I've had a mixed experience with Grounded 2. It flip-flops between brilliance and frustration. The magic of living in an insect kingdom that's been made massive around me, by virtue of my being shrunk, is absolutely still here. I will never tire of watching spiders the size of cars prowl around the blades-of-grass forest around me, or bees buzz like helicopters above. And now there's more everything: more insects, more world, more variety, more story, more nuance to its systems, more things to make. In every way, Grounded 2 has widened and deepened - sometimes quite literally. There's a much clearer sense Obsidian knows the game it's making now and what the community wants from it. But with this added game-framework also comes busywork and a sense of grind, and a feeling of sometimes being held back from doing what you really want to do.

Case in point: I'm about 15 hours in and still can't explore a frozen biome around a pushed-over ice-cream cart that I want to explore, because I can't yet make the warmth-giving armour I need to survive there. I can't make it because I don't have access to the resources I need, either because the insects they come from are too strong for me to reliably kill, or because my tools won't harvest the plants they come from - and I can't upgrade my tools because I don't have the resources I need for that, either.

Usually what happens is I venture out, determined to overcome these obstacles, and am productive and successful for a while, then I'm ambushed by spiders or mosquitos or cockroaches or bees and I die. Then I resurrect all the way back at base, having lost all of the resources I'd collected, needing to start again, which will involve a long trek back to where I was. Where I might well die again. Variations of that - that's what has happened to me over and over. And after a while, I lose my patience with it.

But at the same time, it can be brilliant. That world - this time it's in Unreal Engine 5 and though it looks similar to Grounded 1, you can clearly notice a bump in the fidelity of it. It's still simply rendered in a colourful, smooth-edged, cartoon kind of way, but that doesn't lessen the tension of living in it, particularly at night or underground, where only the glowing eyes of enemies can be seen if you've no torch in hand. And when the sun breaks over the world in the morning, its rays lancing through the grass and dandelions and thistles, making shadows of the creatures lurking above, it is spectacular.

There's a much stronger sense of story than in Grounded 1. As soon as the game begins, you're exploring a purpose-made, story-laden, man-made base - one made especially for tiny people - and put in conversation with the 'hilariously evil and barely masking it' boss of the company, Sloane. She's fully voiced - and brilliantly voiced - and talks to you numerous times from various underground bases throughout the experience. There's clear objective-led direction throughout the world, and even a mysterious stranger who begins sending mind-controlled waves of insect enemies against you, threatening the defences of your base. (Finally, a reason to defend.)

There are significant gameplay changes too, amongst these an upgradeable omni-tool which consolidates your axe, shovel, hammer and wrench tools into one handy object, which doesn't take up space in your inventory. This clears space for you to carry more kinds of weapons around with you, or armour, and engage in the game's rock, paper, scissors-style combat. Identify what enemies are vulnerable or resistant to by scanning them through your binoculars, then capitalise on it by using different equipment builds.

There's a lot of new equipment to enable this, even a light sense of character classes in the game, such as fighter, archer, rogue and mage, all with equipment sets designed around amplifying these particular playstyles. Mutations tie into this: passive abilities unlocked by doing things such as killing a lot of enemies with two-handed hammers, that in turn do things like increase your stun chance. You can swap them out as easily as you swap equipment out. The idea is clearly to adapt to the challenge at hand, and it gives a pleasant amount to think about. Enemies also block more now, meaning you need to charge power attacks to break their block, and you can dodge-dash, giving high-damage but low survivability builds a powerful tool to survive combat with.

But perhaps the biggest new toy is mounts, which are insects - a red soldier ant and an orb weaver spider in the early access build's case - that you can ride around on. The ant is unlocked via the main quest a few hours in (the spider a lot later), and involves a perilous venture to an underground ant base, to steal a red ant egg, and once you bring it back and incubate it and hatch your ant "buggy", as it's called, it will be available to you forever more. This mount transforms the experience. Not only is it much quicker than you, especially when sprinting, meaning you can get to places quicker and run away from scary enemies more reliably, but it also has its own, larger inventory to fill, like a pack mule, and can lug around twice the amount of blades of grass and weed stems you can, at a far greater speed, which hugely speeds up base building. What's more, it can chomp through barriers you can't otherwise get through, and you can fight with it, either while riding it or while on foot, with it fighting by your side, which can be an incredibly useful way of turning a creature's attention while you pummel it. It can even convince other ants to follow along with you. I don't like to go anywhere without my ant; I've formed quite a bond with it.

The ant is great. The problem is that I feel hampered without it. There's a particularly slow few hours at the beginning of the game where you're effectively exploring a world on foot that's designed to be explored on ant-back, which becomes laborious. It's also particularly annoying if you're a long way from base and struggling to survive, and the ant is knocked out and automatically returned to your hatchery, leaving you stranded somewhere in the wilderness on foot. It's a long way home at that point, especially if you're carrying valuable resources.

Similarly, while the added gameplay nuance is welcome, the downside of having more equipment to play with means you've got to make and carry more equipment to play with. This in addition to building the many types of things you need in your base - things like smoothie stations, cooking ovens, blacksmith-like machinery, hatcheries, and so on. In other words, there's a lot to do, which is great for giving players things to do and keeping them busy, but can feel overwhelming, especially playing alone, and especially when dying somewhere and having to set out again to retrieve the things you wanted to get.

Grounded 2 is not an easy game, then - at least, it's not for me playing alone on medium difficulty. It feels as though it's been designed for slow progress, and for you to feel like you're gradually taming this world around you and overcoming the beasts around you, before moving onto other ones. Which is fine, by the way. There's a powerful thrill in defeating big enemies for the first time, be they a spider or a cockroach or a beetle, and by making them tricky to overcome, the game makes you notice them more. It gives them a bit of a spotlight, a chance to shine, which I like. I've even started looking at some of them differently in the real world, not that my flat is populated by scorpions, I don't think. But the precarious nature of Grounded 2 sometimes means you're ganged up on, ambushed and killed, and it feels unfair.

I expect this changes dramatically when you have someone else to play with, but this is something I wasn't able to get working in the private press build of the game. Together with someone, who can get you back up when you're downed, and fight enemies with you, there's a much greater chance you'll be able to overcome the objectives the game sets for you. Indeed, it feels like Grounded 2 is meant to be played this way and as though all aspects of it, from resource gathering to crafting, base building, adventuring, and combat, will be helped by having someone else there with you. So I need a little more time, then, to properly try Grounded 2 in multiplayer as the game rolls out to everyone, and to venture deeper into the more dramatically new parts of the world. Time to discover the particular magic of Grounded 2. I suspect it's there - I've seen flashes of it - but I'm waiting to be entirely convinced.