Subnautica: Below Zero Review

You know I never thought that after being emotionally traumatized by the water levels in Sonic as a child, forever to hear the damn warning chime in my nightmares, that I would end up so deeply enjoying a game that all but capitalizes on that very trauma. Subnautica made an incredible splash when it first showed up in early access, but the game really came into its own after its post-1.0 release and became one of the pillars of the survival genre. It wasn’t exactly a smooth development, but the result was great in spite of the rocky ride. If Minecraft was on one end of the survival spectrum where story and characters are nonexistent to background noise, Subnautica represented the opposite end with story and characters being an integral part of the experience and a driver of the exploration and survival itself. Subnautica Below Zero would start its own journey on the heels of its predecessor’s success, and despite yet another rocky development, its 1.0 is here. The question is, did Unknown Worlds capture lightning in a bottle twice?

I’ll save you the suspense: Subnautica Below Zero does not live up to the original, and your enjoyment factor is going to largely depend on what you’re looking for in a sequel to Subnautica. That doesn’t necessarily mean the game is bad, so don’t get the wrong idea. What it does mean is that diving into Below Zero might not be as cut and dry as it might seem. Let me do my best to explain.

When I asked a number of Subnautica fans what they loved most about the first game, by far the most common points were exploring the unknown, seeing the diverse biomes, and discovering what was really going on with the planet. The real draw of Subnautica was in its environments and the exploration of them. Biomes were diverse, threats were nearly everywhere to keep you on your toes, and the mystery of the world kept you wanting to dive deeper and deeper to discover its secrets. When I asked those same people what they were hoping to get out of Below Zero, the answers were nearly identical. They were hoping for that same experience of the first and were eager to get those feelings all over again. For those who had completed Below Zero, I asked if it lived up to those expectations. Out of the dozens I got to talk with about their experience, only two people said that it did for them what they had hoped for. For those people, there was a specific reason for this and it’s here where we can really start.

You play as Robin, a xenologist and sister to Sam, a roboticist for Alterra Corporation. Robin wasn’t so keen on the job, and her feelings don’t seem to be misplaced as Alterra sends her a notice of Sam’s death in an unfortunate accident. Not being given more information than that, Robin sets out to get answers for herself and grabs a shuttle to the planet. Because this family is apparently cursed, Robin’s shuttle is hit by a meteor and subsequently crash lands in Sector Zero – conveniently the zone where Sam was working. Robin then finds the Dop Pod and gets her bearings before starting her search.

Subnautica Below Zero’s first challenge is that it takes place on the same planet as the first game, despite being…colder above the water line. If you played the first game, you are going to feel at home almost immediately which is, in my opinion, not a good thing. Your surroundings will look surprisingly familiar, and your tasks will be the same. Build a knife. Find and scan a habitat builder, a Seaglide, and maybe a flashlight. Craft those things. Explore a bit and find a place to build your base. Now start working on exploring more and deeper, hopefully finding the tech you need to go deeper as you do. This familiarity with environment really takes away a lot of the magic the first game had. Few of the biomes in Below Zero are truly unique experiences, with nearly all other areas looking strikingly similar to the original. You may find yourself a bit too at ease, too, as threats are far less prevalent in Below Zero.

Of course, you’ll be exploring above ground as well, and this time it’s pretty chilly out there. Instead of managing your oxygen as you would underwater, you’ll be managing your body temperature.  Early on, hypothermia will come on quickly and you’ll have to find shelter or another source of heat to stave it off. That could be a cave, certain species of flower, ground-level thermal vents, or later in the game simply…sitting on your open-air Snowfox. There’s not a lot of exciting stuff to see above water, unfortunately. While it’s always lovely seeing snowscapes in games, Below Zero’s is mostly bland with few distinguishing landmarks or features with frequent inclement weather making it even less likely you’ll be taking much of it in. It can result in some confusing navigation at worst and is a completely uninspired addition to the game’s environments at best.

