Palworld Review

A while back, the family started to play Palworld. At first, it was fun, but quickly became a game that was about how quickly you could find the best place to build your base over actual exploring and survival.

The concept of the game is to catch PALS .and defend your base. Upgrading your base and finding higher level PALs that are more powerful and have better stats for what you are looking for and apparently for breeding.

The concept and PALS are similar in idea to Pokemon. However, you can see differences in the PALS that have been based on that game concept. To that point, when we began to playing there was much controversy around the similarities for which many were indicating that a legal battle was coming.

The game play itself didn’t follow a storyline that could be seen as similar to Pokemon. There are no trainers, no specific battles that you need to win to reach a particular level, and no morphing of PALS. Okay, so maybe there are a few specific battles to win to progress through the game, but you don’t have to do these battles to enjoy the game or even reach max level.

There is also not much guidance provided, but that is expected with survival style games. What little help there is doesn’t tell you how best to play. Again, it’s not something you see with survival type games, so it’s not an issue, but with so many ways to play some instruction would have been nice.

Our family took a couple of approaches to playing the game together. The Oldest child took to exploring the edges of the map and was the first to find some of the more unique PALS. These PALS were also more powerful when compared with others and typically were not found on the main lands or were versions of Boss PALs.

I enjoyed finding new materials and building the base and creating buildings for us to use. While also collecting PALS to collection quests as you could receive a boost of xp if you collected a particular member of the same type of PALS.

My husband enjoyed exploring and opening up as much of the map as possible alongside finding unique PALS who had the right STATS. For the most part we worked together to build our base and explore the world.

Unfortunately, at the time, the youngest child kept getting into trouble and losing his tech privileges. So he ended up fairly far behind everyone else in progression.

The other big challenge was how to all play together as that required a person to host the game we would all use. Which created challenges when we wanted to play something else, but someone wanted to continue their progressin on the server. This is typical of most survival games. If you want something not public, it has to be hosted by someone on a local server or computer.

The game itself was enjoyable, engaging and fun. We had hoped for more however.  Or at least maybe a different type of progression.  Once we did everything captured everything and started to explore breeding there wasn’t much more to do.

If you are looking for something that is a little different from Minecraft, simple enough to engage younger audiences and challenging enough for adults, this game just might be something to take a look at.