Before Palworld’s Early Access debut in 2024, I remember eagerly wanting to review the completely unhinged-looking “Pokemon with guns” game, mostly as a joke. Hilariously, the joke was on me when it not only became one of the biggest games of the year, but also one of my all-time favorite survival games. With its 1.0 update now finally at-hand over two years later, I was quite excited to jump back into this strange, sometimes-oddly-dark creature collector. Though I’m only a dozen hours into a fresh playthrough of the 1.0 version, so far it has improved in all the ways I hoped it would after sinking so much time into its earliest incarnation. Most of the technical rough edges have been smoothed over, progression has been smartly streamlined, and loads of missing bits and baubles have been added, like a fully realized story with NPCs to chat with and quest lines to complete – not to mention a proper ending to that story, which I am hungry to reach before I put a final score on this review.

If you’ve never played Palworld before, then there’s very little I can say to prepare you for this completely bizarre adventure. You’ll recruit a roster of colorful critters who make Nintendo’s legal team furious to perform unpaid labor in your work camps as you explore an increasingly dangerous world filled with gun-toting maniacs. This mix of creature collecting, open-world exploration, RPG-adjacent leveling and questing, and survival mechanics that have you building up a base to store your pals and conquer the wilds probably shouldn’t work. But it really does. And with 1.0 expanding on the fundamentals to flesh out the world and the kinds of activities you tackle within it, that over-the-top adventure is more compelling than it’s ever been.

For starters, there are now comprehensible reasons for your character to be doing the things they are doing – an actual storyline to accompany the climb from “naked barbarian with a stick” to “industrial sweatshop proprietor with godlike power.” NPCs will send you on missions and direct you toward the next set of meaningful activities to pursue. Most of those activities ask you to travel deeper into a dangerous island world dominated by wild creatures and psychotic human factions, and it’s been fun to get to know some of the friendly and unfriendly faces along the way (especially compared to Early Access, where you were just fighting them with no explanation). That said, I haven’t seen enough of the story to know if it’s all that good yet, and would describe the first hours as being passable. It’s nice context for what I’m doing at least, but time will tell if it becomes something I’m genuinely excited to see more of or just stay as decent set dressing for the overall goofiness.

The biggest difference since the last time I played is, without question, all of the various performance improvements and bug fixes as the issues used to be rampant – to the point where the Xbox version was initially almost unplayable at times. I’m still early on, and the most egregious stuff didn’t rear its ugly head until late in the journey, but at least so far it's been much more stable. Framerates are still a bit jittery at times, but nowhere near the extent they once were, and those hiccups haven’t come anywhere close to mucking up the experience, whereas they used to be a fairly regular annoyance.

Another big improvement is the progression system, which previously felt quite uneven and grindy at times. The pace in these early hours has been much cleaner, pushing me into the action faster and pointing me toward clear objectives that got me out of my bases to explore, fight bosses, and capture pals more quickly. Of course, this is also now my third time playing through this stretch of Palworld, so it’s possible that my familiarity with these opening hours has more to do with it than anything else. I’ll have a better sense of how much progression has actually improved once I get into the huge stretches of new territory I haven’t seen yet and need to figure things out for the first time.

I’m still quite early in my 1.0 Palworld adventure, but I’ve instantly remembered why I was so captivated by this hodgepodge of ideas. I’ve got plenty more to work my way through, a whole bunch of new Pals to collect (that I’ve only just started to see pop up here and there), and who knows what else in store. This is a big update with a lot of game to get through, so I’ll update this review as I get deeper in, and then have a final score in the coming weeks.