I am a child of the 90s and like many of you, Pokémon was part of my childhood. Like me, many of you have grown up with pocket monsters and I in particular owe my love for video games to the Big N—and I haven’t played a Pokémon in about 15 years. Therefore, when you play Palworld you feel like something inside you explodes; catches fire and you end up letting go of your childhood, and that’s where the good thing about the Pocketpair game lies, because that sweetened pokemon and? series of the great japanese sagaseeks to amaze anyone who has a fond memory of Game Freak.
In fact, reduced to a minimum, Palworld is a meme, and does not hide its status as a joke. It was announced two years ago with the shocking idea of ”it’s a Pokémon with machine guns”, and it has carried that almost slogan until its premiere this week in . An early access that I’ve been playing for a week and that has shown me that although Palworld is shady, in terms of how it plays with your feelings, when it doesn’t parody Pokémon, falls to pieces.
It turns out that, in the end, Palworld needs to stretch the gum of a meme thanks to which it will be during the first weeks, but which will diminish when the novelty wears off. It is not something exclusive to him, it must be said, it happens to all games. However, Pocketpair’s open world live by and for jokes, and it takes more than laughs to keep the game going. Of course, to Caesar what is Caesar’s, there is potential in some of his ideas; again, those “Pokeideas”.
Palworld, a parody that starts from a very simple idea: the freedom of the player
Is Palworld anything more than “Pokémon with shotguns” and flagrant violations of international slavery and war agreements? Yeah, freedom. Apart from being a meme and an avoidance, almost like Neo in The Matrix, of any type of demand from Nintendo for a copy, Palworld actually makes eyes at the open world concept of Breath of the Wild.
Pocketpair’s game—by the way, it is the third one they have developed, they are not new to video games—seeks to replicate that “handmade” feeling of the Big N with a vast game world, divided by islands and with a structure of “if you see a mountain in the distance, you can reach it.” Almost like a isekaia work where the protagonist is transported from one world to another to which he is unknown, we will begin our adventure by editing our character with some classic customization options that, if I don’t argue, it’s because they don’t come out of the rule.
The important thing here is that feeling of a massive, yet empty world. It is not a procedural mapand that play tricks in several aspects so we all have the same extension and locations regardless of our game, but so massive in scale that it bloats from the beginning and that, even without being very inspired, with a lot of plain without buildings or striking visual elements, it knows how to get good It feels like being in a dreamlike natural setting, and here you come in as the protagonist.
Less Pokémon and more a regular one
If in its layout of the world it is Zelda, in its mechanical It is one, one more it must be said. Pocketpair knows the characteristics of the genre and does not bring anything new to the mix: construction system, collection, need to eat and sleep, day-night cycle and hot-cold; and a system of improvements, levels and statistics linked to the level of our camp or that of our character. And, of course, that of ours pals.
The Pals, the Pokémon on this side of the judicial agreements, are the other leg of the table that is Palworld and, without a doubt, the most striking. There are, in total, 111 Pals to discover and capture, and they will be recorded in your Palpedia, the Pokedex of a lifetime. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have defended to the death the most basic concept of the license and although they have had competitors of one type or another, causing Palworld to lose that sense of uniqueness, Any game let us capture animalshave powers and, ultimately, are the allies of humans, has the attention of the whole community of players.
There are, in total, 111 Pals to discover and capture, and they will be noted in your Palpedia
However, it is the first time in a long time that I have felt like playing something related to Pokémon because Palworld, the closer it gets to the Japanese license, the better it moves. Capturing Pals, for example, is done with the classic system of lowering the life of the animal in question and throwing a ball at its head, hoping that it is too tired to resist. Here, the difference that Palworld puts on the table, following the parody trail, is that if in one we weakened the Pokémon with blows from other Pokémon; here we do it based on shotguns, rifles, grenade launcher or the bare fists.
As in Pokémon, there is a percentage of success and it will depend on the life of the Pal or the sphere that we launch
It’s fun, so much fun to go hunting for Pals. I admit, it’s very violent and makes you rethink things, but Palworld plays his cards well when it comes to imitating Game Freak and laughing, almost as a Scary Movie, of everything that his saga represents. However, everything is diluted when Palworld is due to the survival genre instead of adventure, because the concessions you make are less fun.
Capturing Pals is, in short, a way to automate the functions of your camp because the combatIn fact, it is limited to two options: attackeither not to attack. And even so, don’t expect that concept of automated factories with animal assembly lines that the game’s previews seemed to hint at. It’s all simpler than that, although simplicity is not bad and in a game like this with so much concept, it is even necessary.
