The ant-sized thrills of Grounded return in a sequel which lays exciting foundations for the future. There’s work to do but, already, an exciting adventure to have.
It’s the little details that get me. It’s dog-sized baby cockroaches and their elephant-sized elders showing up to slurp the goo of enemies I’ve been fighting, or the rhinoceros-sized bees hovering like helicopters as they collect pollen from plants. It’s stumbling upon orb weaver spiders the size of cars, snoring at night, or tank-sized wolf spiders battling tank-sized scorpions in the dark, all red eyes, pincers, shrieks and fangs. It’s the scuttling and scurrying you hear as you tiptoe through grass-blade forests, living in a world usually hidden beneath your feet, feeling like you’re only seeing it now for the first time. It’s walking down the road in real life and wondering, as you see berries trodden into the ground, how strong their skin really would be if made into armour. That’s the effect Grounded 2 has.
Grounded 2 early access reviewDeveloper: Obsidian Entertainment and Eidos MontrealPublisher: Microsoft Game StudiosPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now in early access on PC (Steam and Xbox), Xbox Series S/X and Game Pass
But broadly speaking, we’ve been here before. Grounded 2, like Grounded 1 before it, is a co-operative survival game based around the concept of you being shrunk to ant size and having to survive in the magnified insect world you now see around you. You still chop blades of grass the size of trees to build a base with, you still collect dew drops in the morning to drink from, and you still chase tiny green aphids around in order to cook them on a spit. You still work your way through tiers of equipment made with varying insect parts, and you’re still on the trail of the shady company with tiny-sized bases in the world that has done this to you, for some reason. The playing space might have changed from a backyard garden to a park, but the experience is fundamentally the same.
The question becomes, then, whether this sudden-to-appear sequel does enough to justify the sequel tag, and you’ll know if you read my impressions of Grounded 2’s early access release last week, I was previously unsure. It had flashes of brilliance but they were countered by moments of frustration while playing alone. I ended that piece wanting to see more and to experience the game with other people, which I now have, which is why I’m more confident telling you Grounded 2 isn’t only a justifiable sequel but, in actual fact, the next-generation of the idea.
It’s clever. Making a new game rather than expanding the older one has allowed developer Obsidian, and its co-developer Eidos Montreal, to both rebuild the Grounded experience in a new engine, allowing it to subtly but significantly increases the fidelity of the world – particularly where lighting is concerned – while also designing a playing area that can support new gameplay ideas. The biggest and most exciting of these is mounts. You can now gallop around the world on ant-back or spider-back, which not only greatly speeds your exploration but allows you to more reliably outrun enemies. They also help you carry significantly more, having separate, larger inventories of their own, and this greatly eases mobile storage issues. It’s much safer to store valuable materials with your mount, because if you die, you’ll drop your backpack and things you’ve collected, but if they die, they’ll be returned to base, bag intact.