Subnautica Below Zero Review - Why doesn't it hold up?

before we even get started i'm going to answer the questions you likely have in mind up front because this review will 100 spoil both subnautica and subnautica below zero if you liked the first game it's probably worth playing this one too despite 99 of this video being criticism of the game it's still a unique experience at a price point of only 30 dollars it isn't exactly a greedy asking price subnautica at its worst is still an above average survival experience so take that for what it's worth i will however say that below zero is considerably worse than the original game in every category but if you enjoyed the original you'll still probably want to play below zero before watching this video this is the farthest that i can take you on company space bucks robin you sure you want this the research isn't everything it is to me and sam you need to know what happened the meteor storm i can use it for cover from all tara's i'll eyes my way back the fated sequel to one of the most impactful survival games of all time and easily one of my favorite video games ever i was so excited when i heard about this game coming out that i bought it the minute it launched in early access but every time i sat down to play the game i couldn't shake the feeling that something about it wasn't working for me i knew that the sequel wouldn't have the same impact as the first game and i didn't go into it expecting that but even outside of that something about the game just wasn't working so why wasn't it working for me what what's wrong with it if we want to talk about what below xero did wrong first we're gonna have to talk about what subnautica did right welcome to 4546b enjoy your stay the original subnautica was a masterpiece of tension survival struggle and exploration i won't dwell on any one issue here because there's already a multitude of awesome videos explaining why and this video is likely going to be plenty long without needing to fully review the first game as well but we do need to contextualize the arguments here in subnautica you're a silent protagonist your ship crashes on an unknown world and it's up to you to figure it out armed with only a life pod a pda and a dream you're slowly drip-fed information about what happened and what's going on around you in searching for the other survivors you learn that you're completely alone your radio picks up signals from the other life pods but all the other survivors died shortly after impact every time you learn more about the world rather than becoming more comfortable with your surroundings you're given more reasons to be within the afraid 24 hours not all the survivors just died from wildlife some were intentionally killed your didn't crash it was shot down by a hostile race of precursor aliens and what's more the reason they shot you down was to prevent an alien bacterium on the planet from escaping which you're currently now infected with and have two weeks to live worse still the biomechanical terminators left behind to hunt out the bacteria know where you are and they're coming to kill you i won't beat that horse to death because like i said it's been done before but the tension of the first game i would argue was a non-negotiable part of its success in a sea of minecraft clones and soulless early access survival cash grabs games like the forest green hell and subnautica have solved the crucial problem with survival games which is making you feel like you're actually surviving something these games dealt with the problem by asking what if we made the player afraid of their environment fear will keep the local systems in line and that simple deceptively brilliant question single-handedly solved the pitfall of making survival games more interesting now it wasn't just a chore of filling a food and water meteor the actual act of survival itself was an engaging exciting activity now back to below zero a lot of the initial impact of synmatica was coming to terms with having to dive for resources and expose yourself to danger in a completely alien skill set no other game was quite like it so keeping the experience fresh for veteran players i thought would necessitate pulling players out of their learned comfort zone in some clever way and at first it looked like that's what they were trying to do you don't start out with a habitat builder you have to discover it later what's more almost all the technology you need in the early game is hidden inside cave networks that are maze-like and run fairly deep as well as hidden within the twisty bridges by him which asks you to dive a lot deeper unassisted than you normally would it's kind of clever actually you have to dive deeper into unknown biomes and your only source of air in these biomes are these oxygen plants so you just have to keep diving deeper and deeper and trust that there's air wherever you're going and risk drowning except that you quickly realize that there's so many oxygen plants in every biome that you're never in any real danger at all these plants also replenish very quickly so that in any area with more than two oxygen plants in it you can float between the two of them and never run out of air it doesn't wind up being very restrictive at all this is a problem for a couple of reasons firstly the illusion of danger only works when the illusion isn't broken which is pretty obvious giving players just enough air to get by versus giving them so much air they're never in danger it's a symptom of the larger issue which is that the game fails to properly handle tension in the way that the first game did we're still and we're going to talk more about this later this game isn't as deep as the original literally the deepest biome of the game only goes to about 900 meters so if you encourage people to swim 300 to 400 meters down you're using up a lot of real estate really early on the oxygen plant gimmick gets used a lot too all of the sea monkey caves the deep twisty bridges buy em again in the kappa mining site and in various other caves like the deep lily caves even the shipwrecks you explore are packed with oxygen plants where they really shouldn't have any reason to grow if you set up a source of tension and then immediately spoil that source of tension then what's the point it's gonna fail every single time it gets used so often that i just got tired of it oh another deep biome let me guess there's no danger just dive and find yep oxygen plants i was so tired of the scheme that when i got to the copper mining site i just forced my seat truck in through the doors where it's not supposed to fit because i was just tired of dealing with oxygen plants consider this you can build a system of tubes from the surface to carry air down into deeper biomes which is a technology that is rarely used outside of a couple of very niche speed runs it seemed like the perfect opportunity to force veteran players to say oh okay the game isn't going to give me a safety net i have to bring my own air down before i can progress and build their own air tubes but because the oxygen plants are everywhere it renders that technology redundant in possibly the only situation where it might have been useful in the first place all of that being said it would have been a really great idea and i think it still kind of works at first the best and only example of a success would be in the deep twisty bridges biome it's dark it's oppressive the music is hostile aggressive plants are on the seafloor and of the biome so as you attempt to avoid your first encounters with a dangerous squid shark you're likely to get grabbed on their way to the oxygen plant it was for the most part well executed and seeing this biome in the early access had