Recent reviews by Dounlode

I bought this game to play with some friends, and they love it, so obviously there is a target audience. I just can't fathom what their problem is. I tried to refund it, but we had played for too long in our first session while I was trying to give it a chance.

To be fair: The concept is good, it looks good. That's about as far as I'll go with the positives.

The inventory system is garbage. Putting an item in your hotbar doesn't remove it from your inventory, but equipping it does? Come on, one or the other, pick one. Why is it that equipping a dandelion directly to your accessory slot does nothing, but putting it on your hotbar and then activating it puts it in your accessory slot and then it works? Is that just me? Is that a bug? That feels like a bug. Trying to take items out of storage or put them into storage is clunky too, even after the update where they claimed to fix it, although that may be a feature of the awful multiplayer functionality rather than the awful inventory.

That brings me to the multiplayer issues. The number of times I have to log out and log back in during a session to resync item locations and states with the host is unacceptable. I'll frequently spend a few seconds trying to pick up an item, because even just picking up items is sometimes awkward, and then realize the reason I can't pick it up is because it's not actually there on the host's machine. Putting grass planks on a pallet or removing them too quickly sometimes results in phantom grass just hanging out that isn't actually there. Sometimes other players just walking around appear to be ragdolling through space because the game isn't communicating their state properly. I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting, I've just stopped caring at this point.

Like any survival game, there are both combat and base building elements. Unfortunately, they're both lacking. I'm mostly interested in the base building aspect, so all I can say about the combat is that it's not fun. I've just been avoiding it and leaving it to the other players because I don't care to bother with it anymore.

The base building has a lot of nice features, but the progression of it and the execution of it have issues. Trying to figure out where I have to point to make a section of wall connect to the adjacent wall is way too fiddly. Trying to connect a set of stairs to a platform or another set of stairs takes a lot of messing around, and then when it's finally lined up and you click, the blueprint ends up in the wrong place anyway. I spent a lot of time waiting to unlock higher tiers of certain utility furniture before I gave up and looked at the wiki and discovered that there is no higher tier. You're just expected to suffer through slow, inefficient machines for the rest of the game. The vast majority of the progression in the game is new weapons and armor, but if the combat is no fun, what's the point in that?

I wanted to like Grounded. I really did. Fix the fundamental systems, and I might even want to play it once in a while. As it is I just get mad every time I have to do anything.

Oh, and please, PLEASE let me turn off discount Claptrap.

Niche looked like it was going to be a really fun game right up until I hit the tutorial and it became obvious how poorly designed the interface is.

One step of the tutorial tells you to click the family tree button "in the lower left", but there are a lot of buttons in the lower left and most of them aren't labeled. None of the stats are explained in the tutorial, nor is the mutation mechanic, the action count, or many of the other important features.

It gets even worse once you leave the tutorial and puts you on an "easy" island. I don't dislike hard games, I love a challenge. But there's a difference between something being hard because it requires skill and something being hard because you can't win if the game decides to throw the wrong thing at you. Here's the setup for this problem: All of your animals have a limited lifespan and can take a maximum of three actions per day, two or even one if they're not fully grown. Those actions include moving, collecting food, cutting grass, attacking things, mating, everything. Each of your animals also require one unit of food every day which must be located and collected. Movement actions are limited to one space at a time if there's tall grass in the way and almost every space starts off with tall grass. That, in and of itself, was frustrating enough. All three actions in a day would be spent cutting grass and moving to find food while the food meter slowly goes to zero. And then just when you think you've got all your space cleared up for easy movement and your food sources located and you might actually be able to start playing the game, the grass starts growing back. It doesn't even grow back in the order you removed it, it's as though every space has a percent chance of just spawning new grass every day. If you do manage to secure enough food sources to keep your animals fed, some bigger creature shows up and starts systematically killing them off. In my first game some huge black thing showed up and started attacking my animals one at a time and it took three days of all three animals attacking it with every action to kill it and by that time it had killed two of them and the last one was starving. This is the easy island right out of the tutorial and it didn't get any better in subsequent games.

So no, I don't recommend anyone buy this game. If it was in early access I could cut it some slack for not having its systems sorted out yet, but this is a full release which means someone had to look at this and say "Yup, that's what I want my game to be". That's upsetting because this game looks like it has so much promise. Revamp the tutorial and rethink the core systems and I would give it another chance, but the way it is I can't bring myself to start up another new file.

For people who are fans of Kingdom of Loathing this is a perfect next step for the world they're already familiar with. It's got all the grade A writing KoL is known for and an awesome new way of interacting with it.
For people who like the idea of KoL but didn't have the attention span to keep coming back, this is the perfect way to get your humor fix and wrap everything up in a timely manner.
For people who have no idea what KoL is this is a perfect foot in the door to really get the feel for the style without feeling like they've committed to a neverending game.

As a long-time KoL player (2005-present) I was immediately familiar and comfortable with the setting and systems while still feeling like I was experiencing something new and exciting. Once I started I just couldn't put it down and more or less finished a playthrough in one sitting.

TLDR; I recommend this game 100% to anybody regardless of their familiarity with related material. It's just great.