Grounded 2 tries the same trick twice, but at least you can ride the bugs this time

I only played the original Grounded for a short spell in 2020, but I remember it well. It was mere months into the COVID-19 pandemic and my friends were desperate for new games to try as an excuse to socialize. Thanks to its launch on Xbox Game Pass, we decided to get a group together to give Grounded a shot. We ignored the survival game’s story entirely and set our sights on constructing a giant base of operations instead. We were stuck indoors, but it felt like we were kids in the backyard. We worked until we got bored and moved on to something else days later; we wanted to play pirates or bank robbers next time.

That experience now comes to mind as I play Grounded 2’s early access release five years later. The sequel follows the same formula, tasking me with turning a defenseless, shrunken kid into a backyard warrior through a familiar crafting hook. It all once again digitizes the nostalgic feeling of exploring the woods behind your house with friends. But though it gains some playful new features that supersize the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids fantasy of it all, its lack of surprises in its early form makes for a double dip that will need to work to rebuild the series’ multiplayer magic if it’s going to become a lasting playdate.

Building off of Grounded’s worldbuilding, the sequel finds the not-so-virtuous Ominent Practical Technologies moving its people-shrinking research out of a contained backyard and into a much larger local park. A group of kids once again get caught up in that project and are forced to survive while unraveling a corporate mystery that immediately tells you that this is a project from Obsidian Entertainment. The anticapitalist satire is more central from the jump, following the same trend that The Outer Worlds 2 appears to be on ahead of its release later this year.

Once I escape an underground lab and am set loose into a park, I’m reintroduced to the same basic survival tenets that made the first Grounded such a success. When I’m not managing my thirst and hunger intake by slurping dew drops and eating mushrooms, I’m collecting pebbles, sap, plant fiber, and more. Each natural ingredient is reimagined as a crafting material that I can use to build a workbench, some basic gear, and a place to sleep. The thrill of Grounded 2 lies in just how quickly that escalates. Soon, I’m building a fort out of grass planks and turning an acorn into a water bucket.

It’s no surprise to me that base building remains the sequel’s strong suit. Growing up, my friends and I embarked on a multiyear project to build elaborate forts in the woods behind a friend’s house. It was a silly excuse to play around during the summer days, but everyone involved took immense pride in the endeavor. Why wouldn’t we? We were creating something out of nothing. Seeing dead trees transform into towering walls thanks to our own ingenuity made us feel like engineers. Grounded 2 still delivers that same experience by way of an easy to grasp crafting flow and Lego-like base construction.

While that foundation is strong, the changes to the exterior feel minimal thus far. I still spend the early game marveling at giant ladybugs, collecting Raw Science to unlock new features, hunting down Milk Molars, and more. The starting map is much bigger already in early access, and the lighting does the natural world more justice thanks to an Unreal Engine 5 upgrade, but I’m still largely navigating grass fields that look identical to the ones I traversed in 2020. Some larger points of interest do at least help break that up — a downed ice cream cart cleverly stands in for your typical snow biome, for instance.

The playful wonder created by those sights is counterbalanced by a resource-collecting hook that can get tedious fast, though. My early hours have me pulling my hair out as I hunt for specific materials in a sea of grass. How do I get some weed stems? It takes a good hour of wandering until I realize I need to locate and chop down some dandelions. Once I do that and unlock a new quest, I’m sent back out into the field in search of acorns, clovers, and whatever other plants I need. Every small victory only opens another grocery list for me to chase. That’s just the nature of a survival game like this, but Grounded 2’s slow start can feel especially tiresome considering that I’ve already done it all once before.

So far, there’s only one addition that feels like a new ride in an old playground: buggies. I can now mount bugs after going through the long process of building a hatchery and incubating an egg. The prize is that I gain the ability to ride an ant, letting me traverse a much larger map faster than before. When I demoed the game earlier this summer, a developer told me that it was a highly requested feature from fans. I get why. It more fully makes me feel like George of the Jungle, a master of the natural world who turns danger into opportunity.

Until more updates trickle in, Grounded 2 will have to ride on that feature for a while longer. Anyone coming back to the series on day one will find the same “start from zero” survival loop with the same arachno-jump scares — less of a recess and more of a job. I’m not sure that it’ll be exciting enough to get my COVID gang back together, but any pals that are new to the series will get a good fort out of their playdate, no matter how long it lasts before their imagination takes them elsewhere.

Grounded 2 is available in early access starting July 29 on Windows PC and Xbox Series X.