Recent reviews by Cubly

Lots of fun with friends and a great modding scene.

The game is quality, very polished.

Devs are very in touch with their community too, which is always a great sign!

If you haven't played Grounded 1, play that instead. While there's a lot of similarities to Grounded, Grounded 2 downgrades the experience in many ways.

The game starts with a tutorial. It's just so unnecessary and takes away from that first initial wonder and discovery. In Grounded, you get thrown into the world immediately and the first objective you get is "Explore". The starting area was designed so you immediately come across the resources you'll need to get started, sprigs, sap, pebblets, the first bug you kill is probably a weevil or an aphid. And while Grounded held your hand a bit too much, it was an acceptable amount.

In Grounded 2 however, you are just pointed by markers to everything, the game holds your hand so aggressively that it might as well just play the game for you. "Here's sap", "here's a sprig", the whole time. It means the game and the world isnt designed in such an intuitive way like the first game and it starts to show in the rest of the game as you progress.

The Omni-tool... while on the surface it might sound like convenience, it's this kind of simplification across the game that really takes away all the charm the first game had. Instead of crafting your own tools and upgrading them, you just passively have an omni-tool, then you hold interact on a resource to use it. It's clunky and removes immersion. It's a terrible addition to the game.

Mounts. On paper they sound great! An ant you can ride around on, collect resources and fight enemies with. The problem is the game is now designed around them. Once you have one, you cannot play the game without. The enemies in the world are more densely packed, so just running around has you under attack almost all the time, there's a lot less breathing room than in Grounded. In order to get anywhere where progression is, you have to get past tough bugs that relentlessly chase you, if you run you then aggro another handful. The mount lets you get away easily, it's clearly the intended way to play now, but it makes the game boring and feel more like a chore. The mounts should have been followers that pick up planks and stems for you instead.

As mentioned, the map isn't designed as well. The flow into new areas doesn't exist, it all seems a bit random in comparison to Grounded. There's not as much breathing room, most areas have some aggressive bug constantly patrolling.

Grounded 2 has lost a lot of charm from the original game.

It also suffers from Unreal Engine. Slow performance, with lots of lighting and shadow artifacting.

the game is boring af, just f spam simulator.

very unpolished, feels like its still in alpha. every npc looks plastic, you view the game through a character with cataracts. the npcs clip through their clothes everytime you handcuff them, did the devs even play their own game?

Downgrade from the first game.

Poor lighting from deferred rendering makes everything harder to read. There's flickering and grainy textures. The game has lost its cool art style from the first one.

A real shame.

It's a console game. Very basic.

Controller control scheme, a downgrade from Snowrunner.

Uses deferred rendering, so looks horrible, a blurry, flickering and ghosting mess.

Multiplayer didn't even function.

Devs, stop using Unreal Engine. The game is just a blurry under-performing mess like every UE5 game is.

Poor engine choice aside, it's just a worse Valheim with a RuneScape skin currently.

Trains

Very one dimensional. You just shoot robots, get some different guns and some perks, but the gameplay loop isn't satisfying to me, getting item drops mid run is more fun than just choosing one at the end of a zone.
There's not a lot of clarity in what's happening, hard to see some projectiles, not immediately obvious you are low hp. There's lots of quality of life to be made in these areas.

Could be fun, but there's better roguelites out there, RoR, Gunfire to name two popular ones.
Might try again in the future after updates.

Fun game, cool concept of being linked together. Not overly challenging, but fun. Some bugs here and there that screwed us over.

Really fun game with mates, can highly recommend! I hope the developer keeps supporting this one because it's a gem <3