unfair description of the survival crafting, creature-collecting adventure, and two years ago, I would’ve agreed with it. It certainly looks like a case of copying someone’s homework, though that’s not a good distillation of the Palworld 1.0 we have today.
Palworld has come a long way since early access, with the bones of a satisfying, iterative creature collector all here. I just wish I jived with more of the survival bits, and that Palworld embraced the things that make it stand apart from Pokémon outside of hokey ultra-violence satire.
The Pokémon in the room
Let’s go ahead and get it out of the way—yes, Palworld’s trainers, pal spheres, and even some monster designs are all similar to Pokémon. And yes, that’s part of the appeal. It’s also one of the least interesting influences when you start digging into the meat of Palworld’s systems.
Comparisons to Ark or Conan Exiles feel more apt with its minion-like system for catching pals and deploying them to do base-keeping chores back home. In Ark, dinosaurs toddle about your base completing grindy survival crafting tasks, while thralls in Conan Exiles serve a similar purpose.
Palworld’s pals work like the dinosaurs and thralls, but the execution is leagues better. Organizing your workforce is immediately satisfying in a way the others aren’t, because you don’t have to fight with it. I catch a pal, check its skills, and drop it at a crafting station to get started. There’s no overly obtuse taming mechanic, and no need to engage with messy stat calculus. Even when I didn’t have a clear grasp of all the nuances, my army of cute critters got their chores done without much fuss.
Not every pal is willing to do every type of job, and I love how Palworld conveys their preferences through ‘work suitability’ levels—a clearly delineated set of specialty task icons highlighting a pal’s capabilities. I was never left wondering why my new favorite early game pal, Pupperai, wasn’t best in show for helping out around the base. It could only chop trees, pick berries, and move materials. Pupperai looks unemployable when the wild Tanzee nearby has those same skills, plus expertise in two additional task types.
My problem in Ark was always feeling so exhausted by the taming process that I would eventually just say ‘fine, I’ll do it myself,’ before abandoning the idea. Pals will always try and help, at least a little, and the option for min-maxing is there through work suitability levels, partner skills, and passives.
Aesthetically displeasing
While I dig some of the new pal designs and scenery, Palworld’s look and presentation occasionally sour me on the whole thing. There’s just no way around how off-putting I find some of the game’s tone and direction, which only grows worse as Palworld signals it’s not very confident in its own artistic decisions. I get it, you aren’t like the other games, you’re different—the edgy older brother with a crude sense of humor.
I’m not just talking about Lovander giving me the bedroom eyes, either. Palworld has several little moments with weird tonal dissonance that feel inserted for virality or a need to prove it’s different.
The first time I felt that way was right after crafting the Meat Cleaver, an early game tool you can use for butchering adorable critters like Lamball or Cattiva. So, being the monster that I am and unwilling to sacrifice Pupperai, I surveyed the starting area, judged all of its pals by their cuteness, and chose the one I liked the least as my first test subject. Sorry, Chikipi.
Violently butchering my pals didn’t have much purpose, or at least not in the early game. In the time it took me to fetch a Chikipi from my Palbox and hack it apart, I could’ve already clobbered one in the wild without the weird blur effect making it into a goofy spectacle. There’s no explicit gore to hide, it’s just a bit for making the action cartoonishly violent. It was only in the very late game, when I unlocked the cleaver’s automated mass-killing counterpart, that I saw any potential use for butchering pals at all.
Most of Palworld doesn’t strain this hard to be shocking, but there’s an air of the attitude sprinkled throughout. You’ll find pals crying in cages, warnings that some little ‘buddies’ are working in various states of injury, and a handful of little guys wielding guns. Honestly, I’m glad there aren’t more gun-wielding pals. That’s more your avatar’s thing. Tanzee, along with maybe four or five other pals are the only ones I can recall that stay strapped. You mostly just craft saddles to ride them like horses… or put them on the death machine.
Home groan
Legend has it that if you look into a mirror and whisper “survival crafting” three times, I’ll come leaping out to ask what we’re playing and when. I love’em, especially if they come with a good set of blocks because my friends always appoint me to the position of base architect, and I’m not stopping there. Our survival crafting house is getting the full service, appropriate holiday decor and all.
If you’re also that person, bad news: Palworld makes for a pretty boring set of Legos.
If you’re not that person, well, it’s nice that the building is so bare-bones simple you can slap some crap on the ground and move on. But if I’m going to spend 100+ hours surviving and crafting, you’re damn right I’m getting irritatingly picky about how my space looks.
Palworld’s kit isn’t all bad, but the underwhelming architecture and a few 1.0 tools are still worth mentioning:
- The building grid is massive and painfully strict. You have to stack three walls to accommodate bigger pals if you don’t want to see them clipping through.
