Smalland: Survive the Wilds

My group and I played grounded when it came and are just getting to small lands now and I gotta say after hearing how it was not "worse" than grounded just different I have to wholeheartedly disagree. The entire game feels like a discount B movie version ripoff of grounded. What is ok: The combat is fairly good following the same general resistance/weakness setup as grounded. The tools are nearly indentical. Resource gathering - same pretty much with far less interesting things (nothing like grounded's teeth or candies, just overall less well thought out it feels like. But sufficient. Base building is ok, tiles don't snap together well and you can build tiles right ontop of on another instead of having the snap properly. Can be a bit frustration. Like Grounded it has similar (but slightly worse) chest storage abilities but can craft from chests. Still a small step down (can't put everything away with one key. Cons: The Text based interactions Rather than voice acting the entire story is told with poorly written text based interactions that exceedingly simply and generally annoying. From having to go three lines deep to teleport up to your treebase (or down) to generally cheesy dialogue options it's just really disappointing and atmosphere breaking in may cases. Just reads as low effort and a bit cheesy. Multiplayer. Pretty decent connections, some disconnects over long sessions but nothing game breaking. If you play in multiplayer even if you join a guild, every player has to interact and go through all the same text conversations to get all the quests and such. Every player has to pick up every resource to unlock the ability to craft what that resource might unlock as a blueprint. Every player must craft every work station in order to obtain the crafting recipes that workstation unlocks. What group keeps track of every item they pick up? Then you have to drop it to your 3 friends if it unlocked a new recipe. If you miss that your buds could be missing a food recipe you know about for a while until it comes in discussion. (I had no idea my buds didn't know how to make jam because I was the base builder and placed the cauldron). When we finally figured this out everyone had to destroy and replace all the workstations in the base to make sure they had everything. Map Icons Your group isn't on your map. You have to manually put them there each game (click on them on the map to put them on your compass). Map icons are large and obscure what is beneath them. If you put down a bed in the field to spawn at, then die, your friend's Icons can obscure your spawn point so you can't click on it untill they move out of the way. Imagine combat when you die and can't spawn on your nearby bed because your buddies are still alive and fighting and can't leave the area to free up your spawn point Gravestone placement. When you die, stuff is stored in your gravestone but gravestones can spawn in some wonky places, some impossible to reach even though it says last stable ground you were on (especially for water or falling). Mixed Bag: Taming Haven't tamed a ton so far but right off tamed animals can be mounts or fight alongside you (like Conan Exiles) and like Exiles they took the worst aspects in that your tames seem to hit harder than you - so with 4 tames they are outclassing you damage wise by a lot, at least in early game. You start to feel like an observer, especially in MP when you all have tames. As mounts they are fun. They should have been mounts only fight mounted or get off and fight. All in all as we are playing the game the thought running through all our heads is : "We played Grounded a few years ago, it would be more fun to play through it again then play Smalllands". So I can't really recommend the game. It's ok if you need something different and it's a a super sale, but Grounded a 2nd 3rd time through is still more fun.