As a teenager, you may have dreamed of a more adult version of your favorite Pokémon game. What if we added violence and guns? What if we added raid combat? Survival game mechanics? The possibility of playing online? It was probably this kind of crazy meeting room escalation that gave birth to Palworld.
Developed by Japanese studio PocketPair, Palworld was released in early access on Friday. In five days, the game was a hit and sold 7 million copies. This weekend, the game hit a peak of 1.29 million daily players, the fifth largest user spike on Steam, ahead of huge games from recent years like Elden Ring Or Cyberpunk 2077. It’s only beaten by timeless multiplayer games like Dota 2 Or Counter-Strike.
A survival game like any other
20 minutes couldn’t pass up an opportunity to play this improbable concept. Despite the phrase “Pokémon with weapons” thrown around everywhere, Palworld is very different from the Nintendo franchise. Rather than training your “Pals” and having them compete in turn-based battles, here, they are used more to collect resources and build your base camp. It’s definitely closer to a survival game like Minecraft Or Ark.
In the first hours of the game, we spend a lot of time chopping wood and capturing the same sheep ten times for experience points. You will have to build a base and put the creatures you capture in the wild to work there, being careful not to mistreat them too much. Accumulating resources allows you to craft equipment for yourself and your comrades, before heading out to attack stronger monsters to capture.
Apart from this loop, the game also offers some very basic dungeons, successions of rooms filled with enemies. The combat system, rather simplistic, is ultimately quite disappointing compared to all the staging of the game and its marketing. After the initial surprise and the first moments of hilarity between friends when you realize that you can indeed equip your cute little squirrel with a gun, you spend a lot of time pressing your mouse while waiting to see the enemy die.
Copy is not played
It’s hard to avoid the question of creature plagiarism. If some Pals are different enough to plead common inspiration or coincidence, others have no excuse. Trying to guess which Pokémon was copied becomes a game within the game. We’ll let you judge whether the resemblance between Sparkit, a yellow and black electric mouse, and Pikachu is purely coincidental. For our part, we have almost systematically found an equivalent to the creatures of Palworld in the Nintendo bestiary.
If this conscience doesn’t bother you – after all, borrowing mechanics is nothing new in video games – Palworld is harmless, even a little forgettable. There’s enough to spend around twenty hours with friends, as long as you like mining stones and crafting equipment. But since the game is in early access, it will probably receive updates to expand a little. On the other hand, if you want an experience closer to Pokémon and role-playing games, you should rather head towards other games inspired by the monster-catching franchise, like Cassette Beasts, TemTem Or Coromon. And too bad for the machine guns.