Recent reviews by Clockwork Brain

The gameplay is solid, but the game's main strength is definitely the writing. The dialogue is full of clever jokes and cheeky references, and the characters are all very memorable and entertaining. The game repeatedly subverts player expectations. The only real complaints I have are nitpicks like most of the background music fading out at the end instead of looping cleanly, and the answering machine on the Sovereign not playing, neither of which actually affect the gameplay. Josh Hano even made music videos and is continuing to publish a graphic novel series continuing the story of Nefarious, and I just can't for the life of me understand why this isn't more popular.

Works great, it's free, and it crashes on me significantly less often than Maya did when I had that program.

It's a decent game; the crafting system is fun and encourages you to explore middle earth for resources, you have the fun quest and forging systems from LEGO Lord of The Rings, and now you can actually summon mounts from the character wheel. However, it does suffer from several flaws:

Big Figs. This game has them, but they're poorly implemented. Unlike the previously made LEGO Marvel game that introduced Big Figs, in this game you can't play as them on any level, and when it comes to combat they actually suck since they aren't any tougher than minifigs and their attack hitboxes make it easy for enemies to get behind, beside, or simply too close to you for your attacks to hit them, and they are incredibly slow at turning while in combat, making them unwieldy. You never feel powerful playing as a Big Fig, their only use is dealing with orange handles only found in the overworld, but that quickly gets invalidated by a lost treasure item you can find in freeplay mode.

Custom Characters. Just like in the previous LOTR game, the custom characters are split between normal-sized people and halfling-sized people, and also like the previous game giving a custom character an elf-eared hairpiece doesn't give them the agility of an elf. Furthermore, you can't give custom characters any equipment, unlike the previous game, so any custom character needs to get their items from the equipment menu. Speaking of which:

Equipment. This game changed the way you accessed the equipment menu, which isn't that big a deal since you quickly get used to it, but there's a problem with it in free-play mode, that problem being that any treasure items you equip vanish the second you switch character, rather than carrying over to whoever you switched to or staying with that character when you switch back to them. This makes treasure items a pain to use in free play mode, especially if you want to play a tall character because inevitably you'll need to buddy up which can only be done by short characters. Big Figs are able to smash big plates that need buddying up, but once again, they aren't allowed in Freeplay mode. Speaking of buddying up, there is a specific mithril treasure item called the shadow staff, which summons a shadow of yourself to fight alongside you. Unfortunately, you cannot buddy up with your shadow, so the shadow buddy doesn't really do anything.

Lastly the levels don't play through the entire hobbit movie. They stop right after Smaug breaks out of the mountain. This seems incredibly strange when the rest of the game seems more polished and really feels like the developers put time and care into this.

But overall it's a fun game with good replay value, and aside from the utter disapointment that Big Figs turned out to be, there aren't any major issues with the game.

Suffers some major flaws, such as not carrying the freeplay characters you were playing as to the overworld, so you have to re-select characters each time. This wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the fact that the character selection menu is incredibly disorganized, with even story mode characters being all over the place. Additionally, this game has most of the stores and such in the helicarrier like the previous LEGO Marvel game, but unlike the previous LEGO Marvel game, you don't spawn in the helicarrier, forcing you to either hunt down a vehicle depo that isn't shown on the minimap or switch to a flying character and take several minutes to fly all the way above the clouds and onto the helicarrier. Speaking of the minimap, unlike previous LEGO games where you could open up the minimap with select and set destinations for yourself, in this game you can't open the minimap at all, because they decided to make the button that normally opens the minimap send you to space instead for some reason instead of having some sort of object you interact with to access it, except there is also an object you interact with to access it. And unlike LEGO Star Wars: The Clone Wars, where you could access all the stores and such while in space, this game instead has you take a rocket to space and unload the area you were just in, so that you can't just back out of the menu. It would have been far more intuitive if the space menu was instead located within the bridge of the helicarrier, which HAS a freaking holographic GLOBE in it already.

And unfortunately, the game hasn't received DLC for any of the Avengers or other MCU movies made after Age of Ultron, meaning no Spiderman, no Ant-Man, no Black Panther, and no Thanos. Furthermore, while they added levels based on other MCU movies made between Avengers and A:AOU, there are no levels of MCU movies made before Avengers, except technically Captain America because of flashbacks.

In short, the overworld and freeplay parts of the game feel sloppy and rushed, and the game doesn't have enough content to feel worth playing after completing all the levels, especially since the only character you need to buy to 100% everything is Ultron, who isn't particularly expensive. You don't even need to buy Loki since he's unlocked in the Thor II level.

First of all, I am incredibly upset that I had to install a community made mod just to be able to run this thing. The fact that the community managers have pinned a thread linking to that mod, implying the devs are not only aware of the issues, but that there is already a solution to those issues, just adds insult to injury.

