The media describe Palworlds as "Pokemon with guns". Which is a pretty bad description. Because at the heart of things, Palworlds is a survival crafting game, in the vein of Valheim or Ark: Survival. With Pokemon. A few of which might carry a gun, eventually. Have you ever built a base in Valheim or a similar game in single-player mode and then felt that the place felt empty and lifeless? Have you ever played a Pokemon game and thought that you didn't get to interact much with your Pokemon, other than sending them out into battle? Palworld takes these two problems and solves them by combining the two genres: The Pokemon, called "pals" in this game, are placed in the base, and will work there. Which means your base is full of activity, from the cat mining rocks to the elk logging trees to the elephant watering your crops. And you can feed your pals, pet them, assign them to specific workstations, or call them all together to repel the occasional invasion. And all of this works pretty well, and is a lot of fun. With pals needing different skills for example to plant crops, water them, and then harvest them, you will need to go out not only to "collect them all", but to find specific types for specific tasks in your base. Other pals aren't that good at working, but are good at combat, and you can have them help you there. And yes, there is one little pal you can get early on who will sit on your head and fire an Uzi from there, while the player is still in the spear and bow era of technology. You need to fight wild pals to weaken them before you throw a sphere (pokeball) at them to catch them. And sometimes you just need to kill wild pals for their loot.

As the developers didn't want to limit stealing ideas from Nintendo to Pokemons, they also lifted the complete open world movement system from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which is great, because there are too many open world games in which you can neither climb nor fly. With the movement possibilities comes the design philosophy: You not only *can* climb any mountain, you actually *want* to, because you might find a treasure chest or a rare egg there. Exploration is a lot of fun, because besides treasure and eggs you are always on the lookout for pals you don't have yet. And there are a few rare collectible resources, from journal entries giving a bit of lore to effigies that serve to upgrade your catching ability after you killed the first boss.

While I like the look and a lot of the design decisions, I am not really happy with the technical state of the game. Especially on Game Pass, which is apparently one patch behind the Steam version. The Game Pass version for example currently has no way to quit the game. You can quit to the title screen, but you can't get back to the desktop from there other than with ALT-F4. I was also extremely disappointed when I found a dungeon, but then found it mostly empty, and the few monsters inside tended to get stuck in the walls and obstacles. The UI is often somewhat clunky, it took me forever to find out how to destroy stuff that I had built. In some places there is an "en_Text" placeholder for the English language text (and that gets a lot worse for other languages). In short, when they labeled this game "early access", they weren't lying. The hope is that the huge pile of money they just made will allow them to improve the game quickly.