Valheim is the far bigger game yet alone because of the huge soulless map. Grounded is nicely condensed. Not to big.. not to small... handcrafted and not %generated it's also complete.

Building in Grounded is.. kinda meh since you only can craft like one or two parts before you need to get another stack of materials. It's realistic that the kid you play can only hold like 5-8 planks but .. meh. Thats where valheim gets my one and only +1. Even tho I don't particulary like it here either, everything is so grind heavy in both games.. just that in valheim you would need +1000-100k stones, wood etc for stuff while in grounded you would need +10-1000 of materials depending ofc what and how big you wanna build. In grounded you can at least build some stuff to get around far quicker. With some effort you can zipline to every location without ever running there again. Which is super nice.

Combat is better in grounded since weapons feel far better to swing. In Valheim everything feels like you slice through butter.. no weight to it.. enemies only have like 2 poorly telegraphed attacks while in Grounded there are at least 3 different attacks per bigger bug. Tension also is far different since there actually are dangerous creatures you can't really exploit the ♥♥♥♥ out of. In valheim the only thing that gets you killed is gravity and being overwhelmed by numbers not because some mob is challenging to fight.

Nights in grounded are scary as hell and the only game that requires me to sleep lol. The amount of times I nearly ♥♥♥♥ in my pants in the night because some wolf spider roamed around silently. Valheim could never reproduce it.

Also Grounded isn't some eternal early access game. What they did in 2 years... IG would need 10. It's story based and complete. While Valheim is more like an unfinished terraria sandbox in 3D.

Graphics in grounded are beautiful, Artstyle too.. if you turn down the dof effect in the ini file.. it triggered some headaches for me so it's nice we can turn it down there. While I dont really hate valheims artstyle I quickly used some graphic mods which enhanced my fun with the game. Grounded does not require anything like that since it's just beautiful.

Creature design is awesome. While I still get some goosebumps fighting some spiders.. beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of them helps getting rid of the anxiety. Spiders are scary af but they somehow did it that they are also kinda cute if you focus only on the face lol.

Especially the diving bell spiders in the pond (yes you can actually swim in Grounded.. and you have to !) while easy to fight .. still creep me out. Water+Spiders.. not a good combination for me.

Base defense events are also better in Grounded since you can't just dig moats for success. Even tho building high also can delete that one feature for your playthrough. But it at least feels realistic instead of the dumb AI valheim has where they just wait there looking dumb until you decide to fight them outside of your base.

That said. Grounded.. same as valheim has some serious clipping and mobs getting stuck issues. I don't think devs can ever fix this but it's a minor thing imho.

Since I'm a fan of complete games and no eternal early access games my vote goes to Grounded. Playing a survival game that actually is complete and next to finished (dunno if they plan to develop more content for grounded) surely is nice since this genre if flooded with eternal never get done early access games.