3/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Grounded.

Grounded is the same survival, crafty, base-buildy multiplayer game you've played a thousand times. But the conceit here is that you're tiny and in the backyard. Is that enough to set it apart and make it worth your time? Sorta! There's a real charm to the Honey I Shrunk the Kids trope. Pikmin oozes with that sort of charm, for instance. How do we feel about it in Grounded? It's cute but it's not really enough to carry a game that is otherwise largely bland. The backyard setting is cute, it is somewhat engaging and the map is stunningly large. You can encounter a bunch of cool little biomes like a rain puddle, a backyard tree, a thick hedge, tipped over soda cans and more. Each are cool set pieces with a few interesting mechanics. But what ultimately befalls Grounded is what happens to almost all of these games. There's just not enough. The variety wanes and the actions all end up fundamentally being the same. Chop a tree (or a blade of grass) to get wood, cut that wood into planks, trim those planks into some other usable material, get sap, convert that sap into something else, combine all of this with some combat part and now you have some armor. Repeat the same process to build a wall. Do it again to build a furnace. Etc etc. Without enough new things to discover or new gameplay loops, the game feels too samey too quickly. And there's a surprising amount of difficulty in killing the spiders in the game, which would be more welcomed if the game felt fun enough to muddle through its slog to get there. Surprisingly too few enemy types, a map that's huge but not full of much wonder, crafting is both too tedious and too thin. What is fun is that it controls quite well, it runs quite well, and the backyard setting is fun enough overall. Compared to something like Valheim, Grounded's whimsy gives it a bit more staying power and broader appeal. Combat isn't appreciably better or worse and the basebuilding is definitely worse than in Valheim, but the world around you is much more fun. In the end though after about 10 hours you end up just doing the same sort of thing repeatedly for the sake of doing the same sort of thing repeatedly. The game is left to stand on nothing but its completely generic gameplay loop in its somewhat novel set dressing. Once you do tire of the novelty of being small, you'll put the game down and I'll doubt you'll ever come back to it.