Played through it a couple times in early access and my 4 player group started over again a few weeks ago. We were all pleasantly surprised to see al the content they added for release that we never saw before, so even with the restarts we still wanted more.

It is a great survival/crafting/basebuilding game with a nice variety of locations, progression tiers, and enemies. The story is serviceable, and the voice acting did get a few chuckles from our group.

My minor gripes are performance on large bases, a couple glitches (they never did completely fix phantom water droplets) and having to use xbox friends instead of steam friends on the steam release. But it works, and we haven’t had any problems playing together online.

I don’t know if I would play it much single player, as I think the progression would get somewhat tedious, but having friends to divvy up tasks makes it enjoyable. Also one of the treasure finding puzzles really stood out to me, as three of our group all contributed a bit to solving the puzzle, while the fourth stayed at home expanding the base. I’m sure any of us could have solved the puzzle solo, but how it worked out made it a great little moment in the game.

Having it available on gamepass makes it a pretty easy choice for someone cash strapped, as you get a ton of value out of that even without Grounded.

At least Dark Sky Reserves are becoming more well known and treasured resources. Doesn’t really help with the satellite constellations or LEDs though.