Grounded

Honestly a phenomenal game. Grounded is definitely my overall favorite open world survival crafting game to date. There are some games out there that have Grounded beat in certain categories (some might have better writing, combat, balancing, etc.), but Grounded in aggregate scores the best in my opinion. Pros: The story is pretty fun, can be corny, but that's kinda the point. It has some good references/easter eggs and stays consistent. The game is fun to play solo, and gets even better with friends. There's a lot of really nice quality of life aspects of this game, like hot depositing into all nearby chests, being able to access storage from crafting benches, cool base construction options, ziplines and teleporters, the handy gnat is goated, etc. etc. Exploration is fun to do in this game, and it is well rewarded. The game overall doesn't feel grindy to get crafting materials like many survival crafting games suffer from. Combat is mostly well designed and the enemies (bugs) feel unique. It's not just a bunch of copy-pasted enemies with varying health bars and damage numbers. An incredibly robust custom world creator that even lets players create their own campaigns. There isn't a dumb af fishing mechanic. Cons: The multiplayer experience can be unstable, and doesn't handle lower internet speeds very gracefully. Some of the physics can be wonky. Objects will place weirdly at times, and throwing weapons/items is really bad as the elevation of your throw is incredibly unintuitive. Upgrading weapons in the late game can be grindy, and this gets significantly worse if you have more players in the world. There's no built in compensation for this. Probably my biggest critique is that the weapons and armor aren't super balanced. Some of the gear in this game out performs the others. This unintentionally limits your creativity in the builds you use if you want to not make the game harder on yourself. Overall, the cons are fairly minor, and the quality of gameplay paired with the quality of life additions to this game make it a great one. You can really tell they put a lot of effort into making a good game and listening to player feedback/wishes during development. You can easily get 100+ hours of entertainment out of this game for only 40 bucks. If you like coop survival games, buy this one. Don't even need to wait for a sale to get great value for money.