Grounded Review

Summary

Shrinking down to ant size in Grounded offers a unique perspective, turning the backyard into a dangerous jungle of towering obstacles.
Great balance between survival challenge and streamlined gameplay, with simple resource management and engaging base building mechanics.
Boss fights add excitement, while New Game Plus mode feels unbalanced, but overall Grounded stands strong among survival games.

When I was little, I was absolutely obsessed with Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. I watched it practically every day, until I wore the VHS tape down to nothing. I even loved the sequels, no matter how unbelievably pants they were. Thanks to that, Grounded has been giving me the eyes over 🤪the Game Pass menu since it debuted in 2☂020.

It always had the potential to be a game I fell hard for. Its shrinky-dink theme called to me for so long, but it wasn’t until earlier this year, when I booted it up for inspiration for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:TheGamer’s Survival Week, that I finally got the bug. Grounded is an all-timer survival game, and its recent 1.4 updateℱ and multiplatf🍨orm launch only hammers home how special it is.

Shrunk downౠ to the size of an ant and cast into an overgrown and cluttered backyard, Grounded has you fight for survival against all sorts of creepies crawlies and robots as you build your base, hunt for resources, and, ultimately, fix the machine that can grow you back up to normal size.

There’s a spectacle to being this small. The garden is a jungle, full of 20-foot tall blades of grass, puddles be🔯come lakes, and all kinds of junk and rubbish tower as monolithic obstacles in this tiny world. There’s a density and commitment to its theme that belies its size.

It's A Big World Out There

What looks like a simple trash pile becomes a labyrinthine network of caverns and clifftops when you’re at this scale, and a quick jaunt to check out one place can frequently turn int꧃o a multi-hour ex𓄧pedition into a whole area of the yard you didn’t know existed.

As far as survival games go, it isn’t the most complex, but that’s a good thing. You’ve got to manage your thirst and hunger, but keeping those meters topped up is as easy as sucking ಌon a weevil and grabbing some fresh dew off the grass. Instead of bogging you down in a hundred differen🦋t debilitations and needing a wiki open on your phone to know what’s going on, Grounded streamlines it all to let you focus on exploration and surviving your encounters with the beasties that patrol the yard.

Base building is also a lot of fun. Before too long I&r✤squo;d built up my castle in the side of the big oak tree in the centre of the map, and spent far longer 🐲tweaking my décor and adding new wings to it than I care to admit. Building is smooth and frustration-free, as long as you’re able to defend it from marauding hordes of mosquitoes. The day they came and knocked my observation deck out of the tree was a very bad day indeed.

Though Grounded is famous for its spiders, every enemy is a threat – 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a Wolf Spider will demolish you when you’ve got piddly armour, but it’s nothing compared to a Black Ox Beetle, a Moth, or one of the fantastic boss fights dotted around the place. Even aꦯ ladybird larva can be dangerous without proper planning, because you’re an insignificant speck in a world much, much larger than you.

The combat can be as simple as ‘take a stick, ram it into a bug until it dies’ if you want, but elemental weaknesses and weak spots make learning the environment and the creatures all the more iඣmportant. You don’t want to ta𒀰ke a spicy hammer to a fight with something that’s weak to sour blades, after all, and part of your mastery in Grounded is crafting the right loadouts for every emergency.

Those bosses are easily the highpoint of Grounded. Discovering how to unlock them, what their weaknesses are, mastering parrying their attacks, and eventually getting♐ big rewards for successfully killing one is a 🐓huge rush at a point in the game where you may normally feel untouchable.

The first time I saw the ꦅBroodmother, I made puddles on the floor. After I came back with my Coaltana, Red Ant Armour, and enough healing potion🍸s to tank its hits, it was a complete pussycat.

Survival, big bugs, and eating fried aphids isn’t the only goal here. Grounded has a full storyline complete with quests and NPCs, which is an oddity for the survival gene, even if it feels half-baked and full of plotholes. The cast (which includes Shazam himself, Zachary Levi) give it their all with a cheesy Saturday Morning Cartoon vibe, and uncovering the secret🔜s behind Ominent and its human experimentation does give you more justification to strike out on your own than just hunkering in your base away from the scawwy spiders. It isn’t an emotive story that puts Baldur’s Gate 3 to shame, but it does its job and takes you to every corner of the yard.

New Game Plus Is No Small Task

The final content update for Grounded, which is the “Fully Yoked” bit of the Fully Yoked Edition that PlayStation 5 and Switch also received, is where Grounded stumbles the hardest. It introduced a whole New Game Plus mode that has you bipping to other timelines to continue your time in the yard. It&rsquꦦo;s a compelling idea, especially aft෴er I’d already done everything the base game had to offer, but in practice it feels somewhat hollow.

The difficulty of your 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:New Game Plus worlds is completely out of whack, with enemies just as non-threatening as before thrown into the yard alongside new, souped-up versions of other enemies that can kill you in one hit. The Broodmother, for instance, gets a new laser breath attack that slaughters anything within range, making the hop to a new game feel less like a natural progression of your♏ difficulty and more throwing yourself to the wolf sp🍒iders for no apparent reason.

Though it finished with a thud, Grounded still stands with the greats of the genre, like Subnautica or The Forest. It just oozes confidence in its theme, and successfully pulls off the feeling🥃 of wonder Honey I Shrunk The Kids gave me when I first saw it almost 30 years ago.