Grounded is a fantastic game; let's just get that said right at the beginning. It's one of the best survival games you could be playing right now, with Obsidian's usual polish behind its mechanics and a wholly delightful premise of being a Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Kids-sized protagonist in a backyard. You fight against ants and spiders the way you would against zombies in any other cut-and-dried survival game. And you build bases out of blades of grass, chunks of clay, weed stems, clover leaves, and acorn shells. The word "delightful" and Grounded clearly go hand in hand.

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All that said, despite Grounded's nigh unbreakable grip on all that is fun, there are a few things the game could improve on to make its already good formula even better. The small "fixes" we could apply to Grounded are in no way major changes. Rather, they're teeny (dare we say, shrunken) adjustments that would make our backyard experiences an ounce or two better. Strap on your first set of acorn armor, prepare your first grub smoothie, and read on if you want to know what we think would make Grounded go from being a good game to a great one!

5 Balanced Combat Encounters

Grounded character hitting larva with club

Encountering the first bug that you need to kill will likely be an easy experience. As you first set off into the backyard, you'll come across weevils, aphids, and ants. Weevils and aphids are a source of food you need to chase down and repeatedly stab at with whatever weapon you have on hand, and ants are basically baby's first enemy in Grounded. It's all nice and simple. Then you get bolder, you decide you want to go to a new area, and you come face to face with your first orb weaver. Instant death.

The difficulty of combating spiders is not what's under discussion here. Spiders are the ultimate menace of the backyard, so any encounter with them should be difficult. Rather there's this definite line between overly easy combat encounters and grindy spikes in difficulty. There's no comfortable in between.

You're either ruthlessly slaughtering a hapless insect in your path or you're being demolished by a) a toxic bug nightmare that spews health-consuming poison at you, b) a spider that ignores barriers and physics to jump on you from gargantuan distances (relatively speaking), or c) a swarm of soldier ants you can't possibly block all incoming attacks from. It's a challenge for sure, and we love a challenge, but a middle ground of combat encounters would make fighting experiences feel more varied.

4 More Ranged Weapon Options

Grounded character firing an arrow while jumping.

Playing Grounded with a group of friends doubles the amount of fun you can have, especially if you're all rocking different weapons and armor sets to cater to your individual playstyles. However, those who prefer ranged weapons might feel like they got the short straw. Melee has insect daggers, ant clubs, pebblet spears, maces, rapiers, scythes, you name it, they've got it. But if you're playing the ranged game, you're stuck with a bow or a staff (which shoots out minty or spicy "magic" blobs).

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If you're playing on a tougher difficulty, it pays to have at least one of your buddies positioned farther off during a big bug battle. They can dole out constant damage while the insectoid terror you're brawling with aggros on the melee-oriented players closer to it. So it would be nice for that one person to have more options when it comes to range. A sling would have been amazing, which could have interacted well with items like the splatburst on a smaller scale.

Is the lack of ranged options a massive oversight? Not at all. The different arrow types at least offer a variety of ammunition and effects a ranged fighter can dole out. But how cool would it have been to use a bug-antenna boomerang or a stinkbug musket?

3 Better Dew Drop Management

Grounded characters Willow and Pete standing in dry grass area

Managing thirst is par for the course when it comes to survival games; we're all used to it at this point. Thirst management is annoying all around, but it's typical fare for the genre. You just work your way past those first early hours of building a base and figuring out how to efficiently collect water, and eventually you reach an equilibrium.

Grounded's water management largely relies on dew drops. There are several bodies of water, i.e. puddles and ponds, but the quality of that water is apparently so scummy you'll make your character sick. So you should stick with dew drops. There are two problems with this. The first is that dew mostly collects during the night/early morning. In the middle of the day, it's a bit harder to walk around finding dew since it's scarcer. And at night, holy smokes, that's when wolf spiders like to go prowling. One does not simply walk around looking for dew when wolf spiders are near.

The second issue has to do with dew collectors. You can eventually research and unlock the ability to craft these dew collectors that do exactly what their name says. However, these collectors only hold four dew drops. You need to build a container for dew, especially if you're playing Grounded in a group. Otherwise, you and your friends will be competing for literal drops of water. (Thank god for smoothies though.)

2 Make Beginning Base Materials Stronger (Or Scale Back Bug Vengeance)

Grounded Willow facing off against soldier ants

In Grounded's "Bugs Strike Back" update, Obsidian made it so the various creepy-crawlies of the game could get mad at you if you bothered them too much, i.e. continuously slaughtered them for weapons and armor. If they reach a point of boiling anger, the bug species will march on your base of operations and wreck house. Literally. In order to prevent your base of operations from being completely demolished, you need to unlock stronger building materials than the ones you start with or somehow construct a base in a hard-to-reach place.

While there's admittedly a creative mode that allows you to craft and build glorious houses without worrying about bug attacks, we want to have our cake and eat it too. But this is still a minuscule complaint. Grounded is just that good; we can barely find anything to change to make it utter perfection.

1 A Less Terrifying Arachnophobia Mode

Grounded wolf spider attacking Willow and Pete

If there's one thing Grounded needs to work on, it's making the arachnophobia mode a) less terrifying and b) more easily telegraphed. What the arachnophobia mode lets you do is slowly strip away the features of what makes a spider a spider until you ultimately get a floating blob with vague eye shapes on it.

Now, as someone who is highly uncomfortable with spiders, stripping it of four of its legs does nothing to alleviate fright. Making it a floating abdomen with eyes and fangs almost makes it worse. And when the spider is reduced to a blob state, it becomes incredibly difficult to read its attack patterns. The effort to make spiders more palatable and still scary is massively appreciated, but something needs to be done about the floating bits of Play-Doh that are now wiping the floor with us.

Next: Grounded: Every Bug And What They Drop