The more levels we have, the more improvements we can unlock from the technology tree. This translates into a classic objective-reward system whereby the more we play, the better our camp structures will be. We have since farms to be able to extract wool from the Pals or eat the eggs they lay; areas of tree felling either extraction of resources limited to the classic grid system of the stage; or forges, but all this with the help of the Pals. For example, in the latter we can kind of Flareon fanning the flames and heating the metal that we can use to make bullets, while praying for the end of his life to come.
When the initial surprise wears off and the meme wears off, it all feels like archetypal survival.
And it is that, When it happens the surprise initial and the meme are sold out, everything feels as a archetypal. Many serve a single task and it is fun to see how, when you build something, they go without asking permission to carry out their tasks. But since you always depend on the AI to speed up the tasks, you will end up taking the lead by chopping the nearby trees to obtain material. Furthermore, the construction is not satisfactory and you will end up building a house with four walls and a roof to avoid the hassle of construction mode.
However, this genre can find a niche and benefit, without a doubt, from its online mode of up to 32 playersalthough only if we turn a blind eye to their issues inherited from their concept of a static world. I have not been able to get the most out of this enormous mode, since I have barely been able to bring together two players in the same world, but since the scenario is not procedural and they all appear in the same area, the competitive component is diluted Well, reaching the high part of the map takes days. Furthermore, we cannot take our Pals or characters from one world to another, and the level does not autoscale. Too many hassles for a mode that I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt until it is released.
Take them all, or shoot them down in a cheeky game
I hoped that, far from the , if the studio had avoided the bad eyes of the Japanese, they would still expand and make the idea of ”get them all” of Pokémon their own with a ungainly open world, simple and effective. I have already told you that no, it is due to his condition, but I feel obliged to talk about what does work.
The combat, for example, is so basic and gives so little thought to satisfying the player that it’s fun. As I mentioned, there is no possibility to give directions to your Pals. They are there to make a big deal and help you lower the life of the bug on duty, but, even so, Pocketpair does not bow its head and knows a lot about copying homework.
Each Pal has a basic skill which will be broken down into other secondary schools that follow the classic rule of fireballs, water gun, earthquake… Everything so that, visually, it reminds us of the Japanese saga. We cannot choose them, I have already said that it is basic, but it is the synergy Pal with the player what’s fun here.
They all have a fourth skillone that we can only unlock based on the level we have and that allows us use Pals as shields, flamethrower, mounts to travel the great plains, or even the possibility of give them firearms. It’s all so absurd that I wish it were explored more thoroughly because concepts like the , are barely Pal with brilli-brilli with nothing to do other than serve as decoration in the factory.
Of course, it’s not just about fighting the Pals and although here, again, Palworld gets tripped up, it leaves some little crumbs something that will evolve, I suppose, over the months. Each area of the map, where as in the Japanese saga there are Pals of different rarity, is besieged by the Syndicate. I don’t really know what implications this group has. They are AI-controlled humans who serve as putty to shoot at, but they capture pals and eat them. In reality they are like us, but let’s consider them the villains of a poorly told story.
Apart from serving as mere entertainment and a target to beat because many of them will have captured a unique Pal who, once released, will join our ranks, we have the Syndicate towers. Again, taking a look at Pokémon, these serve as gymsalthough there is hardly a confrontation straight against a boss which, all things considered, is the most anticlimactic that one might expect. They are punch sponges and their small stage and the impossibility of using potions, or using power-ups, reduces the strategy to a tug of war to see who does the most damage. The idea is good, the execution is not. At the end of the day they are obstacles, optionalwhich do not give much of themselves and cannot be enjoyed cooperatively (the latter based on the version played).
The caves They are more fun. There is a little bit of everything: strange Pals that, as in Pokémon, are native to the dark areas and of greater rarity. But there are also chests, eggs that you can collect and hatch in an incubator, or enemy AI that you can shoot to win. It is an optional scenario too, not random and that, in the played version, does not regenerate its itemsso once you complete it there is no interest in accessing it again.
Is Palworld a Pokémon-killer? No, it’s a meme that will soon start working
There are good ideas in Palworld, but at half speed. When it tries to be a successor to Game Freak, like a sugar-coated Pokémon, that’s when I want to play the most. Even visually, although it has that air of from Unreal Engine 5 —an engine that, by the way, supports the game—, there are beautiful moments and the design of the Pals is anything but ugly. In addition, performance with an RTX 3060 Ti and an i5 12400 is not bad, with few edges to polish which will help its expansion on PC.
When it tries to be a successor to Game Freak, like a sweetened Pokémon, that’s when I most want to play
It is a game that you have the feeling exists to give something to talk about. I also don’t want to be too bad with its mechanics, because although I have plenty of them—or at least I have plenty of everything that is like another survival game— still has a lot path ahead.
