Palworld vs The Competition: A Creature Collector Comparison
For 20 years, there has been one dominating empire in the genre of games known as creature collectors (I would know, it’s only about 10 months older than I am), and there have been copious different emulations and iterations of the same idea, but only one is known for standing its ground in the same playing field.
Released in early access in 2021 by Pocketpair Inc., Palworld has taken the gaming world by storm with its unique take on the creature collector style, as well as some copyright conspiracy that has much of the gaming world picking sides between “inspired by” and “100% copied”. With this game making such a stir, is it even worth the time to play? Let’s discuss.
Before you can open the game, you must design your avatar, and while other, more popular creature collectors can be rather restrictive in this category, Palworld… isn’t much better, unfortunately. Having pink or purple skin color is more than what has been on offer in other games, but avatar options are still limited across the board. Of course, avatar creation doesn’t have as much effect on whether a game is good or not, but if immersion is the goal, then more options would be helpful for players to achieve a representation of self that players can be happy with.
There is a story to the game through found journal entries from a previous explorer, but I have been playing this game for 216 hours, and I haven’t found many of these, and the ones I have found are very sporadic in sequence. The story isn’t exactly important in order to play the game, but as I said previously, if immersion is the goal, then I would think developers would want the player to read what they spent time writing and having the journals scattered across an open world landscape in the hopes that players MAY find them during exploration isn’t the best way forward in my opinion.
Given the wide expanse of the game, it may prove better to have the journals pop into your inventory as the player levels up, but that’s only my opinion.
The game controls well on the whole, but there is a bit of finger-twisting on PC when riding a flying mount, as moving forward, up/downward, and sprinting are all in the same area. That is the only specific instance of this control issue.
Riding, swimming, and running mounts work well and with little issue. Similarly, just running around as the player does well, and I highly suggest leveling up stamina if running and climbing as a significant part of your exploration of the world as a whole.
The base system works nicely, too. Having a storage to go through the pals you have collected does well, and the farming mechanic is smooth. There is one issue that I keep having on my play-through, and that is when there are a bunch of pals deployed at base, one or two will get “stuck” in place and will starve until redeployed from the palbox, but otherwise, the base building is on point.
The pals themselves are unique, with some similarities to another popular creature-collector game, but such comparison would be nit-pick
y. There are currently 187 in total to collect, with some reskins that change typing, but overall are unique across the game. I am one to read the entries on these kinds of games and found several that made me giggle, some that made me a little horrified, but overall, they add depth and history to the game (more so than the journals that are hidden in plain sight, in my opinion). I also enjoy the fact that they can help you with tasks at base and have specific animations for such.
There are even places in the world with chests that can ONLY be opened by the pal with that kind of task. And, yes, I do know about giving the pals guns, but currently in my play-through of the game, I don’t see the reasoning for giving the pals guns other than just because. Butchering of pals for parts is also in the game, and it's not that its not beneficial to do so (pal organs of specific typing are used in crafting recipes) I just don’t like to acknowledge it and choose to think that if I hunt down pals for specific organs, that I’m causing them to go unconscious.
So, now comes the part where I give my opinion on whether the game is worth the time or not. I’ll be honest, it can go either way. There are pros and cons to both Palworld and the other creature collector game I have been strongly alluding to throughout this article. Yes, one tends to have more polish and appeals to my animal-loving nature, especially given the fact that I literally grew up immersed in the different media of that particular game (games, trading cards, TV shows, etc.).
On the other hand, however, I definitely had more fun with the multiplayer aspect in Palworld and the idea of building something with friends, as the only multiplayer aspect of other, more popular creature collectors is fighting our creatures to find the superior collector of creatures. The more popular creature collector did have cool mechanics when trading creatures, but it's not something you get to experience when you play alone, as I did when I grew up playing the more popular creature collector.
To summarize, there are definitely reasons to try different creature collector games as they all have unique and individual game mechanics and great art styles, but Palworld is definitely one to try out, and it's not even out of early access yet, so it could be entirely different as time passes.
I can only hope it ages like wine instead of like milk, but seeing as it’s currently on sale for $23.99 at the time of me writing this, where’s the harm in giving it a spin?
If you like the game, please show love to the developers who work so hard and deserve appreciation.
Get the game from Steam:
