Grounded
Grounded is effectively a multiplayer survival game of "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids". It's well optimised, the building system is polished and it's really immersive to play in. There are tons of building pieces which should make some interesting possibilities for bases. The garden world is pretty huge, hand crafted and full of interesting things to find. At such a small scale, it's really interesting to walk among the dirt, seeing grass stalks as high as trees. There's also tons of verticality; you can climb grass stalks, get high up to get a better view of your surroundings, delve into an ant hill and go diving in the pond. There's also loads of weapon and armour sets to make from bug parts.
Pros
- Gorgeous, especially the lighting
- The design of the game world is impeccable. You can climb tall things to get a better view, landmarks are useful for navigating etc
- Bugs interact with each other. Bombardiers attack groups of ants. Ants attack weevils.
- There's a blueprint system for planning buildings in advance
- When you throw a spear at a creature, it gets stuck in it
- Really cool hand-crafted map to explore
- The map is HUGE
- There are landmarks scattered around the garden which are great to explore as a tiny person
- You can craft armour out of bugs
- Huge attention to detail. You can climb a stalk of grass at night and watch them all wave gently in the wind
- There's a big pond with lots of underwater things to explore
- You can 'peep' a creature by looking at it while pretending to have binoculars, and it adds that creature's weaknesses to a database
- You unlock special powers (mutations) by performing feats like exploration and killing certain enemies a lot
- There are tons of decor items. One of them is an armour stand that lets you quick-swap the equipped set it's wearing
- You can relocate buildings at any time so you don't lose building materials
- You can quick-drop your inventory into nearby chests
- Ongoing patches have massively improved the game and removed most of the negative points I had
Cons
- Multiplayer is completely unplayable unless you're in the same house. Remote players get disconnected at least every 10 minutes, and the synchronisation is very unreliable
- It uses Microsoft instead of Steam for multiplayer, which is a genuinely shitty interface for playing together. Once you eventually manage to add each other as friends (which, unintuitively you do by 'following' each other), it took us a while to work out how to stop hearing everyone twice.
- You can place markers, but you can't label them - only symbols. I have to have a text editor open next to the game so I know what all the random symbols are
- Your thirst and hunger reset to about 30% every time you sleep, regardless of how full or empty you were when you went to bed, which makes eating in the afternoon or evening mostly pointless
- Personally I don't think it makes much sense that you need tier 2 bug parts to make tier 2 weapons. That means you need to kill tier 2 creatures with tier 1 weapons and armour to advance
- The combat is the biggest weak point. Your attacks are 3-hit combos, but your attacks don't interrupt the enemy, so they usually attack you during your combo.
- On medium difficulty, the game is ridiculously hard. Once I knocked it down to Mild, I was actually able to play solo and enjoy it