Subnautica: Below Zero Review

Published by Ryan L at April 7, 2022

Travel through the frigid wastelands of the glacier above ground and dive deeper to depths and caverns rich in aquatic flora and encountering dangerous fauna in search of your sister in the hauntingly-beautiful Subnautica: Below Zero!

Introduction

Subnautica has produced one of the most unique open-world survival experiences the genre has ever seen.

Rather than just dropping you off in a middle of a forest with nothing but your fists and quick-thinking intuition to barely get through the first few days of ensuring your survival, the developers at Unknown Worlds Entertainment turns the genre on its head and instead just puts you in a burning escape pod moments away from crash-landing into the middle of the ocean and being next to the ship that you were just in not too long ago and being right at the doorstep of a radiation-contaminated zone around it.

Oh, and half the ocean’s out for your swimsuit-clad behind as fish food.

Calling Subnautica one of the most horrifying experiences I ever had in an open-world survival game would be an understatement. The open-world survival genre set in the great blue sea with many undiscovered horrors lurking deep below us is a genre that has never been explored before, and poses a new set of challenges to even the most basic tasks to get the players to set up a barebones base of operations.

The astronomical rise in popularity that Subanutica has gained during its beta and full release also sparked other new open-world survival games taking place in a similar setting, albeit a much more grounded experience, with Raft placing you in a tattered wooden panel floating in the middle of the ocean and using what little objects you can procure around your surroundings and crafting them to create a self-sustaining utopia to live out the rest of your life in the open ocean infested with sharks.

But none can hold the candle to the original Subnautica, and the 2021 sequel sparked an immense amount of hype for the next chapter in surviving in the deep ocean once again. Unknown Worlds Entertainment recaptured the experience of the first Subnautica game and turned everything all the up to eleven to make a survival experience that not only makes you feel like the little fish in a big pond, but as the little fish in a rich ecosystem brimming with life.

The Story

Usually in open-world survivals, there isn’t a concrete storyline that drives the player to survive for their lives in a completely unknown world that is otherwise rich in some sort of lore put together by the developers. Games like Minecraft just drops you off in the middle of nowhere and you instinctually start punching trees to make some rudimentary tools and build a makeshift dirt shack for the next few nights, while some games give you a single focused goal to keep pushing you towards the endgame such as The Forest where you have to find and save your son from a cannibal tribe and Outlast, where you're an editor from a local newspaper and an anonymous source gives you a task and then promptly sending you to die in an abandoned lunatic asylum.

Subanutica: Below Zero improves upon the storytelling aspect from the first game, where instead of being thrust into the world and forced to survive and then discover what happened to the ship you’ve crashed from, Subnautica: Below Zero puts in the eyes of Robin Ayou, a scientist who is dead set of finding out the causes of her sister’s death moments after the events of the first game where the main protagonist flees the planet in a rocket.

Subanutica: Below Zero constantly pushes you to continuously improve on your survival situation in an effort to find out what truly happened in this vast world surrounded by water and ice. The experience is further enhanced with numerous pieces of dialogue that helps the player piece together the events of the lives of the previous settlers before you and giving you a bigger picture of the situation at hand, as well as the addition of another NPC you can interact with. A lone survivor on the planet who provides with some materials to help further your quest in uncovering the truth.

Subanutica: Below Zero expands the story of the unknown alien race that you also encounter in the second half of the first game. Similar to the first game, you will ultimately come across some alien structures and ruins at some point in your playthrough. But unlike the first game, the player is given some extra context of the civilization of these alien species and encouraging you to discover more about it.

Just as the world is rich in beautiful and dangerous aquatic flora and wildlife, Subnautica: Below Zero perfectly balances both sides perfectly by allowing you to further explore deeper parts of the oceans to scavenge for more rare materials and stealthily swimming around bloodthirsty predators and picking up bits and pieces of the main story quest at the same time to work your way to the end of the game.

Visuals

Unknown Worlds Entertainment definitely upped the visuals of the game by a significant amount. When you first look at the cold, drab and harsh plains of the glacier and then experiencing the deep caverns lit up by bioluminescent light, you can definitely tell the art team had a field day with creating rich and unique ecosystems in the land above and the waters below.

The icy wastelands and winds that cuts into the player’s body with coldness and shrouded in a thick mist adds a sense of danger and little to no chances of survivability if you stay out in the open for even a few more minutes, and in a distance, a red glow welcomes you to come closer and share its warmth to give you a fighting chance to brave the cold once more and giving you the energy to make the final push to your home base you’ve built on land.