Exploring these environments is made easier with the various vehicles you can build that will let you get where you otherwise couldn’t with just your two feet. This is where there are some minor divergences from Subnautica, as not all vehicles have returned, and some new additions have taken their place. The Snowfox is a new but horribly engineered hovercraft of sorts that falls apart if you sneeze in its general direction and is trumped by the Prawn Suit even on land for basically every scenario short of wanting to get killed faster. The Seamoth has been replaced by the Seatruck which also takes over much of the functionality that the Cyclops submarine provided. It can have various modules added to it to serve your needs whether that be a storage module, a sleeper module, a fabricator module, a docking module and more. The docking module specifically allows the Seatruck to haul around the Prawn Suit, which does make a return and has been made a bit easier to pilot. Sadly, the Seatruck manages to not be as user-friendly an experience as the Seamoth, while also not providing the ultimate utility of the Cyclops. In fairness, the Cyclops wouldn’t have really worked in Below Zero as the map isn’t quite suited for such a monster vehicle.

Sadly, the poor Cyclops would be like a bull in a china shop should it be dropped into the seas of Below Zero. Most of the biomes, and indeed much of the areas between the biomes are a snugger fit than the first game’s. I’m not sure what the exact comparison would be, but it feels like half the size of Subnautica’s map and maybe even a bit less. The map design is also far poorer than the original and so despite being substantially smaller, I found myself getting lost more easily and forgetting where certain biomes were in relation to one another. There are huge areas of vast nothingness to add to the confusion, and that’s not part of the ecological dead zone, either. Of course, you can use beacons to mark points of interest, and it’s recommended you do so, but you shouldn’t be relying on them to conquer poor map design so much as just making sure you don’t lose track of where that particular entrance to a cave is, for example. Don’t get me started on how we still have to rely on poorly hand-drawn maps instead of our PDA forming a proper digital map to work with as we explore. We can make entire structures and machines appear out of thin air, but we can’t piece together digital maps via exploration data.

Navigation is also hamstrung a bit by how location markers on your HUD are placed. Often it’s of the location itself and not an access point to the location. This can lead to traveling around in circles trying to find the one crack that lets you get under a reef shelf or other area to possibly snake your way down to where you need to be. That’s all fine and good, but there is at least one marker in particular that is tied to the main quest that unintentionally acts as a red herring. Going to the marker specifically does in fact result in finding something but if you didn’t go below the shelf to the actual location, you may miss what that marker is really pinpointing.

When you get relatively close to the entrance you are given auditory clues to let you know something is there, but if you’re like me and were in the area to collect something to craft with and thought you didn’t have the gear to go deep enough to explore just yet you can be seriously put off track of the main quest. That’s because without successfully finding that entrance and subsequently kickstarting that quest chain, you will have wasted your time with all the additional exploring you do in the meantime as it will require you to revisit those areas to trigger the next thing to do. You have no way of really knowing where you’ll need to revisit. Making matters worse, there are also time-based revelations that will only begin after completing that area, meaning if you don’t complete it early when you’re expected to it compounds your wasted time the longer you take. The entire driving mechanic of the main quest can be missed entirely too easily, and this was another common complaint I saw from many of those I talked with who played through Below Zero.

What about the story, though? Well, it’s a mixed bag. While the ending certainly has more oomph than the entirety of the story that comes before it, it’s not exactly a page-turner. What’s even more perplexing is that you don’t even technically have to see through to the end the storyline surrounding Sam to complete the game, which isn’t exactly done in a narratively subversive sort of way, it just…is. The world-building done in the first game is the bulk of what’s on hand for Below Zero, and the new characters introduced are entirely forgettable and serve no real purpose save perhaps a single interaction you observe via a recording that involves Sam which gives her some meagre development. While Subnautica’s world-building and storytelling was well integrated with the environments, it was far more suited to do so where Below Zero isn’t so lucky in that regard. That means that your experience of the story is mostly during exposition dumps only, and that means that you can go for extended periods not getting much in the way of story. Many of the tidbits you can pick up and read on your pad don’t do much to carry the gaps either, not that there’s a lot to flesh out in the first place. That’s because there’s only about 15 minutes worth of story in Below Zero as a whole, and only the very end provides a truly intriguing expansion of the first game’s narrative.

