Subnautica Review: Taking A Deep Dive

Story

A deep-space vessel called the Aurora crash lands on the alien planet 4546B during its maiden voyage. The lone survivor of the crash, Ryley Robinson, must collect resources and face the hostile alien wildlife to survive. Over the course of his exploration of the mysterious water-world, Ryley uncovers another crash from ten years prior and discovers a mysterious illness afflicting the animals. Neither crash turns out to be an accident and if Ryley has any hope of being rescued he'll first need to find a way to treat the illness that threatens all life on 4546B - including his own.

Gameplay

Subnautica is a survival game with four modes that will effect the difficulty:

• Survival: Health, hunger, thirst and oxygen have to be managed. Certain items are removed from the players inventory upon death.
• Freedom: Identical to Survival, but without hunger and thirst.
• Hardcore: Includes permadeath - save file is deleted.
• Creative: All depleting characteristics are removed, all blueprints are unlocked, and the player can craft without needing resources.

During the normal survival mode the player will need to surface for oxygen, or enter a base or vehicle with an air supply. A unique and welcome feature (originally a bug) causes the screen to slip into darkness just before the player drowns, essentially giving the player a few extra seconds to reach a safe zone. Like most survival games, food will need to acquired from catching small fish and drinkable water will be obtained with filtration systems.

Use materials gathered from the environment or grown in an aqua-garden to craft new, better gear.

Necessity spurs the player forward, forcing you out of the safety of the reef into ever deeper, darker, more dangerous water. Different materials are found at different depths and in different biomes, as are the blueprints needed for new tools, vehicles, and items. Deeper depths in turn require new ways of dealing with the crushing water pressure and new sources of energy will need to be found the further away from the sun the player dives.

Left: The Cyclops submarine can be used as a portable base. Right: Vehicles can be damaged and if not repaired, utterly destroyed.

Armed with just a knife, the player is very much at the bottom of the extraterrestrial food chain, having few ways of fighting off the angry alien animals. Instead the game encourages the player to work around - not against the wildlife, such as turning off lights around creatures attracted to them or swimming around (not over) the mushroom-like structures eel-type creatures call home.

The wildlife can be scanned to learn more about it. The player may even find a pet.

Subnautica does not have a map, forcing the player to instead use the Aurora as a point of reference, aided by a compass and markers to get around. Radio signals prompt the player into exploring the wider world, but for the most part the player is largely left to figure things out on their own, whether that's through observation or scanning things for info and reading the data pads, the game wants the player to feel like a survivor in an unknown land.

Above water is were the experience sours because movement on the two explorable islands is sluggish and tedious. Although, I like to think Ryley just forgot to take his flippers off. There are also several biomes underwater that I hardly spent any time in because they were barren wastes with nothing of interest, or because resources there were so sparse that there was no way to feasibly build a base without hauling over resources from a more bountiful biome. One solution to encourages more visitation to these more remotes areas would be to have the fauna unique to the region, such as the Sea Treader Leviathans, provide an essential resource unobtainable anywhere else.

There are also numerous performance issues and bugs throughout the game - frame-rate drops, infinite loading screens, crashes, save file wipes, and terrible texture pop-ins when the character's mobility outpaces the game's ability to load assets. As of patch 1.12 (3 years after the official release) the game is relatively stable but still not without issue.

 

Conclusion