Subnautica took PC players below the surface of an aquatic alien world for the first time back in the tail-end of 2014. It took nearly seven years for various versions of the game to evolve from Early Access on PC only to physical copies bound for consoles, which just arrived last week. Thankfully, Unknown Worlds Entertainment's frozen follow-up Subnautica: Below Zero managed to jump from Early Access to full release in a little over two years. That means that wannabe explorers everywhere can now dive into both open-world survival action-adventure games, no matter what platform you're on.
If you've already played the original Subnautica, loved it, and perhaps thought to yourself, "What this game needs is an additional chance of freezing to death," then boy are you going to love Subnautica: Below Zero. However, if the original game wasn't your style, then I'm sorry to say that the same is probably true for the sequel. Unknown Worlds Entertainment opted to stick with the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" model of game development, so both games feel very similar to each other. The good side of that decision is that players will get to explore a seemingly endless ocean environment (and some extensive land-based areas in the sequel) with a focus on discovery and survival, while the downside is that rather unintuitive crafting mechanics and somewhat clunky, imprecise controls continue to plague ths experience a bit. A more in-depth (pun!) review follows below, after a brief synopsis and a look at the game itself.
Now available on PC and Mac via Steam and Epic Game Store, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, Subnautica: Below Zero "plunges players into the icy depths of Planet 4546B, an ocean world full of mysterious creatures and watery wonders. With a single-player storyline, breathtaking biomes to explore, technology to craft, and mysteries to uncover, Subnautica: Below Zero promises an adventure that’s out of this world." Check out the console announcement trailer for Subnautica: Below Zero below:
While both Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero offer unique ways to explore creative, beautiful, and deadly alien worlds in your own unfettered way, it's absolutely worth mentioning the overarcing narrative presented in each. The bones of the original game's story find the crash-landed player struggling for survival while also uncovering a covert corporate mission and a planets-spanning threat to untold billions of lifeforms; it's pretty epic. Subnautica: Below Zero picks up where the original left off and doubles down on the secrets of both the Alterra Corporation and those of ancient civilizations that are still influencing the universe in the far-flung 22nd century. It's a great exploration of an original mythology that often leaves us with more questions than answers (in a good way) while also focusing the story on your player character's quest to find out what really happened to her sister. That's a solid and compelling mystery to focus on when you're not, you know, swimming for your life from carnivorous sea creatures, surfacing for oxygen before passing out, or seeking a warm shelter to stave off hypothermia.
Subnautica: Below Zero stays true to its name by adding in the freezing factor to the previously established survivalist aspects of food, thirst, oxygen, and "not being eaten." Rather than throw a wrench into the survival mechanisms that worked in the original, the hypothermia concern merely feels like one more manageable variable to account for and take precautions against. Staying underwater in your high-tech suit will actually solve this problem most of the time, and there's always heat-generating land plants that can warm you up when you're exploring on foot, for once. All of that adds a fun level of challenge and difficulty to the worthwhile follow-up adventure.
But say you just want to dive in and not worry about all of the limiting factors such as food, water, oxygen, and warmth. This is a game after all, one that transports you to a fictional alien planet in order to cobble together some incredibly useful and versatile tech; does it have to realistically kill you, too? No, actually, it doesn't. Subnautica purists may say that the only way to play these games is with the permadeath option which gives you one life to live and that's it, but there's plenty of flexibility baked into the new game options. You can choose permadeath, of course, or really any combination of lethal factors, right down to the Creative mode that basically gives you everything you need to have fun while removing all the lethal factors. To each their own!
For my time with the game, I went with the standard Survival mode, meaning all of the survivability threats were active and I could die, but I would respawn having lost some equipment. (Survival, Freedom, Hardcore, and Creative modes are available in both games.) This was a good and bad decision, honestly. On the good side of things, it made crafting, maintaining my meters, and minimizing risks all necessary considerations that I actually had to invest some mental energy into. If you don't, you're dead, and that's more of an inconvenience and time-waster on this mode than it is a gamebreaker. The downside, however, is that these pressures limit the freedom of exploration you feel and, quite truthfully, how much fun you can have simply swimming around amongst a variety of alien creatures. Add in the sometimes clunky and imprecise controls, in which console controllers give it their best effort at replicating the finer motor control of a mouse and keyboard, and the game's unintuitive crafting system (basically resorting to an "Explore til you find what you need" mentality), and even Survival mode can be more of a headache than not.
If you have the time, the will, and the desire to roam around an alien planet with the threat of certain death from all angles, Subnautica: Below Zero is a great game that will give you hours and hours of fun. The same goes for folks who want the Subnautica environment without the top-down pressure experience, since Creative and Freedom modes also exist. Plus, since it's been out in Early Access for some time, there are plenty of walkthroughs and wikis should you get stuck and choose to use them. For me, it was tough to strike the right balance between just enough of a threat to keep me on my toes and enough guidance from the game so that I wasn't fumbling in the dark at 200 meters down. Your mileage (or meterage?) may vary.
Subnautica: Below Zero is a solidly built game that's worthy of both its predecessor and the Subnautica franchise overall. You can now enjoy both games on every platform out there, and there's absolutely no good reason not to give them a try.
Rating: B-
