I really liked Grounded. I played through it with a friend and really enjoyed how polished and well-made the game was. It was really fun to explore and the combat could be exciting and fun. I think the story/adventure was well done too, and it was fun figuring things out as you went along.

You could definitely try it out on Gamepass or get it on sale. I would definitely recommend it though.

Here’s my response on the Steam sublemmy

I haven’t played it yet but from what i’ve heard it’s geared towards collaborative playing, making the single mode rather grindy.

I really disliked the combat, there’s no way to avoid getting hit so you just have to spam healing items and tank the damage.

I haven’t played since it was still early access, but I had a blast playing it with my brother!

I don’t think I’ve ever felt visceral terror in a game like I did when one of those giant spiders came rushing at me, and I’m not even generally afraid of spiders.

Great game, the whole concept is very neat. I loved the combo of survival, action, challenge and story. Also, the devs keep adding more to it, so there’s a lot to do. I played many hours and I’d say it’s a no brainer to try on game pass, and very good value for $60. Not sure what it costs now.

Played through it a couple times in early access and my 4 player group started over again a few weeks ago. We were all pleasantly surprised to see al the content they added for release that we never saw before, so even with the restarts we still wanted more.

It is a great survival/crafting/basebuilding game with a nice variety of locations, progression tiers, and enemies. The story is serviceable, and the voice acting did get a few chuckles from our group.

My minor gripes are performance on large bases, a couple glitches (they never did completely fix phantom water droplets) and having to use xbox friends instead of steam friends on the steam release. But it works, and we haven’t had any problems playing together online.

I don’t know if I would play it much single player, as I think the progression would get somewhat tedious, but having friends to divvy up tasks makes it enjoyable. Also one of the treasure finding puzzles really stood out to me, as three of our group all contributed a bit to solving the puzzle, while the fourth stayed at home expanding the base. I’m sure any of us could have solved the puzzle solo, but how it worked out made it a great little moment in the game.

Having it available on gamepass makes it a pretty easy choice for someone cash strapped, as you get a ton of value out of that even without Grounded.

Played it in solo mode and also with friends for a while.

A thing I really liked was the shared savegames, that system replaces the need for dedicated servers completely (savegames are cloud-shared between the players automatically, everybody always has the latest version)

Gameplaywise I really loved it, basebuilding was so much fun, the crafting system has some really good ideas I wish to see in other games (automatically picking ingredients out of boxes for example)

I’m not sure why we stopped playing, it felt a bit lengthy at times I think, also coordinating 4 people to find common timeslots so that everybody experiences most of the story was difficult. Also the mobs get a bit repetitive/annoying sometimes - I could do with less spiders in general…

Writing this though, I almost feel like reinstalling it and diving into the singleplayer again. Got it over MS Gamepass, if that is stil on there, you might want to try to get the trial for 1€ for the first month.