Grounded review9/22/2023 ![]() Single and multiplayer modes are identical save for the number of you, and the amount of wildlife and water. The premise is that you're all kids who've been shrunk to the size of an estate agent's brain and abandoned in a large garden. Including this stargate-looking unfinished blueprint. I didn't even need to help the gang, they merrily built a camp while I gathered food and water. And it's hard to tell who had the most fun. I was joined by outgoing guides writer Dave Irwin, Joel Franey of USGamer, and Thomas who does nerding for EGX and MCM. I'm banging on about all this instead of just ditching Grounded altogether because it's bloody excellent. Nonetheless, with two out of seven of us unable to play full stop, two more getting occasional disconnections, and the rest of us suffering lag, it's difficult to recommend it without the disclaimer that it's currently a bit of a gamble. I also had frequent crashes during Grounded's Steam Games Fest demo, although since it entered early access it's been fine for me, so there have at least been some improvements. Matt's game repeatedly crashed a minute or two in, and RPS contributor Craig Pearson wasn't able to play at all before crashing out. This was not the end of the technical troubles. ![]() The only time it became any kind of issue was when trying to explain the controls to someone who wasn't using a keyboard. Second, cross-play with Xbox One users is seamless. The good news, though, is twofold: first, once you've done all that and got back into the game, Grounded's co-op is quick and simple to set up. You can do the former from within Grounded, but the latter means coming out and navigating the impressively terrible Xbox-whatever-they're-calling-it-this-week software, where clarity goes to die. If you've bought it on Steam, this will never interfere with your single player business, but playing with friends requires logging into a Microsoft account, then awkwardly adding each other as friends on the Xbox software. Some of that is not Grounded's fault, in itself much of the faffing came from the awkward way its multiplayer has been stapled to the Microsoft store. Matt and I tried to play together and it took half an hour of faffing around before we gave up. Let's get this out of the way: it has problems. But if it can overcome those during its early access period, it may well be game of the year material. In its current state of development, I can't quite recommend it as wholeheartedly as I want to. Even after several hours (which flew by for all of us), we found it hard to pin down exactly what about it was so. Grounded's multiplayer has captured something special. But the lag meant I kept missing and it just got a bit embarassing, so we retrieved the spears and went back to scouting for dewdrops. I threw a spear at the first person to harm an ant.
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