I’ve had a mixed experience with Grounded 2. It flip-flops between brilliance and frustration. The magic of living in an insect kingdom that’s been made massive around me, by virtue of my being shrunk, is absolutely still here. I will never tire of watching spiders the size of cars prowl around the blades-of-grass forest around me, or bees buzz like helicopters above. And now there’s more everything: more insects, more world, more variety, more story, more nuance to its systems, more things to make. In every way, Grounded 2 has widened and deepened – sometimes quite literally. There’s a much clearer sense Obsidian knows the game it’s making now and what the community wants from it. But with this added game-framework also comes busywork and a sense of grind, and a feeling of sometimes being held back from doing what you really want to do.
Grounded 2Developer: ObsidianPublisher: MicrosoftPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases today in early access on PC (Steam and Xbox), Xbox Series S/X and Game Pass.
Case in point: I’m about 15 hours in and still can’t explore a frozen biome around a pushed-over ice-cream cart that I want to explore, because I can’t yet make the warmth-giving armour I need to survive there. I can’t make it because I don’t have access to the resources I need, either because the insects they come from are too strong for me to reliably kill, or because my tools won’t harvest the plants they come from – and I can’t upgrade my tools because I don’t have the resources I need for that, either.
Usually what happens is I venture out, determined to overcome these obstacles, and am productive and successful for a while, then I’m ambushed by spiders or mosquitos or cockroaches or bees and I die. Then I resurrect all the way back at base, having lost all of the resources I’d collected, needing to start again, which will involve a long trek back to where I was. Where I might well die again. Variations of that – that’s what has happened to me over and over. And after a while, I lose my patience with it.
But at the same time, it can be brilliant. That world – this time it’s in Unreal Engine 5 and though it looks similar to Grounded 1, you can clearly notice a bump in the fidelity of it. It’s still simply rendered in a colourful, smooth-edged, cartoon kind of way, but that doesn’t lessen the tension of living in it, particularly at night or underground, where only the glowing eyes of enemies can be seen if you’ve no torch in hand. And when the sun breaks over the world in the morning, its rays lancing through the grass and dandelions and thistles, making shadows of the creatures lurking above, it is spectacular.