As for the actual gameplay, I found it to be... quite bland, TBH. The "world is made of cardboard" aspect is never really explored, so aside from the drawing system it's purely cosmetic, which was a huge letdown.

I think the reason this game never took off is that limiting themselves to just cardboard was too limiting to make the mechanics feel unique. There are different materials, but all the different materials are clearly just different colored cardboard, which limits the amount of customization to just shape, since all the materials really being the same material with different texture means you can only customize the shape of objects, which results in everything looking same-y.

What this game really needs to take off is to scrap the current system of treating differently colored cardboard as different resources and instead capitalize on the arts and crafts aspect. Construction paper foliage, crayon deposits, chalk boulders, Play-Doh clumps, popsicle stick strongholds, glitter glue basins, tissue paper water, cotton ball clouds and/or sheep wool, dangerous water pools enclosed in carton board, string vines, tinfoil ore, rubber band tumbleweeds, felt animal hide, the possibilities are endless. Then, since different materials would actually have different physical properties, you could add more customization options. For instance, paintings using a paper canvas colored with crayon held within a cardboard frame.

IT'S HERE IT'S HERE IT'S HERE!!!!

It's basically Honey I Shrunk the Kids; the videogame. As a survival game, Grounded features a unique yet familiar environment, as well as several fun mechanics. From hauling grass blades and weed stems over your shoulder like an ant, to covering yourself in ant carcases to fool soldier ants into thinking you're one of them. The game is still very early access, so there isn't a whole lot of content to talk about right now; but the development roadmap promises a plethora of exciting features that will change the way the game is played; from making your own aphid farm to using pheremones to manipulate ants into doing your dirty work, to new environments being expanded to explore, such as the pond or the upcoming expansion of the hedge zone.

I have re-tried the game since my original review, and either they fixed the issue or the cheap gaming PC i had at the time was causing issues, but since I started playing again on my new gaming PC I have encountered none of the problems I've stated previously.

Below is my original review, struck out and with some commentary.

The platforming in this game is TERRIBLE. trying to jump over an obstacle, onto the center of a bouncy crate, or jumping past a hole in the ground, is so finicky it's practically a dice roll. I think the issue is with Crash's physical collision box; side collisions with world geometry seem to operate based on simple "hit or miss" settings as opposed to simulating momentum and center of mass, so if even the soles of his sneakers touch the side of the obstacle he's trying to jump over, the game engine counts it as hitting a wall rather than pushing him upwards to simulate how the mass of his body would continue its motion, maybe even adding a comical stumbling animation. Wow, i horribly miss-diagnosed the issue; a far more likely explanation is that the modern gaming engine this game uses assigns Crash a pill-shaped collision hull, compared to the rectangular bounding box older engines used. The old bounding box system made collision for the base of the model completely flat, allowing you to seemingly stand on thin air if a tiny part of your Bbox was touching solid ground. However, the modern pill-shaped collision hulls have a round top and bottom, so if the center of your pill isn't on solid ground, your character will slide off. This still has an easy fix, as most game engines allow you to set a step height for characters to force their bodies up when they collide with a ledge that's higher than their root position. You can also customize how much friction your character has, which can help prevent slipping.

Now, this collision sensitivity wouldn't be a problem, if Crash jumped just a tad higher, or perhaps the gravity was just slightly lower, but as is, even those fallen pillars only let you jump over them if you jump from the right side, and if you have your joystick at a slight angle when you try to cross that gap, or if you jumped just an inch too soon, then you're screwed. "inch too soon?" what a dumb way of saying there was little, if any, room for error on jumps. I also didn't mention that this was the first level of the first game, so the level parts I mention here didn't have any context

I think what angers me the most about this is that it's such a simple thing to fix; like I said, just add a little more force to Crash's jumping, or lower the gravity slightly, and boom; problem solved. It's something that you'd think would have come up during playtesting, which makes it all the more infuriating that it exists in the final release. It's like they didn't even bother playtesting this game!

Also, the video lags behind the audio for cinematics, and there is sometimes a slight delay between controller input and character movement. Maybe those two issues would be fixed if I had more processing power, but I shouldn't need to set up an external hard drive to be treated as ram just to be able to play this game properly on my GAMING PC. In retrospect, this lag should have been my first clue that my computer was struggling to run the game. If I figured that out sooner, I might have returned my cheap "gaming PC" soon enough for me to also return the Geforce RTX 60 I bought for it for the refund.

A ridiculously fun game with infinite possibilities. Though I would recommend convincing your friends to buy it with you rather than just buying it yourself; the "lolrandom" thrill isn't as fun when you don't have anyone to share it with.

Astounding gameplay! I love the sophisticated AI; how they stand still until they see you, then seek out the shortest route to your location, is absolutely groundbreaking!