Saying Obsidian Entertainment is having a busy year would be an understatement. In 2025 alone, it has three major gaming projects in the works. With Avowed now behind it and The Outer Worlds 2 ahead, the first-party Xbox studio is now ready to ship its second survival game. This isn’t a full release though, just like the original game that went on to become one of the studio’s biggest hits, Grounded 2 is first coming to the masses in early access, aiming to shape its future using feedback from the community.
Before all that though, the game has to start somewhere. I was given access to Grounded 2 ahead of the early access launch to check out just how the sequel is shaping up. My time with the pre-release version of the game was spent solo. For a game that’s focused on cooperative survival, saying I was hooked would be an understatement, especially since I only played the original with a group of friends.
I was a big fan of Grounded, the Obsidian team delivered a unique, story-heavy survival game that revolved around four teenagers being shrunk to the size of ants and solving the mystery behind it, with a whole lot of base building, suspenseful moments, and boss battles in between. Three years after that launch, and plenty of post-launch updates later, Obsidian is going for a much bigger leap in technology with Grounded 2, and it’s not just a graphics upgrade.
After spending over a dozen hours inside this massive, tiny, in-development world, I can finally give my thoughts on the sequel. While there will be some comparisons to the original, I am writing this review focusing on Grounded 2 as a completely fresh experience. I will also be avoiding as many story spoilers as possible. Here are my thoughts on the early access release of Grounded 2.
From the Backyard to Brookhollow Park
The story begins two years after the events of the first game, and it’s time for the original teenagers to get miniaturized once again. Gone are the days of exploring the famous ‘Backyard’ of a mad scientist, it’s time for Brookhollow Park to shine, a brand-new region that’s touted as being as big as the map of the original Grounded. From what I could explore, even larger sections of the park are blocked off, with more chunks of it probably landing in upcoming updates.
Compared to the original’s barebones story debut with confusing directions in early access, Grounded 2 has a much more in-depth questline to follow and a better onboarding process already for this early access release. It has you digging into an old mystery that has bewildered players for years, alongside plenty of information on the company that’s causing all these miniaturizations and teenager-based experiments. The writing keeps its dark humor but never crosses over to being edgy, offering a disturbing but humorous take on the whole bug-infested situation.
Obsidian has nailed the feeling of being tiny, which is to be expected considering its years of experience with the series. Entering the garden for the first time was goosebump inducing, and not just because of the cockroaches that decided to introduce themselves. Even if the Grounded franchise were a standard-affair survival game, the unique setting alone would be a fantastic backdrop for a game. The studio, thankfully, leans into it quite heavily. Humongous grass blades become planks for basic building, grapes in faraway trees become the tough leather you need for more intricate armors, and even the drop of leftover liquid from a fallen juice box is a godsend when your thirst and hunger are at dangerous levels. Difficulty can be adjusted at any time from the menu, though it’s important to note that the further away you explore from the starting area, the more dangerous the park gets, making for a gradual and more natural curve at any chosen difficulty.
The park is full of small wonders to discover. The early access version is home to a large number of anthills filled with treasures, a gas-mask-requiring garbage can swarming with roaches, a random 90s cellphone with calls still trying to reach its owner, a mysterious locked briefcase, an overturned ice cream cart that serves as a snowy biome, the fiery brimstone of a fallen grill, the gloomy underside of a vending machine, hidden unique weapons just out of reach, and so much more to cautiously explore. It’s the harvestable materials and rare bugs in these areas that offer the materials to get the best upgrades and tools, so they are always valuable and very satisfying expeditions.
The land is full of tiny critters, which are now not so tiny, I suppose. Alongside returning faces from the previous game, such as ants, gnats, spiders, bees, beetles, mosquitoes, and a certain bird, all-new arrivals like scorpions, cockroaches, butterflies, caterpillars, mantises, snails, and more are joining the party. I can handle spiders just fine, so I’ve never needed the built-in Arachnophobia mode to reduce them to a floating blob. But cockroaches are just something else. An anthill I was exploring that had been taken over by roaches will probably stay in my mind forever. The sound of skittering legs as swarms zipped around me was horrifying, just as the developer intended, I assume. There is a nasty surprise about them that I won’t be diving deeper into. The only upside is that they are a neutral mob, only attacking you if you threaten them first.
A new type of threat is here in the garden too: bugs that are being controlled by an unknown entity. These can be much more ferocious than their regular counterparts, and there’s also a new mechanic that has them attacking in waves every few in-game days to keep you on your toes. Having to scramble to build a base that can withstand such attacks was a great incentive for me to not be lazy and camp out anywhere without walls, as I usually do.
Grounded 2 also improves upon the pseudo class system that lets you approach combat in your own way if you’re willing to put in the effort to craft the armor and weapons you need. Want to be a rogue that deals massive stealth damage and uses dual-wielded weapons? Done. Want to cosplay a mage and spew chemicals at incoming bugs from afar? Done. Want to be bug-hunting Legolas with an eye patch? Also done. Having friends that require different bug parts and special ingredients for their own armor extends the amount of fun you can extract from the game by a large margin, as each of these resources is spread out quite well across the map.