- Its building pieces, like walls and foundations, are of course oversized as a result. Palworld’s map already suffers from a lot of empty space, and it’s tough to let that go when my base looks the same way thanks to so much dead space.
- I love the new paint tool that changes the color of some building pieces. Light shades of wood are almost always a sin in my book, so I used it to customize wooden building pieces and turn them into darker grains.
- Paint works on storage furnishings too, and I love displays of color-coded chests. However, you can’t paint some of the more basic furnishings like simple tables or chairs, though those futuristic production facilities need it the most.
- The alignment tool for snapping walls or furnishings neatly beside each other rules. We should make this mandatory in every base builder.
Creature crafter
Micromanaging pal work suitabilities was easily the best part of my Palworld base design experience, and getting into the nitty-gritty of breeding for other stats was a similar treat. It’s another thing you don’t have to fully engage with—I didn’t even touch the system until approaching the final boss—but it’s a delight for anyone also into Pokémon’s stat-perfecting systems.
Pals have more situational builds, so I can spec them to help out with housekeeping, combat, or buffing duties. Do you want a Sekhmet for combat or crafting? Will Chillet keep your base cool, be your primary mount, or both? Their passives—a random selection of traits affecting everything from work speed to attack damage to their ability to work at night—are randomly assigned to pals caught in the wild, and help you breed for traits suiting their role.
I’ve got absolutely zero chill when it comes to in-game travel, so I didn’t even fuss over breeding a more powerful sidekick for the final fight. I just wanted the fastest ride available, and that’s led me down an Eidrolon Ignis breeding frenzy. Don’t worry, Palworld doesn’t make it weird. There’s just a lot that goes into the process, which includes tasks like:
- Mass catching wild pals for the desired gender or passive. Sometimes you’ll even stumble upon a Lucky pal, the game’s version of shiny Pokémon.
- Adding pals with breeding-specific buffs to the team managing your base.
- Setting up facilities like the Breeding Farm and Egg Incubator; the Ranch for special food ingredients; or the Pal Condenser for merging weaker pals into your best one.
- Breeding for particular stats, passives, an entirely different pal, or even the chance at Mutated Eggs with special features.
I haven’t seen many cool Mutated Eggs yet, and my main battle team remains mostly made up of pals caught in the wild, not bred for specialities. For most of my 100+ hours through the main story, I only tinkered with the Surgery Table to give pals special passive implants. It looks a bit grim when set up, but fortunately lacks the theatrical brutality of butchering. I rolled my eyes at the presentation, then tinkered with implant combinations for hours.
That’s emblematic of my Palworld experience. Lots of little moments where I grimaced at edgy reminders it’s a big kid’s game before getting lost in the freedom of its systems. It was nice to skirt by in tough battles without going all-in on designer pals, but when the time came, I could indulge in the side of me that loves involving a spreadsheet.
“Gotta catch’em all,” also takes on a whole new meaning when I can actually catch them all in a single game with no fuss. Pokémon’s historically miserable system of transferring, trading, buying the same game in a different color, and limited events evolved into one of my biggest peeves with the series. Palworld doesn’t have the same massive monster roster, or at least not yet.
Knowing I could complete the Palpedia was a delight that often kept my character and her team overleveled from pal-catching XP. I sped through most story bosses using the default world settings, and felt like I was missing out on seeing what my pals could do while I was busy blowing the place up. It wasn’t until the late game that I was humbled by a monstrous boss pal. Several deaths later led me to give aerial combat an honest try, and well, I should’ve done that from the beginning.
There’s a push and pull between some of the things that matter most to me in survival crafting games, though I can’t deny how good Palworld’s creature collecting foundation is.
A showdown with Panthalus—Palworld’s mythical big whale beastie—forced me to respect the mechanics. It was either that, or risk drowning again. So, I relied on my flying pal, Jetragon, for safety.
My new strategy worked, and shooting missiles from above was more fun than running around with a gun. Both are effective, but from the sky I’m at least using my pal, and I like the control I have over both my character and her pal as a unit. Palworld let me experiment more than I realized, and I like that.
There’s a push and pull between some of the things that matter most to me in survival crafting games, though I can’t deny how good Palworld’s creature collecting foundation is. I love micromanaging pals at my base, fighting alongside them, and perfecting pedigrees through implants and eggs. I’m disappointed by the base building, lackluster open world, and mundane exploration.
It also lacks personality, unless being bludgeoned to death with a bat labeled “violence” counts as one. We can argue it’s parody or satire, sure, but it’s not very good at that, either.
With all of its success, I hope Palworld uses future updates to establish a more confident identity that relies less on being the most audacious person in the room. It’s full of enough thoughtful systems and entertaining loops worth embracing—no need to dress it down in callow internet humor.
