Aground

Beneath its rough exterior lies a surprisingly engaging title that is only hampered by its lack of fast travel methods. The game’s cyclical nature relies on the player’s natural drive for exploration and manages to reward this inherent trait by ensuring there’s always something new to discover. When Aground clicks, you’ll find yourself wanting to return to the game over and over again.

Aground for me manages to capture all the fun about crafting that made Minecraft positive but without needing to be so creative. It also captures the fun exploration that made Terraria enjoyable but with much greater depth to the story and progression.

Aground surprised me with how much I kept wanting to get back to it the more I played. It won’t win any awards for its visuals and could certainly do well by limiting battling. That said, it hit the mark with tranquil digging, incentivizing crafting with small goals in its missions, and gradually pushing you along to explore the wider world around your starting grounds.

Aground on Xbox is a game that starts off simple and rapidly gets more and more complicated, with a massive amount of different things to do and objectives to achieve. These objectives lead you to new discoveries and paths to explore, and this isn’t a game that will be finished quickly. The sheer amount of things to do can be a bit overwhelming, but even if you just fancy wandering around and getting materials for crafting, it’s always engaging.