In these survival crafting games, my favorite part is the crafting. I really liked how crafting a canteen, dew collector, and water storage for example solved my drinking water problem. The omni-tool system is great, as you don't have to press buttons to switch from axe to pickaxe to shovel while gathering resources. I didn't do much base building, as it seemed to have been designed with multiplayer co-op in mind, and carrying 5 planks at a time as a single player would have been a lot of effort. Getting to the point where you could use an ant as a mount was great. While parts of the story fell a bit flat for me, not having played through Grounded 1, the general premise of being a shrunk human in a park full of insects was entertaining.

Over time, the discovery of new resources, and new recipes to craft, slows down. And more and more of the recipes are about weapons and armor. The quests as well as exploration in general pushes you towards more and more dangerous areas, and more and more fights. For example to get that ant mount, you need to enter deep into an ant hill full of aggressive red soldier ants. And that means lots and lots of real time action combat: Quick and charged attacks, timed parries, dodges, the whole gamut of typical action combat functionality. I understand it intellectually, how you need to read the signs in the animation of the enemy to press the right button at the right time, but I don't enjoy doing it and I am not very good at it. Seeing how Grounded 2 evolved towards more and more of that combat, with apparently base defense combat as a sort of end game, I decided to stop playing. It didn't help that there seemed to be a bug where lowering the difficulty from medium to easy didn't seem to be working, and every time I opened that screen again, I was back at medium difficulty.

If you like action combat, I think that Grounded 2 is a very good game. Personally I think I prefer a crafting game with less focus on combat.