Initially i really liked Subnautica and even gave it 4 stars. They have created an interesting world with its own creatures and history. Progress comes from technological development mostly gained from scanning the remains of items. The story is unique although it seems unlikely you would be able to complete it without looking things up. Especially at the start things are great, you have a good sense of development and every 30 minutes or so you get a new radio message sending you somewhere.

And then it just fizzles out. No more messages. Very little technological progress. And because you really want a single base to hold all of the different building materials, you see the same environment constantly. You start to wonder how exactly you're meant to cure yourself. The locations you need to enter are so hard to find that even knowing where they are you might easily miss them.

The oxygen things starts getting on your nerves. Then you hit the depth limit of the Seamoth ship and decide to switch to the Prawn Suit mech. And then you get stuck somewhere deep down. You don't know how to get out, you can't look up and warpers constantly nag you. Ugh.

So you go online and look up the location of the compass blueprint, because for some reason a lifeboat doesn't come with a compass. And you look up where the last Cyclops wreckage is, because the spaceships computer doesn't hold every blueprint imaginable for some reason.

Next up you have to sit through the awful Stalker Teeth farming. They're predators who pick up metal wreckage and attack your ship. Once every 10 or so hits their tooth breaks off and you have to find it somewhere between all the plants. After that you look up where to find X other material you haven't found yet. And finally you can build the ultimate ship, the Cyclops. But when you build it and it drops into the water, for some reason your Seamoth is destroyed and nothing remains, not even the upgrade parts in the separate compartment.

You sigh but you start exploring with your Cyclops/Prawn Suit. The ship is clumsy, overly big and doesn't really function as a mobile base because you can only build small upgrades. The mech suit is still slow and clumsy. You still have to return to your main base to build stuff. It all wears you down. There's no map. There's no auto-pilot. There's no fast travel outside of dying (you respawn in the nearest base).

I finally quit when i had to return a bizarre deep seabase to find an alien key. For some reason even though all the compartments are connected part of the base could only be accessed from outside and i had missed it both times i was there. A squid-monster approached and disabled my lamp a few times with EMP. That was fine. But then for no reason it attacked my Seamoth. The squid attacks electrical sources but my ship was turned off so it made no sense.

I had finally caved and gone through the tedious process of rebuilding it from scratch, including the annoying upgrading. You can't just gather the required materials for X Level 3; you have to make X Level 1, upgrade it to Level 2 and then to Level 3. And each of these will require Material W to be combined with Material Y to make Material Z. It easily takes 10-15 minutes just to gather all the components before you can make the ship.

I just watched the rest of the story on YouTube. They're making an expansion and i really hope they make huge quality-of-life improvements because this game really needs them. If i have sonar i should have a map. If the spaceship has an auto-pilot so should the ones in the water. And if you give my 10 different items to use, give me more than 5 quickslots. And let me put the first aid kit in one, for fucks sake.

I never found underwater levels in any game fun. They often share the same gameplay quirks: sluggish character movement, a diminishing oxygen meter and agile underwater enemies to keep you in constant motion. In fact, many games treat water as a deterrent to keep the player from wandering too far out of bounds. Subnautica is one of the few exceptions where I found the underwater traversal and exploration fun. Unfortunately the game is a massive time-sink and a buggy mess.

The premise of Subnautica is that you are a survivor of the spaceship Aurora, that has crash landed on a mysterious watery planet. The goal is to survive by harvesting the local resources, find help and eventually escape.

At my first glance, Subnautica looks like yet another survival crafting game with an underwater twist. But then it dawned on me that there is more that you can do than just survive. You can visit the wreck of the Aurora. You craft vehicles to explore the ocean in greater depths. And then you eventually encounter a mysterious alien building situated on a remote island. There IS a story in Subnautica and the game CAN be finished; but when and how you do it, is completely up to you. The game grants players a tremendous amount of freedom but unfortunately it is much to the game’s detriment.

My first 5-6 hours with Subnautica was a blast. I was crafting better and better equipment. I was constructing my own remote sea bases to make storing and fabricating goods more convenient. And I had constructed the Seamoth, an underwater vehicle that allowed me to traverse previously unreachable biomes filled with unique creatures, ores and plant life. Then I stumbled onto a brick wall, I no longer had any new things to craft.

There are not enough clear objectives in Subnautica. Outside of following the distress signals, visiting the wreck of the Aurora and exploring the alien structure, I had no idea where to go. I had to read through reams of text in the in-game logs to learn that I had to visit two facilities deep below the surface. It’s unusual why the game doesn’t make this more transparent. Even though I have now ascertained this information, I didn’t have the proper vehicle to venture deeper. I knew I had to construct a submarine called the Cyclops, but I didn’t know where to find all the blueprints. There is no map in Subnautica, so even following a walkthrough doesn’t help that much. After eventually gathering all the blueprints to construct the submarine there is the hassle of finding all the necessary materials to fabricate it. I had to build several Scanner Rooms to find the requisite ores. I wasn’t having fun with the game anymore and this whole process felt like mindless busywork.