And on the other hand, the underwater world deep in the ocean is a massive improvement to the first Subnautica’s open world. The wide and expansive ocean floor is still riddled with life more than ever and the rich kelp forests still towers over you, but the most memorable part of the game is when you start to dive deeper into the caverns and the unique biomes and ecosystems that it houses. Their own set of characteristics, flora, fauna, and color schemes give each and every one of them a completely unique ecosystem from one another. One cavern you enter can be overgrown with strong roots by an underwater plant with the water around it having a green hue from the chlorophyll, and another having large purple crystals that grow from all sides of the cave walls and lighting up the cavern in a beautiful violet light as a deadly creature is skulking around.

Often times, I have trouble remembering what I was doing in the first place and just floated around in the open water while admiring the structures around me. Not caring about my oxygen levels dropping. I still remember my first experience playing the original Subnautica where I had to psych myself up to go deeper into the caverns to grab a couple of rare materials for a piece of equipment, and the light from my Seamoth and other smaller plants being my only source of illumination to check for any dangers that lurk within. In Subnautica: Below Zero, I never once felt scared when entering a new biome and would just stop my Prawn Suit by the cave entrance and just take it all in.

I never found any of the new caverns and biomes to be terrifying just like the first game, but rather, hauntingly beautiful instead.

Playthrough Highlights

I’m going to honest with you here, I never actually finished the original Subnautica up until recently when the trailer for it came out last year. And in effort to get up to speed with the game, I forced myself to swallow my fears and headbutted my way through every living thing that tried to kill me underwater and finished my last playthrough within 8 hours.

If you have played the original Subnautica like I have before, then many of the mechanics will definitely feel right at home for you as it did for me. The crafting system remains largely the same as the first game with all of the ingredients and blueprints being at the places you expect them to be at to survive in the first few minutes of the game. Subnautica: Below Zero is the perfect game for those who are planning to dive into the underwater world of Subnautica for the first time, very early on you get a tool that will help you find a specific material that you need to complete an item.

In addition to that, there are a whole slew of vehicles that are newly introduced to Subnautica: Below Zero. The Prawn Suit makes a grand return and puts you back in the saddle to punch Leviathans in the late game, and the new Seatruck is the Cyclop’s replacement as a smaller, more mobile, and agile vehicle that allows you to add more modules and hauling your Prawn Suit to the farthest reaches of the ocean as your very own underwater RV.

On top of that, there is more emphasis on discovering landmarks and secrets in the glaciers on land this time as well as a new vehicle to traverse through empty plains in a short amount of time; The Snowfox. The arctic is filled with tame and dangerous creatures that holds some valuable materials you will need for more advanced items, and the introduction of the new Spy Pengling allows you to harvest materials from dangerous areas and even wildlife without conflict.

Customization of seabases still remain largely the same, but this time with more customization options than before. You can build workshop outposts to stash excess materials, a primary base of operations, a farm, living quarters (of which I named my mansion Fort Vodka, filled with bedrooms, a kitchen, a theatre, and an indoor zoo filled with kidnapped Penglings). The sky is pretty much the limit to what you can build underwater and on land.

One of the truly horrifying, but most memorable moments that I ever had was looking for Spiral Plant clippings when I was finishing my Seatruck’s final upgrade. Where do I find the Spiral Plant clippings? In the Ventgarden. Where do I find the Ventgarden? Inside of a freakin’ jellyfish with a forest inside of it. How do I get the Spiral Plant clippings from it? Well, it didn’t take too long for me to find out. I swam up to the jellyfish’s sphincter while bracing myself with terror and disgust, but only to have my fears melt away quickly and looked through the clear head of the Ventgarden in a bed of corals with sheer awe instead.

Overall Impressions

I had a blast playing this new arctic setting of Subnautica: Below Zero. The revamped visuals of the deep ocean still blow me away to this day and the story behind the alien civilization from the previous game is what kept me going to finishing the game.

Players of the previous Subnautica game will feel right at home when starting their first play through, and this sequel is one that I can recommend to newcomers of the game to pick the game up for themselves and experience a completely new open-world survival setting.

Subnautica: Below Zero is definitely a step above other open-world survival games with its expansion of the underwater world and lore in the universe, and an entirely unique gameplay that still hold true to its predecessor. A true gem in the indie games category.