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The Palworld Early Access is officially out on Steam giving players their first chance to sample the game that many have been speculating could be the Pokemon killer. Could it really live up to those massive expectations, though? In all likelihood, it won’t dethrone one of the most lucrative franchises in the world. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of things Palworld does better than the Pokemon games, though.
Combat
Turn-based combat is far from a bad thing, but modern JRPGs like Persona 5 and Dragon Quest 11 have perfected fluid and snappy turn-based systems that prevent a lot of the more sluggish and tedious elements of their older counterparts. Even the latest Pokemon games, unfortunately, still operate under those antiquated systems. Most players out there find themselves dreading when a move hits multiple times or lowers multiple stats for this reason, and it slows and already glacial combat system down further.
Palworld, on the other hand, takes an approach more akin to the fluid overworld combat system of Pokemon Legends: Arceus but with even less separation between the exploration and combat sections. Players can build while their Pals are attacking an aggressive creature.
Creature Cooperation/Interaction
In Pokemon, the player’s options for interacting with what they’ve caught outside of battle tend to be fairly limited. The most recent games, Scarlet and Violet, have picnics and the ability to let their primary Pokemon out for battles and general walking, which is certainly the best implementation of Pokemon interaction thus far. Palworld takes it to another level, though. Think about those hundreds of Pokemon sitting perpetually on a PC in most games, and now imagine if they were helping craft items or wandering around the player’s base instead.
Not only can the player carry five Pals to all assist in a battle at once rather than one at a time, but the Pals back at the player’s base can simultaneously be assigned to various tasks like crafting and farming.
Visuals
The bar to surpass Pokemon in visuals is incredibly low, which is how Palworld is able to fairly easily jump over it without even being particularly visually stunning itself. That’s not to say Palworld doesn’t look nice, it just has some graphical shortcomings that, if anything, are expected from a studio of this size. That’s not even mentioning the fact that it’s currently an Early Access title. What is Game Freak’s excuse when the studio is one of the most profitable in the world? That’s anybody’s guess.
Optimization
Current multiplayer server issues aside, it’s hard to deny that Palworld runs pretty well, especially for an Early Access title. There have been other Early Access games more easily forgiven for launching in far more broken states. The frame rate is consistent (at least on PC) and any load times are typically very reasonable for an open-world game of its size. It feels almost unnecessary to compare that to the recent Pokemon games like Scarlet and Violet or Sword and Shield. Even a better example like Pokemon Legends: Arceus is still far more inconsistent in its frame rate when there are a lot more things onscreen than Palworld. It’s not even a competition.
Multiplayer
At the time of writing, saying the multiplayer of Palworld is better than Pokemon could be open to some understandable scrutiny. The Palworld servers have been under major strain on account of selling an unexpected two million copies in its first 24 hours since launch and the developer has been rushing to fix the problems that have naturally been created by that fact. Still, the fact that a dedicated open-world server can be created on PC that can host up to 32 players all cooperating, battling, building, and more just takes the cake over any Pokemon multiplayer experience.
The very limited four-player multiplayer mode in Scarlet and Violet was already pretty panned even before this heavy competition, and it’s only going to get tougher as the game continues development.