While it isn’t necessarily as in-depth as some survival games, base building is still very much an integral part of the Subnautica experience and the same holds true for Below Zero. You’ll need a place to store larger numbers of useful materials, upgrade and modify your vehicles, grow some food and more. Building your base hasn’t much changed from Subnautica but that’s fine because it was already a strong feature that didn’t need much tweaking. It could have used some love, however, in terms of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixing. Building bases that are at the water line in sections is still a bit wonky in that it’ll sound like you’re walking through water when in your base, and in the corners and next to windows you’ll have the water line sneak its way in. Some pictures you can put up on the walls don’t load their textures appropriately sometimes, and you will likely have the stairs to your base partially disappear on you if you have them, among other oddities. None of the bugs I encountered while building my bases, much like anywhere else in the game, were game-breaking – just either silly or annoying.

The rigidity of the building mechanic still leads to some frustrating moments when trying to work with the landscape around your base, but that’s likely only going to be a problem if you’re like me and build more needlessly complex base designs. I’d still love crafting stations to be able to pull from storage containers in your base or at least from those in the same multipurpose room, but again that’s a small gripe. We do get large multipurpose rooms this time around which is a nice addition, and control rooms allow you to manage and modify your base including its colours much like you can with vehicles. Powering your base is still more or less about just choosing one power source and running with it, which begs the question why there are so many options for powering a base that barely needs any power. Overall, I still feel like Subnautica’s base building strikes a fantastic balance between the flexibility of design and overall user-friendliness that can result in awesome-looking, functional bases without needing an engineering degree – I just would have liked them to polish the experience up a bit more given it hasn’t really evolved in any appreciable way.

Look, I understand that it’s challenging as an indie developer to put out a game like Subnautica and then be expected to one-up it or be able to capture that which the original did despite a rocky development. I know that monetarily speaking, any time you can reuse or upcycle assets for use in another game it’s incredibly useful and financially a smart decision. When I finished Below Zero, however, I felt like I had just finished a game that should have been an expansion to the original that got begrudgingly stretched to attempt to make up what could be called a wholly stand-alone game that they could charge the same price for. There is just no way that Below Zero is worth the same price of admission as Subnautica based on what’s being given here.

So where does that leave us, then? Well, what my experience taught me was that Subnautica Below Zero is likely for one of two groups of people: those who are ok with repeating largely what they did in the first game almost beat for beat within an environment that’s equally as similar, and those who haven’t played the first game but are more interested in the story and/or scope of Below Zero. It’s a great-looking and sounding game (minus maybe the mildly suggestive eating and drinking sounds) and is certainly more polished than the first in this regard, especially in terms of stability. The music is perhaps more easily forgotten than the firsts, and the environments as mentioned before aren’t as inspired or unique but the art style is still just as praiseworthy.

For those who were hoping to recapture the same feelings of exploration and the unknown that Subnautica gave them, it’s a bit of a tougher sell. It’s even harder to recommend still, as they are charging the same price for both Subnautica and Subnautica Below Zero where the first is demonstrably more substantial and well done. In fact, there’s a good chance that a great number of Subnautica fans would be just as satisfied watching the story beats on YouTube and replaying the first game if they need to scratch their Subnautica itch. While Subnautica Below Zero is not a bad game, it is not something to be recommended universally, either – even for fans of the original. A thin layer of story spread over an experience that is far too similar to Subnautica doesn’t do much more than respectably get the job done, making Subnautica Below Zero ultimately feel like a missed opportunity.