Ever since watching Honey, I Shrunk The Kids on VHS – yes, I am that old – I’ve had a fascination with viewing our natural worldfrom a different perspective. My son has inherited this from me, with ants, bugs and creatures often taking up residence in our home, and only occasionally escaping from whatever abode we’ve housed them in. Grounded 2 is a game built on that same generational fascination, the wonder of this known, but unknown, landscape, and the incredible creatures that live there. Oh, and being able to ride on them, that’s important too.
Few games have managed to make our natural world feel so alien, or the few metres of a grass lawn as expansive as the original Grounded. It was a game that started life in Early Access, growing steadily with its community’s input, and becoming a clear jewel in the Xbox pantheon. They’re hoping that the same path will work for the sequel, and in Grounded 2, it’s not so much that bigger is better, but rather that this is small, but perfectly formed.
I love games that let you choose between first and third person, and from the off, that puts Grounded 2 in my good books. It really helps you to have either a sense of scale, or a sense of immediacy, and you can switch between the two in the pause menu. I’d have preferred it to be on a simple button press or stick click, but I’ll live with it.
You have the same four characters to choose from, with Max, Willow, Pete and Hoops all looking like kids that loiter in the street, but appear more likely to help you in with your shopping than steal it. Set in the 80s, there’s a touch of Kid N Play about Max and a smidgen of, well, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, about Pete, to give you a really strong sense of time and place.
If you were a kid then yourself, there’s plenty of nods to your childhood to keep you chuckling away too, especially through the opening cutscene. Even if you weren’t, the writing throughout is just perfectly weighted, and genuinely funny.
Ominent, headed by the worryingly cheery Sloane Beaumont, are the big bad company here, and they’re clearly up to no good, drawing the four kids into a murky world of scientific shenanigans and missing minors. There’s a nice lightness of tone to these early moments with the game, and they’ve definitely captured the miniaturised person movie vibes.
You find yourself shrunk down, and making your way through a damaged facility, where it turns out you’ve been recruited as an employee of Ominent. Actually, when I say recruited, I mean kidnapped using an explosion to cover up what’s happened.
From here, you’re embarking on a survival crafting adventure that’s keen to give you a whole heap of control and options, without necessarily explaining them all. If you’ve been playing the original recently, then this might feel easier, but with my last time with Grounded coming a number of years ago, it feels pretty full on. I think the onboarding experience just needs a little tweak though, since it’s also immediately engaging, and gives you plenty to do and focus on from the off.
That starts with foraging, grabbing everything in sight, before moving onto more active resource collection using your axe, hammer or shovel. Each item you collect can then be analysed, unlocking further knowledge about its uses, or new recipes that it’s a component of.
This is a classic survival game, so whatever you’re building, you need to think about food and water. It’s way too easy to get carried away building and collecting before you suddenly get told you’re going to die in two minutes. If you do die – which you probably will – you just respawn, and need to find your way back to your backpack in order to collect everything you had. It doesn’t feel overly punishing, but you’ll be a lot warier after the first time it happens.
There’s plenty of combat against an array of bugs and creatures in Grounded 2, and Obsidian have made it more varied and exciting than the original, with weapon specialisations that can turn you into a mage, knight or dual-wielding assassin. There’s currently fewer enemy types, but I expect we’ll see a steady stream of them as the game continues development. Combat definitely feels better in first person, with a level of accuracy there that third-person can’t match. I’m not sure how much Obsidian can do to remedy that, but here’s hoping they can make a few tweaks.
For all that the first steps felt full-on, Grounded 2 does a great job of making its natural world feel connected and intuitive. From things like having to knock down a particular type of grass to get grass seeds, to the way that ants will steel food from your cooking spit, this feels like a real, living world, and it’s a constant delight thanks to that sense of realism and natural discovery.
Grounded 2 looks great. It builds on the original’s art design and layers on a modern sheen of enhancements, making it a genuine looker, especially within the survival/crafting genre. Brookhollow Park might be a regular park, but Obsidian have found clever ways to make different areas have distinct looks, including frozen wilds thanks to an ice cream truck. Performance on PC is mostly stable, though as you build up your base and come across more enemies, the frame rate can definitely take a bit of a hit.
Grounded 2 already has a clear advantage over its predecessor, taking everything that worked well in the original while making smart changes to various mechanics, making things more natural and easier to live with. I can’t wait to see where it heads over the coming months, as it feels like Grounded 2 could be another essential title for Obsidian and Xbox.
