Subnautica: Below Zero - Review

Games that drop me into a world and basically say good luck, have always had an appeal, but more often than not, they are the same core game, just with a different visual style, enter Subnautica. The series took that open world survival aspect, but layered in a story to help make everything feel more connected, now the sequel has arrived, but does it reach new depths of the gaming landscape or is it just too waterlogged to matter?

Below Zero takes the formula that Subnautica first offered, but expands upon it, by introducing characters and a few over-arching goals to achieve, the most important addition is discovering what happed to the Robin’s sister. While that might be the reason for going to the planet, soon after you land, a distress beacon calls out and upon finding the source, you meet an alien AI, which downloads itself into your head, kicking off the bigger story. While the story is intriguing at times, the mystery aspect of it is easy to forget, purely because the game is so dependent on your finding resources to achieve the final goal, what happed to Robin’s sister and finding a new body for the AI that is renting space in your head.

The gameplay that is being offered here should be quite familiar to anyone who played the first game, survival is the core aspect to the game, with every action that you take either helping or hindering your chances at making it off the planet. Most of the exploration that you do takes place underwater, meaning that your survival is dependent on things like oxygen, which limits you early on until you start upgrading your O2 canisters. Because of this restriction you will spend a lot of the time early on swimming in shallow waters, scanning the various fish and plants, all the while trying to come up with a plan on how to move forward. This is not like Minecraft where you can just run out, collect a bunch of resources and then head on back to your little base, because of the number of ways in which to die, each time you venture out you need to be on top of your game. When you leave your base, you will have to deal with things like your health, your hunger and thirst, and that's assuming you don't swim beneath the surface.

The hunger and thirst mechanics are interesting additions to the game, purely because most people won't think of those, Minecraft of course has a hunger meter which can impact your overall health but it's really easy to obtain food in that game. Here a lot of your food will come from fish and while some of the fish you can catch pretty easily on your own, the more you explore the more food you'll need and as fast as you might be at swimming, the fish are always faster. This of course leads to building tools to collect fish for you while you're out collecting other resources, like growing crops in Minecraft, but in order to get to that level of technology you need to have scanned a lot of things in order to understand how it all comes together. It's this dynamic system that made me appreciate how interesting the game world is, the basic stuff makes sense but when you need to build your own batteries to charge your tools in order to scan or use a flashlight, or even later on building a proper base, discovering that you need a plant to do that was not something I was expecting.

Now you don't always need to find plants to build batteries, sticking with them as the example here, because there is salvageable technology all around the place, some of it is easy to spot, some of it not so easy and of course the more useful the find, the deeper it usually is. The requirements early on for building the basic tools, to help you survive are simple enough, meaning you won't need to swim down any further than 50 metres to find most of the items. However, as you start to expand your base or build larger and more powerful equipment you'll need to swim down further, and this is where the balance of everything comes into play. Each time I made a plan of attack on how to get what I needed, in order to build an item or get food or try any survive time on the surface, it would require me to think about each and every step of the process. This isn't because it's a complicated system, it's actually very straightforward and easy to use, but there were times when I would find myself trying to work out the best way to achieve a goal, when I can only carry so many things with me.

The problem with balance needed for success, is that in order to put everything into your favour you need the gear, but to get the gear you need the materials and to get enough of those you need the gear, it's a big old catch 22. Even trying to scan the environment requires tool that needs power. And while you can locate some batteries in salvage, you are going to have to charge your own at some point, that means you need power, which means you need solar panels, which are your basic way of charging early on. Building solar panels is easy once you have the materials but again you need to try and find the materials and the problem is the game doesn't make it easy to spy things on the ground, there were times when I would swim up to something I believed to be at deposit of material, only to get confused that it was just part of a rock. Eventually though I was able to build more useful items and start exploring more of the planet, moving the story along and building a bigger base, but that then starts to provide other issues to take into consideration like structural integrity of your base, that is of course assuming you can build a base without throwing your controller through a wall.

