Game: Aground
Genre: Adventure, Role-Playing, Simulation
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam, PS4)
Developers | Publishers: Fancy Fish Games | Whitethorn Digital
Age Rating: EU 16+ | USA E10+
Price: US $14.99 | EU €12,29 |UK £10.99
Release Date: February 11th, 2021
Review code used, with many thanks to Whitethorn Digital
Aground by developers Fancy Fish Games is a Mining/Crafting RPG, where there is an overall goal, story and reason to craft and build. It originally started life as a free game and then a Kickstarter campaign in 2018.
Try to Survive
You play the part of one of the last human survivors who find themselves stranded on an uninhabited island. You find other survivors and work together with them to build a settlement and slowly explore and grow. You all set about building a camp, but to do that you also have to collect resources.
First off, you can customise the appearance of your character at the start of the game. The options are pretty limited, but it’s still a nice feature to be added.
Lots to do to Survive
You and your fellow campmates gather resources, mine, craft, cook, and grow crops. You hunt and grow food, that’s used to heal your health and stamina.
You can go mining deep into the ground below your settlement, mining is a lot of fun and simple to do. Push the direction as your character cuts through the earth block by block. Once you have filled your backpack with treasures from deep below the ground you return to camp.
Everyone Helps
The other stranded NPC’s who all have a speciality such as a builder, farmer, miner, or hunter, will give you quests to complete, like build a furnace or make a bow and arrow. All the quests progress the storyline from one way to another. You’ll be expanding your little settlement by added fields for crops, pig pens, and a fruit orchard and much more. There is so much to do that you constantly kept busy, but you never feel pressured. The various NPC’s that join your little camp don’t just stand around, they also help, they move about the camp collecting and contribute resources to your stockpile too.
Heaps of Content
Underneath its simplistic retro visuals, there is a large amount of content in Aground. The storyline twists and turns and throws up lots of unexpected surprises. There are trips to other islands and fantasy, science fiction elements all in the game.
There is so much about the game I don’t want to spoil in this review as it would ruin some of the surprises. Aground is a mix of genres, a little bit of everything added in. The developers have done an amazing job of keeping the game fresh as you play through it. There is something new happening often to keep you interested.
You start out with almost nothing, and you eventually build your way up to a thriving settlement. The sense of continued progression is one of the things that Aground does very well!
Visuals and Controls
I like the games retro visuals, and the music is great and fits in well with the look of the game. However, I don’t think the same can be said for the sound effects and the character voices. The voices are a one tone beep and it gets irritating quickly as does the click noise you hear when moving through your inventory. Thankfully you can silence the effects in the settings and that is exactly what I did.
Aground is controlled via the joy-cons, it feels a little clunky and it took me a while to get used to it and for it to feel natural. You can place items from your inventory into hotkeys for quick access, which is a handy feature when you have more than one tool.
Conclusion
Aground is a super fun game, with lots to do in it. Plenty of crafting, mining and so on to keep you amused. The story twists are interesting, your never quite sure where it will all lead to. It can get a little repetitive as regards the collecting of resources, but what game doesn’t.
If you’re a fan of games that focus on survival, collecting resources and crafting and at the price point for Aground I can highly recommend it!
Final Verdict: I Like It a Lot 
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