Bug mounts, Omnitools, and a new perspective
Even if you’re playing solo, like I did for this review, you won’t be without allies. One of the most highly requested features from the first game, mounts, are finally here, letting you gain and ride a bug of your own choosing. Dubbed Buggies, they provide much-needed methods to travel across the garden fast, extra firepower, and even better, more loot carrying capacity. For the early access launch, it seems only two critters are available as Buggies, as I could only find out about the Red Ant and an Orb Weaver Spider mounts for now. These require finding the proper recipes, building a hatching hub, hunting for specific types of eggs, and slowly hatching them to make them your own, all as part of the main questline, so it’s not a missable feature.
I instantly fell in love with the mount system, making me go everywhere with my new ant partner in crime. Their speed makes it much easier to get away from ambushing spiders. Even if I do want to fight, having a regenerating ant with me that can take hits while I go for heavy swings and dodges was a delight. The ant was also capable of carrying a large number of building materials separately, making building with them a breeze. I have become so accustomed to the mounts system so far that I’m not sure how I even played the original without them, cutting down the time spent walking around and gathering materials by a massive amount.
Grounded 2 also adds a new third-person perspective, and it slots in almost perfectly with the gameplay. Once I switched to third-person during the tutorial section of the game, I forgot first-person even existed until I had to get a thrown spear back from a weird angle under a leaf. The camera automatically switches to third-person whenever a mount is being used as well, making the transition into the new perspective a useful one and not a simple cosmetic addition.
It was also clear that Obsidian wants to remove or improve on the grind-heavy or busywork parts of the original. Another improvement in this area is the Omnitool. Gone are the days of needing separate items just for harvesting the land. The new Omnitool takes the form of an axe, a hammer, a shovel, and even a repair wrench that does not take any inventory slots and does not degrade. Each part must be upgraded individually (with bug parts and XP) to harvest tougher materials and can even be customized. Inventory management haters can rejoice, the change let me just have weapons, healing, and consumable items on the hot bar, a massive improvement over almost any survival game, cutting down the need to fiddle with the inventory slots entirely.
Visuals, performance, bugs
While the art style remains faithful to the original, Obsidian has dialed up the visuals of the sequel in almost every aspect. The lighting alone is beautiful. From the sun peering through grass blades at dawn and the dim glow of a lone park lamp in the middle of the night to the eerily glowing pinpricks seen deep inside ant caves, Grounded 2 is gorgeous. There are more than a few man-made environments present inside the park too, offering a nice contrast against all the greenery and dirt terrain.
The bug models, building materials, the massively scaled-up nature, distant man-made objects are all a visual feast, something I would always get distracted by when exploring. The sound design also helps with the immersion quite heavily. The disturbing sounds of insects are a major highlight, as I mentioned before, and random noises from the outside environment at the edges of the park, like the rumble of passing cars, add another layer of engagement.
I wasn’t too impressed with how everything is running on PC, however. My machine is running an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB paired with an eight-core Ryzen 7 3700X and 16GB of RAM, with the game running at 1440p resolution. It is also installed on an NVMe SSD. Right now, there are only four presets for adjusting graphics settings: Low, Medium, High, Epic, with no options for deeper adjustments other than resolution.
Even with the High preset the game recommended to me, I found frame rates dropping to the 50s in many areas, and Epic preset made that go near the 30s at many times. Playing for long periods, like 5 hours straight, also had the game slow down heavily as time went on, with restarting the game being a quick fix. I hope granular graphics settings, driver updates, and more optimizations that arrive during early access will keep improving the situation going forward.
While I did not experience any crashes, unlike several other individuals also reviewing the title, there were a few instances where insects were stuck under the ground or simply disappeared in front of my eyes. These were rare and barely impacted my gameplay sessions, and it’s not something that unexpected from early access games.
Conclusion
The Obsidian team easily has another gem in its hands. Even though it’s got its hands full with three games this year, Grounded 2 is shaping up to be a massive leap over the original, even though we may have to wait a couple of years to see the complete vision materialize, just like the original.
The new park’s visuals are breathtaking, biomes are varied, and the insects are as brilliant as ever. Paired with the addictive mount system and the no-frills inventory upgrades, this might be the most satisfying and straight to the point survival game I’ve ever played. Exploration is heavily rewarded, and the focus on actually following a story instead of being an empty sandbox is delightful. Grinding and time-killing tasks have been purposefully reduced, and I’m guessing even more changes in that vein will be coming in future updates.
The performance issues, lack of deeper graphics customization, random bugs (not the alive kind) and glitches I encountered do take away from the experience a little, but being early access, I can look past many of those shortcomings. I unfortunately only managed to play this pre-release version solo, so I cannot comment on how the network performance and multiplayer syncing technologies are working when playing in co-op.
The early access content and gameplay upgrades over the original made Grounded 2 a blast to play through. I could see that the studio is just getting started with the mount system, and I can’t wait to see where it goes with the feature in the future (flying and swimming mounts anyone?). The original had a terrific early access run, with it continuing to receive support even after the 1.0 release. Obsidian has all the groundwork laid out for the sequel to go way beyond the original. I have no qualms about recommending the title at its early access launch for the asking $29.99 price tag. The only difficult part would be waiting for even more content and the 1.0 release, which is probably years away.
Grounded 2 launches into early access on July 29, 2025, on PC via Steam and Microsoft Store, as well as Xbox Series X|S, with a $29.99 price tag. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (with cloud play) and PC Game Pass on the same day. Xbox Play Anywhere support is confirmed as well.
This review was conducted on a pre-release PC version of the game provided by Microsoft.