To pour on more salt into the wound, be prepared for a ridiculous amount of backtracking (unless you are following a walkthrough). I have encountered multiple occasions where I have reached a destination only to find myself having to travel all the way back. The game tends to gate areas with specific tool and item checks but gives no indication about bringing them until you’ve arrived. The game can also become punishingly frustrating in the late game. I wasted several hours because I didn’t adequately prepare the Cyclops with enough surplus batteries and was forced to resurface.

Despite all of these time-sinks, I was still immersed with Subnautica because exploring the different biomes was genuinely exciting. I marveled at the luminescent mushrooms, panicked when I encountered creatures as large as the submarine and was thrilled when I finally reached the deepest levels of the planet. Unfortunately my immersion was completely broken because of the game’s multitude of bugs.

Subnautica was released in early access in late 2014, officially released in early 2018 and I am playing the game now in 2021 and this game is still buggy! Given the vast open world of Subnautica, I expected some “open-world jank” that is typically found in other open world games. I experienced creatures and fauna clipping through the terrain and odd UI issues where my screen would get partially obscured if I was too close to a wall. But then I encountered even worse bugs. The game constantly reminds me that my sea bases are running out of power even though I’m over 1000 meters away and not exactly planning to return to them soon. I would get immediately killed if I exited the Seamoth at full speed. The Prawn Suit would sometimes get stuck in the terrain which requires a full restart to fix. But the worst bug I’ve experienced was a Sea Dragon Leviathan that clipped through the second to final room in the game. I’ve tried restarting the game but it would still be there. I had to carefully walk past the room, hoping it didn’t immediately insta-kill me and then save each time I crossed the room (which you need to do multiple times).

Subnautica by all means is a wonderful crafting and exploration adventure. It is one of the best underwater exploration games that I have played. The game is also extremely buggy, not intuitive and a massive time-sink. Subnautica is one of the few games that I think few would want to play if they couldn’t follow a walkthrough or search for something online. The game simply does not provide enough clear objectives and instead relies too much on the player to eventually stumble upon the solution. Subnautica is a great game if all you want to do is craft and build the ultimate sea base. However, Subnautica has problems if you are planning on actually finishing it.

Subnautica is a lush and gorgeous underwater world filled with discovery and (some) terror, and even if navigating the world and its resources can be a bit unintuitive and dull at times the majority is a thoroughly engaging survival experience.

The game starts with a survivor of a rocketship crash on an alien ocean planet - at first survival odds seem grim but a spare base with a variety of useful tech is available. Only by building more upgrades and exploring the crash, the depths, and elsewhere can the player figure out what to do to get off the planet.

Along the way the player will start by harvesting resources and setting up food and medical supplies - flashlights, repair tools, laser cutters, and other such things will be necessary, and eventually the player will create vehicles and whole bases to explore further. While the QOL upgrades are MOSTLY amazing every time the player gets them (save for that cursed power hog Cyclops), the player will have to blindly explore a bit (or hit the wiki!) to get their bearings. Luckily things like food and water are close by but once the player starts having to find special wreckages in order to unlock key upgrades it becomes a lot more difficult to find one's way. Apparently there were also supposed to be beacons to better mark placements in the world (no map!) but my world did not have any present. Luckily the game is only minorly buggy and instances like these were relatively far and few in between.

Scanning is the real bread and butter of Subnautica. Need to know more about the world? Advanced theories on mysterious aliens? Need a reward for getting close to the jaws of a terrifying leviathan and live to tell the tale? Learning via scans is not just key to progression but allows the player to better engage with the world around them.

And what a world! Whether it's mysterious mushroom forests, comfy seas of kelp or the bitter radioactive wasteland around your ship there's plenty of places to go and things to see. Leviathans and other nefarious enemies help keep things tense and terrifying, as the darkness looms in many places. Subnautica is gorgeously rendered and while it may require a high end PC to run smooth it shines when it does. Music is very ambient, with the right amount of light techno to keep it high tech and lots of cues to match sweepingly large ocean vistas.

