izigame.me

Grounded is one of the better survival experiences I've had over the years. I initially played the game in it's early preview stages when a lot was broken. And I still enjoyed the experience albeit it being less than stellar from a quality of life perspective.
Having completed all achievements on the game I want to break down why I recommend the game and the good and the bad.
The Good: The map design in Grounded is immaculate. So many survival games lean on auto generation and while that works amazingly for games like Terraria with a lot of games it can feel stale. Or resources can spawn in the most inaccessible seemingly broken areas. Grounded's map is hand crafted and you can feel the love and care put into it. From the Sandbox to the Termite Mound every area feels unique and contains some new resource or enemy for the player to experience. The progression loop is satisfying and snappy and the amount of grinding needed to get new armor sets is relatively small in the grand scheme. The combat systems are simple but fun with mastering the parry being a highlight for me. Enemy combos are short and learning them is not overly challenging but still gives a sense of mastery.
I would give the game prior to the optional content and post-game material an 8.5/10 in it's current form. While I did experience technical issues and multiplayer connection problems while playing it was infrequent enough to not be too upsetting.
The Bad: The usefulness of enemy drops is extremely questionable. Outside of their directly associated weapons and armor there is little to no use in killing bugs at a certain point. For example the Fire Ants. Their parts are hardly used in anything outside of the club, armor, and shield associated with them. Why are there not more weapons and ones that require a mish mash of bug parts? It feels useless even hoarding materials sometimes.
The Infected Broodmother is just not fun to fight in her current state. She has so much health that it feels rather boring in phase 1 and 2 and in phase 3 she becomes so fast that all those parry skills the game trained into you feel less useful than they should be (though I did manage to parry almost everything). The amount of debuffs she stacks combined with how small her arena is make this fight very tedious and a test of consistency more than skill.
Finally new game plus is horrendously unbalanced. There is no way to increase your defense above what you had in the base game so enemies will punish you harder than ever for missing parries. Which would not be as painful if it wasn't for every other enemy having explosive damage due to being infused. Which cannot be parried or easily avoided. It's a massive grind and frankly not fun to play.
Conclusion: For all my issues with the post-game and especially the Infected Broodmother I still find Grounded to be an enjoyable survival experience that I would highly recommend. It's super fun with friends and it's hard to say I didn't enjoy the majority of my time with it.