Review
Valheim
Extraordinary craft at a low price, still in early access after five years and still worth every penny.
No. 37 in The Noteworthy 50 · Survival Craft
Palworld
The fastest-selling survival game ever made, still in early access, still fighting Nintendo in court.
Palworld arrived in January 2024 as a punchline — the game where you shoot creatures that look uncomfortably like a competitor's — and then sold over twenty-five million copies in a month, because underneath the joke it turned out to be a genuinely well-constructed survival game.
The design insight is that captured creatures are labour. Pals assigned to a base do the work: mining, farming, generating power, running production lines. That turns creature collection from a battle roster into a factory-management problem, and the resulting loop — capture better workers, automate more of your base, free yourself to explore further — is properly compelling. It is closer to Factorio with monsters than to anything Nintendo makes.
Co-op is where it lives
Dedicated servers support large groups, and building a shared base with friends who each specialise is where the game peaks. Combat is real — actual guns, actual aiming — and the boss fights demand co-ordination. The tone is irreverent throughout and, once you accept it, consistently funny.
The reservations are significant. It remains in early access, the late game thins noticeably, and performance at scale is inconsistent. And the ongoing Japanese patent litigation from Nintendo and The Pokémon Company has already resulted in mechanical changes to shipped features. Pocketpair has continued updating throughout. It is thirty dollars with no microtransactions, which buys a lot of goodwill — just do not assume the roadmap is guaranteed.
What works
- Creature-collecting and base automation combine better than they have any right to
- Dedicated server co-op for up to 32 players works well
- Enormous content-per-dollar for a $30 early access title
- The gunplay and combat are genuinely competent, not an afterthought
What doesn't
- Still early access with an uncertain roadmap and ongoing litigation
- Performance and bugs remain rough at scale
- Late-game progression thins out considerably
- The design derives visibly from other games, which is the entire legal issue
The Catch — what it will cost you
A clean $30 purchase with no microtransactions at all — genuinely rare and worth noting. The risk is not financial extraction, it is completion: Nintendo and The Pokémon Company's patent litigation in Japan has already forced mechanical changes to the game, and the long-term outcome is not yet settled.
Who it's for: Groups of friends who want co-op base building with an automation layer and a sense of humour.