Progression can consist of some hills and valleys - while upgrading the tech can feel really nice in this game (solar powered batteries! Jetpack on the prawn suit!) there can be a lot of fetching necessary for materials and unless the player has a real creative streak the resource management can feel a little repetitive and menial. For the creative though this can be a five star game as bases can be built nearly anywhere and there's a whole variety of units, rooms, and cute chairs that really allows the player to customize the environment if they're willing to fork over the materials required. For those focused on the action-adventure progression part there's also some very interesting things that can be found deep in the ground with enough depth upgrades (and water bottles!)

Overall Subnautica requires some patience and mild bewilderment as it's very difficult to find one's way in multiple places but exploring a rich world filled with terror, wonder, and genuine delight is totally worth the journey! There's also simpler difficulty modes for people overwhelmed by the resource management, but I assure you that most of the design makes sense when you're looking to secure your next meal and survive the next leviathan encounter...

Played on PC in 4K (I bought a new GPU!). I’ve heard a lot about this game before playing it (nothing too spoiler-related, mostly about how good it is), but this game kind of surprised me by how much I was hooked.

The gameplay loop at the beginning-middle of the game is perfect: search for resources, listen on your radio for escape pod locations, search for them, repeat. The biomes are interesting and there’s a lot of diverse creatures/plants to explore and read about. I was actually interested in reading the scan logs for everything, and the world feels fairly alive.

The best part about the game besides the early gameplay loop is definitely the terror that comes from exploring. When it’s dark, I would become so tense that a peeper hitting my seamoth would make me jump. I’ve never really played a horror game to completion before, but this one was interesting enough to keep going.

I’d argue that the last 1/3 of the game is a bit less engaging than the first parts. Once you have all the ships, you have less to actually achieve in terms of unlocking things to build. The areas you explore are near (especially the last area), although the caves are lit up fairly well, taking away a lot of the surprise fear factor. The game’s story is pretty damn good (and relatively subtle, not always in-your-face), so getting to the end is fully worth it.

Overall, Subnautica is a must-play for survival fans. I can’t say the game didn’t annoy me with the handful of bugs I encountered, as the game has a fair lack of polish overall, although the rest fully made up for it. 4/5

Look: 8/10 Beautiful skies and water. They definitely created a world that truly feels full, robust, and "real." Some glitchy aspects, but nothing too bad. I'm usually not a huge fan of first person games but I got used to this quickly.

Sound: 8/10 Nice variety of jingles. Good sound effects overall, especially the creatures and alien machinery/moments.

Play: 8/10 I love the grind aspect of the game. If I could just collect Bladderfish and make water all day I'd be happy to just survive. But of course, you have to do more than that and there's an end to the game and my viewers didn't want me just doing Freedom or Creation mode, so I had to deal with building Oxygen Tanks and then the big ship exploded (and all my viewers messed with me saying I already lost the game). Biggest barrier for me was the sheer amount of info I needed. I think this would be best played first just exploring in Creation or Freedom mode, gathering info for fun, then playing to win. Without a wiki or map or viewers to help me, I likely would have dropped it--but with at least one of those helpers, this is a fun, thorough game.

Feel: 8/10 There was so much more for me to learn, like hatching Creature Eggs, exploring parts of the map I never went to, and bringing a bigger fuller base. There are ways to mess with the big monsters, even kill them, etc. But my focus was just on surviving and beating the game! Haha. Great ending and subtly building plotline with the "mommy."

Attachment: 8/10 The Time Capsule was a cute idea. I am not positive that I would return to this, buttttt given enough time, I think I would come back to build a bigger base, explore more since I didn't even go to the Dunes or other areas, maybe replay it now aware of what I'm doing haha and pay more attention to the story and radio messages etc. Not a favorite game per se, but I love the grind aspect, only got frustrated by the sheer size of info needed (lots of reading heh, best to play such games offstream/when not feeling like I'm supposed to be entertaining haha) and the oxygen/food mechanic, and liked the feeling of "leveling up" with better Oxygen Tank etc to alleviate those frustrations.

Completion: Main Story Playtime: ~25 hours

I first played Subnautica last year, on the Nintendo Switch, and I was strongly considering giving it a 1 Star rating with the clarification that the review would be focusing entirely on the port job. The game barely functions on the Switch, and though I was initially drawn in, the issues became too much of a burden for me to truly enjoy it, and I gave it up about halfway through.

Now that I’ve finished it on the XBOX X, I have a very different experience under my belt. The game is still very buggy and still has massive flaws in the way it’s draw distance and resource generation works, but the game ran so much better that I was able to look past its flaws and enjoy it for its core nature. And I loved it.

I’m not a fan of open world games, but Subnautica feels like an open-world game designed without the significant influence of the wider genre. It’s hard to pin down exactly what I love about the game so much because it excels at almost every aspect.

