PALWORLD

Palworld arrived in January 2024 as the internet's most divisive obsession — the "Pokemon with guns" survival game everyone had an opinion about — and promptly sold more than 25 million copies in a month. Eighteen months of relentless updates later, Pocketpair's monster-collecting survival sandbox has finally crossed the finish line into 1.0, and the full launch is exactly what it always was, only bigger: outrageously moreish, endlessly memeable, and still held together with duct tape.

The elevator pitch does it a disservice. Yes, you catch cute creatures called Pals by chucking spheres at them. But Palworld is really an open-world survival-crafting game that borrows Ark's base-building, Breath of the Wild's climb-anything traversal, and Pokemon's collect-a-thon, then bolts them together into a loop that's almost embarrassingly hard to put down: explore, catch, build, automate, and turn your growing army of Pals loose on ever-bigger threats. Your Pals don't just fight — they mine, farm, craft and power your base while you sleep, and building a humming, self-running factory of adorable workers is genuinely one of the most satisfying automation systems on PS5.

1.0 — bigger, and finally "finished"

The 1.0 update (July 10, 2026) roughly doubles the map, adds the new World Tree region, and folds in fresh Pals and bosses — and crucially, existing saves carry over, so the hundreds of hours veterans have already poured in are safe. It's less a reinvention than a capstone on a game that's been quietly ballooning in scope for over a year, now wearing the "full release" badge and pulling a whole new wave of players back to the Palpagos Islands.

Rough around every edge — and it doesn't matter

None of this is polished in the way a first-party PlayStation game is. Palworld is janky: physics misbehave, the framerate wobbles when your base gets busy, and its wilfully dark humour — Pals as factory labour, ammunition, or worse — lands somewhere between satire and shrug depending on your mood. It is also, by design, unashamedly derivative, wearing its inspirations louder than most studios would dare. But the sheer generosity of the thing — the pace of updates, the scale of the world, the freedom to play it solo or descend into chaos with three friends — papers over the cracks. It's a phenomenon for a reason.

For trophy hunters, the base platinum is a big, comfortable grind rather than a skill wall. Nothing is missable — the whole island is free-roam — so it's about time and persistence: catching 140 different kinds of Pals, 1,000 Pals in total, hoarding 255 Lifmunk Effigies and crafting 20,000 rounds of ammo (which your automated base largely does for you). The real difficulty lives at the endgame: seizing the Oil Rig, downing the Bellanoir and Blazamut Ryu raid bosses, and beating all six Tower bosses on Hard mode for Champion of the Palpagos Islands. Our full base-game roadmap and all 32 trophies are below.