I have had a lot of fun with this game, but it isn't done in some important ways that make it harder to recommend. I do recommend it still but only because they launched this EA title in a state that feels pretty good most of the time and I see extremely good potential. I also like how the devs communicate, and the co-op addition was a good choice.

The Good:

> Combat is so much fun some of the time! Like, so much fun! Some of the time! Committing to a strike feels consequential (aided by the great animations) and even "trash mob" fights can be difficult. There are downsides here too, though, see below

> The art and graphics are fantastic; I love looking at this game and the animations feel weighty and consequential

> Audio is as great as the eye candy

>Story is cool if somewhat generic feeling after playing several other ARPGs and the start of this game feels really similar to the start of PoE2: wake up on a beach, clobber clumsy through a newb zone, then beat the monster that has the town all gated up. Then everybody stammers "how could you defeat that foe?!" but seems to forget that pretty quickly after. There are religious fanatics in the story who I absolutely hate because they are so so smug and self-righteous so kudos to the writers and voice actors for evoking that. Similar to other games like this there are a lot of factions and it can be hard to keep up. This could be my b since I don't really play ARPGs for the story. The voice acting is absolutely fantastic.

> Again, the art is so good. Had to say it twice. I *love* looking at this game.

The Bad:

> The fixed camera is janky and makes it harder to navigate the environments compared to other fixed camera games like PoE. Especially if I am running down (towards the camera) it will hide terrain weirdly (or with a fade delay that gets me killed by fall damage or an enemy) and it can be difficult to understand where to go. The camera also doesn't seem to do me any favors with the platforming puzzles sprinkled here and there. Overall I wish I could rotate the camera, even if only 20 - 30 degrees, to get better angles on things. Or maybe a different way to indicate faded foreground terrain.

>Melee vs Ranged difficulty balance. I'm level 7 in a Threat Level 3 area trying to do a bounty that is these two flaming halberd/axe guys and that fight is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ impossible with melee even though I am higher level than the zone. Even if my parry game is on point I can only parry one attack while my animation resets and the other enemy just blows through me and does 90% of my health in one hit regardless of armor. If I wear light or no armor to stay in the Fast weight class, I can evade instead of parrying but one hit kills me. If I wear anything that puts me in Normal or Heavy weight class, two hits kill me and I'm so slow that I can't get out of the way so I am guaranteed to get hit at least three times per enemy attack animation sequence. Armor feels borderline useless because of how enemies can combo; the only actual strat to not die is to not ever get hit. If I equip a bow on the same character with no armor I can chip-kill both of them without getting hit once because they can never get close enough to hit me w/ the fast dodge. So parrying feels useless vs more than 1 enemy at a time even if I land the parry 9/10 times. Overall this balance *feels* bad but I don't know how to fix it so it feels better while still having bows and melee feel cool and different.



The Ugly:

>Platforming. Jesus ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ christ the platforming is HELL and I hate it every time I have to do it. I like the idea of the terrain being its own puzzle, and I like needing to look around for where to go and having multiple ways to get from here to there, but when I have to balance on a beam and then jump to another beam I want to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ throw my controller out the window. The auto jump drives me insane. It will make me jump before i want, before I am lined up, so that I miss half the jumps I make. Please PLEASE let us manually jump. Like, make it a left-trigger+dash or something to manually jump. Auto jump is half of why I hate platforming in this game.

Has become unplayable with frequent disconnects. Is this is lesson in developer incompetence? Because it used to work well.

I like this game a lot.

It has a lot of bugs and there's gonna be more but it also has quite a few bugs and I'm utterly wow @ the buggy. I want more buggies but those have bugs so I want more less-buggy buggies. Overall this is an elevated experience compared to Grounded 1 and I loved Grounded 1. That game had bugs, no buggy, and in general there weren't really any bugs. This game is buggier, has more bugs, has more bugs planned (though there are bound to be bugs), and even though there are bugs I still have a good time. Eventually the devs will expand the yard, add all the bugs, eliminate all the bugs, and then because of the buggy this game will be perfect.

ETA - I'm playing this in early access on a 7800X3D /w 64g RAM and a 9070XT. I get around 40 fps with settings maxed @ native 4k without scaling. I actually play with scaling @ 50% and graphics on the "high" preset. I maintain 100+ fps pretty consistently and apart from some jerkiness when exiting caves the game looks and runs quite beautiful with these settings. The game crashes to desktop a few times every play session but usually loads right back up. For an Early Access title it feels acceptably stable and performative. If this was a release title, I would probably give it a thumbs-down based on crashes and performance alone.

gud