Grounded 2, even in early access, is one of the best survival games I've ever played

When Grounded 2 finished downloading, it was pretty late. I lied to myself and pretended I'd just dip in for a minute, get my footing, and then call it a night. Seven hours later, I was picking fights with spiders atop my chitinous steed, fending off invading cyborg ants with my acorn turrets and taking pictures of lovely butterflies—it's good to take breaks from all the murder.

This damn game is gonna be a nightmare for my desire to one day go to bed at a reasonable hour. It doesn't rock the boat too much, but the ways in which Obsidian is building on and tweaking the formula established in its first survival game, well, they're just so damn good. It's Grounded, but a much better Grounded.

Room to grow

Some caveats first! Obsidian (and new partner Eidos Montreal) is taking the early access route again, so what you're getting at launch on July 29 is an in-development build where much of the map has yet to be built. But the first area we've gotten our hands on is massive—around the size of the entire first game—and this early access version greatly benefits from the fact that Obsidian's already made one of these before.

Arguably the biggest downside to Grounded 2 being incomplete is the not-very-impressive performance. Graphics settings are extremely limited, so don't expect to get into the nuts and bolts: there are presets, but you can't tweak the specific elements the presets change, and there's no DLSS or alternative.

On the highest preset, I couldn't even get 60 fps, and bumping it down provided only modest performance gains. My rig—RTX 4090, Intel i9-13900k, 32GB RAM—is well above the recommended specs and can handle anything I throw at it normally, so I can't imagine anyone running this smoothly until there are some performance improvements.

The good news is that Grounded 2 is absolutely gorgeous. The colourful cartoon aesthetic from the original game has been maintained, naturally, but benefits from greatly improved lighting and higher quality textures. It is a game of mundane park detritus transformed into stunning, surreal vistas, where a dirty old camera looks like a striking alien monument. There isn't another survival game out there that's better for sightseeing.

More than once I became spider chow because I was distracted by the sun peeking through towering blades of grass, or because I was enchanted by the incredible view of the park from atop its chaotic picnic table. It's almost like the beauty of the natural world is working with the critters, trying to hypnotise me just in time for dinner.

I have come face to face with the grim spectre of death many, many times during my stay in Brookhollow Park. The first Grounded was not an incredibly easy game to solo, but the sequel throws greater challenges at you early on, making a group even more of a boon. But you'll quickly start to feel tough once you befriend some bugs.

The power of friendship

My anthill heist took me an embarrassingly long time to pull off. I'd been sent down into the park's labyrinthine depths by the CEO of definitely-not-evil Ominent, who almost certainly doesn't have ulterior motives, to collect a red ant soldier egg. It was a long journey, full of soldier attacks, two surprise spider attacks and several corpse runs. But at the end I had the egg, and shortly after, my first mount.

Actually, "mount" doesn't begin to capture just how essential your bug friends—restricted to a soldier ant and orb weaver at the moment, but with more on their way—will become. The ant, for instance, can chop down grass, carry a large number of planks, provide you with extra storage on the go and fight. While riding it, you control its attacks, but if you hop off your saddle you can team up, both of you fighting your foes together.

Being a bit more important than worker ants also means soldiers can command their little friends. Yep, you can stroll around with a bug posse if you want. Who needs real friends when you've got an ant army?

It's a huge boon for exploration, too. Even if these buggies, as Obsidian calls them, simply served you as a novel mode of transportation, they'd still be brilliant. My ant moves like the clappers—the Usain Bolt of Brookhollow Park. It's got an impressive leap, as well. This makes the intended size of Grounded 2 feel a little less daunting. When you've got an ant-shaped Bugatti at your beck and call, life feels so much easier.

Friction is necessary for a survival game, but Obsidian's managed to find a fantastic balance between empowerment and challenge. Even with my ant, I faced plenty of trials and tribulations, but I felt capable of doing so much more than I could in the original Grounded. I could travel further, carry more, build up my base faster. Fewer frustrations and more fun—that's the essence of my experience so far.

I still got lost in an underground maze; I still got massacred by a larva that I dug out of the ground, expecting to find a grub; I still had to plan, prioritise and pay attention to my stamina, hunger and thirst. It can be tricky and savage and frantic. But it achieves this while still ironing out some of the more annoying wrinkles.

