Grounded 2 Review

When the original Grounded launched in 2022, it seemed to have a simple enough premise: a survival game infused with as much Honey, I Shrunk the Kids as possible. Four teenagers - the protagonists of the game - were shrunk down by Ominent, an evil corporation (the evil here may be redundant) and ended up in the backyard of one of Ominent’s scientists. Grounded 2 sees the same four protagonists once again reduced to the millimeter scale, but this time stranded in a park, working with Sloane - a new suit at Ominent - against a mutual, mysterious foe.

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Grounded 2 retains a lot of the same DNA from the original game, but tweaks things to make the player’s life better - adding context-sensitive Omni-Tools being a prime example.

If It Ain’t Broke…

Grounded 2 largely takes the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to game design, keeping most of what worked in the original game and giving everything a fresh coat of paint. While the graphics are improved and the menus and UI are more intuitive, the original Grounded was a surprisingly mature survival game, surprising considering that Obsidian Entertainment is better known for its RPGs. Some features - like the ability to hold down a button to quick-stash items from your inventory into a variety of chests, or to be able to draw from said chests to craft and build without having to put every single item in your inventory - suggest that the developers are aware of and actively attempted to mitigate some common sources of tedium prevalent in the genre. Not content to learn solely from the mistakes of others, they also replaced the select of core tools - hammers, axes, shovels, etc., with context-sensitive omni-tools that don’t need to be repaired or equipped - if you see something that can be dug, cut down or cracked open, the right tool is always just a single button press away now.

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The primary gameplay loop in Grounded 2 is a virtuous one - hunt and explore to find new materials to craft near gear and brave harsher challenges.

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Thoroughly exploring will lead to new dungeons, enemies and rewards.

A Day at the Park

The core gameplay loop is pretty simple: You will explore the park, harvest materials, build camps, and construct structures that allow you to craft more refined tools, like silk ropes, weapons, armor, smoothies, bombs, and more, all while managing your thirst and hunger levels. Much of this is geared towards climbing the tech tree, accumulating useful resources (you will always need more plant fiber…) and satiating your needs, but there’s a fair amount of tactics lurking under the surface, as well. Some enemies, like scorpions and spiders, will envenomate you, toxic gases foul the air near rotting food (and stink bugs), spilled ice cream or an abandoned cooler can inflict the chilled debuff, and bombardier beetles can inflict the sizzle debuff. All of these can be mitigated with the right armor or smoothie and easily defeating once dangerous foes and exploring perilous locales after ensuring you’re properly equipped provides a substantial sense of accomplishment… not to mention access to new resources and rewards.

New resources found can be analyzed at an aptly named Resource Analyzer, earning you Brainpower, which in turn unlocks new recipes you can use to craft more advanced workstations, tools, and weapons. You can also find a resource called Raw Science littered about or gain it by completing challenges, which can be used to purchase upgrades and recipe unlocks. It’s a virtuous cycle: explore, find new things, analyze them, craft new tools to increase your survivability, and explore further. You can also find Milk Molars which, when broken open, can be used to purchase permanent upgrades for your character - max life, stamina, larger inventory stacks, etc., and repeatedly completing certain tasks like running out of stamina, killing enemies with certain weapons, reviving fallen companions, etc., will unlock mutations that can be equipped, earning your passive bonuses.

In short, there are a lot of reasons to explore in Grounded 2, and while the resources themselves are interesting enough, the odd collectible, Milk Molars, unique gear, and Raw Science certainly don’t hurt. To facilitate your exploration is a new, detailed map which is vastly superior to the first game’s rather shoddy offering, providing great detail of the park. Objective markers are plentiful, and if you find something interesting - a rare resource, a dangerous foe, a promising cave - you can craft and customize trail markers for the most important points of interest. By advancing the main questline, you’ll unlock the ability to track resources on the map (many things that used to require you to visit a Field Station in the first game can now be handled via menus in the second) and main quests are generally good about guiding you to the uncommon resources you need to progress. All this to say, Grounded 2 manages to make exploration easy and largely keeps the urge to look up information online to a minimum - a real treat for survival games, which usually trend towards the obtuse.

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Once again, Obsidian nails the setting, with excellent set pieces strewn throughout the game,

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mixed with just a pinch of real-world logic, like finding an oak tree to hunt for acorns - it makes for a rich, engaging world to explore.