Base construction is one of the things I was really looking forward to in the game, being able to build a deep-sea facility where I can store my items, view sea life as it swims about and find a place where I can rest while night was upon me, it was a big draw. The problem is that the building system doesn't work with a controller, I should say it doesn't work well, it is functional but not fun and that comes down to the fact that there are no way too snap items, without being right near where they're going to be built. When I first found the area where I was going to build my base it was a fairly smooth piece of seabed with a coral bridge running off to the side, I was really happy with it. The problem that I had is that you can't push things away from you, whilst in the build mode without your character swimming with them and while building a single item or a support foundation isn't really an issue when you're trying to build more or plan out the overall build of your base not being able to see it in a bird's eye or a long distance view, adds in a level of complexity that it didn't need. On top of that the actual controls for building are not intuitive, the right trigger activates the tool then you press the A button to start building and then the right trigger again to cancel, and apart from rotating with the D-pad that's it, sadly though the build system brought up perhaps the most annoying problem that game had for me.

That is the games interface while the overall design works and looks great for the game, there are basically tooltips enabled on every menu option, be it fabrication, power generation, base colouring and of course building which sadly blocks a lot of the screen. These tooltips are not one line of text, there to provide a little more information about the thing you've selected, no for some reason they are a third of the screen space and it makes it impossible to see other things. The first time I encountered this was in fabrication, I had selected what I wanted to build but then the tooltip blocked all the other options behind it, I could still move to them, but I couldn't see what they were until I did. I spent time in the menus to see if there was a way to turn them off or shrink the size of them and no it was just on at all times, which is not the best way to share information in a game, which is a real shame given how beautiful this game can be at times.

From a pure presentation point of view, the game can look stunning, the water effects especially when the surface area is displaced by ice or your vehicle, even going in and out of a base, highlights those amazing water effects. As beautiful as the water is though it pales in comparison to what you can see when you start looking at the sea life, the coral and the rockwork that juts out of the seabed, especially when you dive into the darker areas or it becomes night and you lose a lot of ambient light, everything just comes to life at that point. This doesn't even bring into the equation the ambient light rays that pierce through the top levels of the ocean and filter down through so much water, it does look incredible. Even on land when it's snowing and the winds kicking the snow around and all you really can see is white with the occasional splashes of colour, the game still looks amazing, but for everything that looks amazing, there are technical aspects of the game suffer.

There were times when I would be swimming around only to hit something that wasn't there and then whilst attempting to look around to try and find it, where I was swimming there would now be plants or rock that wasn't there at first. Another time this happened I was diving in my sea truck to try and locate salvage and came across a school of jellyfish type creatures, which looked incredible, but they were popping in and out as if that were part of their unique design, but it felt more like a technical issue. Whilst I can forgive pop in for things that are quite far away when it's happening right in front of you, the sudden changes to the landscape, where it adds detail to surfaces that might looks basic to begin with, quicky becomes frustrating because it means you've gotta slow down to let the game catch up.

On the audio side of things, there is a happier news to report, with the game having an enchanting score, but also removing it, to let isolation really take effect. When you are near the surface, or inside the alien ruins, the score is more prominent, which helps define a sense of safety, but when the music fades away, it amps up the fact that you are on your own. The best part of it, is that it is done in such a way, that it never really calls to itself, meaning that when the music fades away, you don’t notice that it has done that, it is just gone. The other sound effects are wonderfully alien, but still familiar, creatures in the ocean call out in shrill and sometimes scary sounds, tools and mechanical items feel ground, with a touch of futurism, it is an audio landscape that is fun to be immersed in. Even the AI voice that provides status updates on your diving, suit and scanned items is wonderful, because it is not a standard robotic driven voice, the other voiced characters also sound great.

Subnautica: Below Zero is a game that will intrigue most players and frustrate just as many, the story being so heavily mystery driven is fine, but the gameplay is so slow and methodical, it really counteracts the pace the story is trying to convey. The games systems of locating items and building tools are simple enough to work with, but the games base building system is underdeveloped for the controller, leaving me with a sense of poor design, given that the game was made for PC a number of years ago, that would be where I would advise you play it. If you are a fan of survival games, but want more than just exploring the world, this is a game you should look into, just be wary of the fact that you might sink, long before you can swim.

The Score

8.0

Review code provided by Bandai Namco

The Pros

+A world that is teaming with life and demands to be explored

+The story has enough intrigue and character development to draw you in…

The Cons

-… but it is at odds with the pace that the gameplay is offering

-Base building is perhaps to complex a task to complete with a controller