Have you ever found yourself wondering, “wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a Pokemon game with guns?” I too, had this thought when I was in the fourth grade. When the folks at the Chinese game studio Pocket Pair arrived at this same conclusion, they actually had the power to make such a dream come true. Enter, Palworld, which is currently available on Steam and Xbox Stores and is included with Xbox Game Pass.
The saying that good artists copy, and great artists steal, has never been taken to heart more sincerely. Discussion surrounding Palworld has focused on it being a knock-off of just about every game under the sun. Most obviously, its central mechanic of exploring a world full of colorful and cute creatures borrows heavily from Pokemon. Many of these creatures, called “Pals,” appear to be direct knock-offs of official Pokemon designs.
In other areas, Palworld’s gameplay is a patchwork of some of gaming’s biggest trends. It takes the survival-crafting elements of games like Rust or Minecraft, the exploration of recent Zelda titles and a bit of the Monster Hunter franchise. Cumulatively, Palworld’s most direct corollary might be Ark: Survival Evolved, specifically with that game’s dinosaur taming and technological advancement objectives.
One of the strangest things to come out of Palworld’s sudden publicity has to be screenshots of these cute little animals alongside assembly lines manufacturing photorealistic firearms in some kind of macabre gulag-esque spectacle. Much has already been said over the years about the ethics of violent video game content, but Palworld empowers players to engage in a kind of mechanized sadism that you just don’t see that often in video games.
These controversies aside, actually playing the game is a reasonably fun experience. The feeling of achievement when you catch a new Pal you haven’t seen before or finally level up enough to build some new structure or machinery on your base is sufficiently rewarding to encourage further engagement. As of now, Palworld remains in early access, with no set date for a full release. Despite this, the game managed to reach over five million sales within just the first five days of its Jan. 19 release.
Pocket Pair has released a statement regarding their intentions for future content rollouts, promising currently absent features like PvP battling, Pal trading and Raid bosses. Many players are happy to see that Palworld has thus far avoided following in a major trend among other Chinese video games, that being the “Gacha,” model of monetization. In said model, players are incentivized to spend money on microtransactions to have a chance at unlocking rare or high utility characters from an in-game gachapon lottery system.
This fact is doubly surprising given the foundational Pals mechanic is perfect for this kind of monetization. Instead, player-to-player trading will likely spawn a secondary market for sale of rare or high utility Pals. Precedent for this kind of market currently exists on the site PKMBuy, where sellers auction-off rare Pokemon from recent games.
In this and many other respects, the future for Palworld remains somewhat uncertain. The potential for a lawsuit from Nintendo looms, and future sales trends will reveal if Palworld is just the subject of a temporary fascination or if it will continue to rise in popularity.