You All Look Like Mammoths From Down Here!

In addition to being easy to play as far as survival games go, Grounded 2’s setting is wonderfully executed. Many of the insects from the first game have returned - Ants, bombardier beetles, orb spiders, stink bugs, wolf spiders, etc. - and they will variously hiss, roar, chitter, trill, and coo as they go about their daily lives - lady bugs will even snore if you catch them sleeping. All of this is nonsense, but bending the truth to give such creatures, now expanded to relatively massive proportions, some personality and presence. As charismatic as some of your multi-legged neighbors can be, however, the environments themselves are what really steal the show. Discarded plastic utensils become viable bridges, discarded shoes function as small caverns where treasure (or danger) may dwell, and a picnic table covered with a tablecloth might as well be a complicated mountain to surmount. Perhaps our favorite “dungeon” in the early access game was an ant hill, now polluted by buried and discarded bug spray cans. The old ants, dead, and the toxic-filled tunnels now home to opportunistic roaches. Small touches like this constantly left us smiling and eager to explore further, just to see what set piece lay ahead.

Our favorite moments in Grounded 2 are a bit more… well, grounded. While not scientifically accurate, the game does reward the player for making sound observations and deductions. Can’t find water and don’t want to risk drinking the muck on the park floor? Wait until dusk and dawn, when the dew gathers thick on the grass around you. Can’t reach said water? Whack the grass stalk with something and the disturbance will send the water to the ground. Need to find acorns? Find high ground and look for an oak tree - they’ll have fallen on the ground nearby. Hitting the little details is one of the many areas where Grounded 2 triumphs.

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One of the best new additions to the game are buggies - insects you can raise and ride, giving you a hand in combat and making exploration go faster.

Two-Legged and Four-Legged Friends

While Grounded 2 is mostly composed of elements from the first game, some new additions have been made, mainly in the realm of combat. Stamina now regenerates and depletes faster, and while parrying is still incredibly useful, the player can now dodge, allowing encounters to be more dynamic. New weapons have been added and playstyles opened up a bit now that parrying isn’t your only option, and while this helps, combat is still not the game’s strong suit. Enemies tend to feel awfully spongey, especially at the beginning of the game, and while this allows you to feel a sense of progression when crafting new weapons and upgrading old ones, some enemies still feel a bit too durable for the game’s own good. Orb Weavers (large and small) are a constant nuisance, and even trivial enemies like mites appear in large enough numbers and respawn often enough that you’ll probably get sick of them before long.

Another new addition mitigates the tedium of whacking the same enemies too many times - mounts. Or as the game called them, “buggies”. Find eggs and build the appropriate workstations, and you can breed your own loyal insectoid companions, which serve as mounts. They can join you in combat, you can command them to fight while mounted, or you can use them to cover ground more quickly than you can on foot, allowing you to bypass the stalest encounters in the game. Some mounts, like the introductory Red Soldier Ant, can also gnaw through root clusters and open up new areas, and they can be recalled in most locations with a few button presses. Tromping about in a bizarro world of giants is still a great experience, but riding around on your loyal insectoid mount fulfills an unwritten promise all 90s kids have been expecting.

Squashing Technical Issues

While the setting is excellent, there are still some bugs to be squashed before Grounded 2 metamorphoses into its final form. While the game generally runs well, frame skips became more common as we played, and while quitting and rebooting the game fixed this issue, that shouldn’t be a necessary concession to make. Another trifling issue we encountered was enemies spawning inside of objects or under the ground, and while we could hit them when they attacked (and they could hit us), it could still prove to be a nuisance. With maxed out graphical settings (as the game recommended - this isn’t the sort of game that should really trouble a 4080 Super), the game’s frame rate would crash in some menus, a problem that also cropped up when encountering bombardier beetles, whose projectile attacks would sometimes even crash the game. Lowering the graphical settings seemed to fix the former, and the latter seemed tied to the general framerate problems we had with extended play, and hopefully both will be resolved before launch, but if you decide to pick up the early access version of the game, your experience may not be as smooth as you’d expect.

Despite a few performance and balance issues, Grounded 2 looks poised to surpass the original in nearly every way. If you’re a fan of the setting, or of survival games in general, you should definitely keep your eye on this title, especially if you have several people willing to spend time seeing the local park from an all-new perspective with you.