Be prepared

Take the Omni-Tool—an addition that's less impressive than an army of ants on paper, but one that does a lot to make Grounded 2 feel like a huge improvement over its predecessor. The Omni-Tool replaces your gathering tools, so now you've got one tool that can be expanded and upgraded, and it doesn't even take up a single inventory slot.

Regardless of what you've got equipped, when you walk up to a blade of grass or a boulder, you can just start harvesting at the touch of a button. All the good parts have been preserved—it's still a fundamental part of the game's progression, forcing you to go further afield and face trickier challenges so you can upgrade the tool, in turn giving you access to more exotic resources, but now it's simply less of a pointless hassle.

Resource runs are so much more pleasant with this handy Swiss Army Knife. No more mucking around in your inventory, switching out tools or changing hotbars—you just just hit a button. The friction instead comes from the other things you might encounter on the run, whether it's an orb weaver hunting you down, running out of food, or getting stuck in dangerous, unfamiliar territory after dark.

In the first Grounded, I'm more of a builder. In my latest playthrough, much of my time has been spent constructing a handsome house on top of a juice carton, while my girlfriend risks life and limb hunting down resources, murdering tadpoles or getting lost. In my defence, I am usually the one tanking the wolf spiders.

But in Grounded 2, I've chosen to spend a lot more time adventuring. This is partly because I don't want to get too invested in a meaty building project when my save might get murdered during an early access update. But it's also down to Grounded 2 doing a lot more to encourage you to go on frequent adventures.

Instead of a burger-making robot asking you to retrieve computer chips, you've got flesh-and-blood humans giving you quests and challenging you. The aforementioned CEO, for instance, sends you all over the map in bespoke missions, and there's a mysterious hacker who sends waves of cyborg bugs to mess you up, encouraging you to progress further, so that you can unlock better gear or build nasty traps.

Exterminator

Getting into scraps with bugs is a lot more appealing this time around thanks to more robust combat mechanics. You can dash and dodge; when you charge your attacks you get a satisfying little sparkle, telling you it's time to unleash Hell; and both the gear and mutation systems—the latter of which gives you perks based on what you've been doing in the game—have been greatly improved, specifically by tying them into a more class-like structure. You're free to mix and match all you like, but Grounded 2 nudges you towards making more cohesive builds.

The critters themselves are more deadly, too, with a variety of killer attacks and the ability to block—a block that's best broken by battering them with a charged shot. There's definitely a sense that we're moving into action-RPG territory here, and the game benefits greatly from it, making each encounter more engaging, whether you're weaving between the grass to avoid a butterfly's elemental assaults, finding a nice perch so you can safely use your magic staff (not actually magic) to melt your foes, or trying to pull off a perfect parry so a scorpion doesn't kill you with a single pincer barrage.

Butterflies and scorpions represent two of the many new creatures you'll have to tango with. You'll also meet friendly snails who hide in their shells when threatened (they are incredibly fun to watch, and have some of my favourite animations as they slowly slide around the park), incredibly hardy cockroaches (even the wee ones can take a real kicking) and the dreaded praying mantis (only sort of new, since the first game did feature one as a boss).

The older bugs have been tweaked, too, and in some cases have been given quite the glow-up, particularly the wolf spider, which now looks even more demonic. I'm not ashamed to say that I mostly hide from that big bastard.

I encountered a bug of the more progress-halting kind, as well, which Obsidian has been looking into, so I wasn't able to experience the entirety of the early access story. Unexpectedly, this hasn't soured me on Grounded 2 at all. Hopefully it will be fixed by the time you lot get your hands on it, and in the meantime I've just been having a wonderful time running around the park getting into scrapes and japes.

All the improvements contribute towards Grounded 2 being one of the best survival games I've ever played, but strip out all the new mechanics and quality of life tweaks and you're still left with just one of the most impressive, striking and playful game worlds ever created. Brookhollow Park, even in its incomplete state, is an absolute joy to explore, full of enticing nooks and crannies, incredible set pieces and plenty of childlike whimsy.

I'm smitten, folks, and I don't say that about many survival games. There's a lot more to come as Grounded 2 makes its journey from early access to 1.0, but even now it's incredibly easy to recommend. Just be aware that you probably won't want to go back to the original game.