The setting, feel, and even traversal of the game are so unique and fresh simply by virtue of the developers adhering to its central premise so much. You are the survivor of a space ship crash that lands on a planet in the middle of an ocean, and you have to survive, gather resources, and eventually build a ship to escape. But it’s that setting that is the important one: the ocean. There are parts of the game that take place above water (for which I am grateful, if I wasn’t able to build my base above the surface and get some sun I would probably be too depressed to complete the game lol) but by and large it takes place exploring a world that feels 10x more alien than almost any I’ve experienced in a game before, because it’s based on a world right here on Earth that feels more hostile and strange than outer space. The map is fairly small, being around 2x2 kilometers, but since all of that space is 3D, with sections of the map dropping all the way to 1500 meters below sea level, it feels unbelievably vast. I’ve completed the game and there are large areas I haven’t explored or done more than set foot in.

There’s no map or even, initially, a compass to traverse by, and if you go above water you have exactly one landmark to orient by, the massive crashed spaceship visible from anywhere. In order to learn the landscape, you have to be thorough and set up a network of beacons you can use to navigate by, making every new trip out one of legitimate discovery and mystery.

This game is also, frankly, terrifying. I have an almost complete inability to be scared by media. I can count the number of horror films that frightened me on one hand, and all of them I saw when I was a teen or in my early twenties, with nothing else ever reaching that point again. There were multiple nights after playing Subnautica that I couldn’t sleep for seeing the distant, ambiguous form of a sinuous sea monster glimpsed through dark water, just on the edge of vision, every time I closed my eyes.

And yet, eventually, as you push on and gain greater and greater technology to push back against the overwhelming nature, that fear drains away in a very satisfying manner. Subnautica has hands-down the best crafting system tech tree I’ve ever experienced in a game. At the start, you are in an extreme underdog, clinging to the safe shallows surrounding your fallen life pod, constantly coming up for air, searching for food and fresh water and the resources needed to craft more batteries to keep your tools up and running. As you discover new blueprints for technology scattered around the map and the new resources needed to craft them, your problems slowly become manageable, then negligible, until you feel like the king of the planet instead of a scared and helpless castaway.

ather than being basic numerical upgrades, the unlocked technology in Subnautica fundamentally alters the way you interact with the world, to the point that your basic mode of play, traversal, and interaction changes multiple times over the course of the game, all through an organic process. The game’s commitment to simulationist realism of place adds a lot to this. The game never cuts, either for loading or for abstraction. The game’s vehicles aren’t something to be dropped in and out of, summoned at will, but remain physically exactly where you put them, letting you swim about and peer in the windows, walk around inside, and operate everything that needs to be operated by physically moving to it and accessing it directly. It’s hard to explain, but it feels so much more like being in a place than any other game I think I’ve ever experienced. There are so many times where I wondered what to do about a problem, only for the solution to be the actual physical action I would have needed to take in reality rather than some gamey abstraction. Granted, sometimes this illusion breaks spectacularly in the form of the games many bugs and glitches. Such as the time I attempted to remove a bunch of energy draining leeches from the hull of my submarine with a repulsion cannon, only to have it somehow blast the lockers I had placed inside the submarine out onto the ocean floor, still full of all of their tools and resources I had stocked them with. I chose to reload rather than go through the chore of relocating them all, lol.

The story of Subnautica is one of it’s biggest selling points, by virtue of it having an actual story with a well-paced, dynamic narrative carefully crafted within a wide open sandbox survival game. It is a quintessentially video game kind of story, one told with almost no dialogue or character interactions, purely by gating progression in such a way that the game gradually narrows in focus as you advance, leading you from the sensation of having zero direction to following a distinct final act with exciting and intriguing ups and downs.

I’d heard from many others that the game becomes tedious and dull in it’s latter section, but I found this to be almost the opposite. I loved the beginning of the game, but it really started to feel special and interesting towards the end, and I find the back half to be the most compelling section, at least having only played it once. Advice for those who want to have a good time at the end and not feel like it’s a list of chores: Work on building up your rocket ship gradually over the course of the game. It gives a great sense of accomplishment to see it towering over the horizon, and it will keep you from having to do a bunch of resource gathering right at the end. When it comes time to gather the resources for the Hatching Enzyme, you can get all 5 pieces in like 20 minutes by just utilizing the teleporters present in the Containment Facility where you are given the objective in the first place. For me, I would say it is the middle section that drags a bit, when you’re past the point of bare bones survival but haven’t yet been given any real direction towards the conclusion.

As the title says, everyone already knows this game is great. It’s made a huge splash in the gaming community, and I probably can’t say anything about it that hasn’t already been said. But if you’re like me and don’t play on PC and have missed the game so far, grab a copy on a modern console and you’ll have a good time. Just save often.