me very excited to see the rest of the game but the developers many times in early access clearly stated that they wanted the game to be different for better or worse they made a number of design choices that intentionally moved away from the horror elements of the first game it's not that the game has to have a horror focus either but if you're gonna remove something that was so crucial to the original game's success it has to be replaced with something that can carry all of that weight and what it was replaced with was the story and that ultimately fails but we'll have to talk about that in its own section now don't misunderstand me my point is not that they misused oxygen plans therefore the game is bad because that would be very nitpicky and petty my point is that this is one of the few moments in this game that even attempted to use tension in the way that it was used in the first game and it ultimately doesn't work and as we move forward in the review you'll see how much more of a problem that becomes since the vast majority of the game contains no tension at all so when the few tense moments fail due to poor execution you feel it that much more and since you don't have that constant backdrop of tension to enhance the exploration everything else has to carry that weight and it doesn't let's compare map sizes first there's a noticeable difference in surface area the developers have confirmed that below zero is roughly one-sixth the size of the original map the maximum depth is also fairly shallow the deepest biome the game only goes to about 900 meters compared to the nearly 1 500 meters of the original game so there's clearly less to explore but you can definitely go for quality over quantity in a game like this except that i don't think that they did back to the map these areas here are land biomes and we'll talk about those later but underwater you've got the east and the west arctic the sparse arctic and the world edge which are all nearly identical empty biomes they almost look unfinished at times they're devoid of anything really interesting and the west arctic at least has jellyfish but that oddly makes it look even more unfinished like they just copy pasted a few hundred creatures to fill the space i mean just just look at it does that look finished to you or does it look like an otherwise empty biome filled with some visual noise the only reason i went to these biomes at all is because it was easier to find resource nodes due to how empty the biomes were beyond that you have the thermal vents which is identical to a biome from the previous game and the kelp forests which are just kelp bounds with a color swap so what you're left with for real new underwater biomes is actually very little so if even just a few of these don't really do it for you you're out of luck and like i said earlier the biomes don't really run as deep as they did before either so it isn't like there's a whole lot of extra biomes hiding underneath this there's a couple but not many just comparing the numbers here there's only 24 biomes in below zero compared to the 39 in the previous game now obviously we don't need for there to be 39 arbitrary biomes at below zero just to hit the number count but what's here isn't stellar either is the point since the land sections can feel more or less identical along with the underwater arctic portions being very samey and a lot of those biomes are technically just cave extensions of existing biomes so the real actual diversity in biome count is even less than it first appears if you can believe it but it's more than just the quantity of the biomes and i just want to stress that the argument is not that because there's fewer biomes that below zero is a bad game because as i've said the number of biomes is arbitrary and as long as the quality is there it should work but it isn't some of the biggest issues with the biome designs in this game are structural in the original many of the biomes are open air or open water in this case it was very common for the player to find themselves out in the open water not being able to see the bottom of the ocean from where they were leaving the imagination to fill in the gaps i'm sure we all had to change our pants a couple times after speeding along the surface to get to our first island with every time our heads bobbing below the surface we'd hear reaper leviathan screaming underneath it it was terrifying it gave a great sense of scale the biomes on the seafloor were also very open because they were scattered along the sea floor you often had quite a bit of water above you which was a constant reminder to how deep under the water you actually were the game also wasn't afraid to get completely pitch black at the bottom of the ocean or even at the surface at night this only further enhances the sense of scale danger and mystery you're not able to see the entirety of the biome you feel exposed wherever you are and it's difficult to fully survey the biome you're in at all times it also led to quite a few of those organic terrifying moments where you knew you had to go deeper to further the story so all you could do is just look downwards and hold w while they swear under your breath and hope you don't run into something in below zero the biggest change you'll notice immediately is the brightness there's bioluminescence everywhere even at night most biomes are perfectly easy to navigate between creatures plants and ambient light levels nothing is as dark as it was in the previous game so when you find a new biome you can see it all from end to end they're also not as deep not to repeat myself and because the north side of all biomes are flanked by the iceberg it has a way of making the biomes feel small and contained you're never going to get that feeling of exposure that you get from the first game the surface of the water is just never far away and there isn't much that you won't see on your first pass through a biome just to give you numbers nearly every important story discovery is only around 150 to 200 meters below sea level at most we're still once you're finished with some of the few surface biomes every other biome left in the water is a cave biome and they're all incredibly bright the brightness mixed with a confined space makes it all feel very safe and kind of bland honestly even when they're visually interesting like the deep lily pads gave there's no mystery in the biomes because the minute you look you see it all and you know you're not going to be ambushed or surprised by something because there's just not enough space for something to be hidden this is all made worse by the story and the way that the exploration is delivered to you but i'm purposely saving that for last we'll tie all this together at the end don't worry so just to quickly recap the map is smaller there's fewer biomes the biomes aren't as distinct or interesting their structure takes away from the feeling of exploration biomes are all too bright and because the map is much smaller all the biomes feel much closer too you're never gonna have to stock up for a long exploratory journey and build outposts around the map because everything is within comfortable reach which leads to a very bland experience the biome problem goes hand in hand with the biodiversity in this game or the lack thereof it's true that below xero has a lot of new creatures in fauna but you'll likely see a lot of the few hostile ones that matter all too often the old game had a problem with bone sharks being a little bit too frequent but you still had memorable enemies like the electric crab squids the ampoules the sea dragons reaper leviathans warpers enemies with very different attack patterns memorable sound effects and behaviors each new biome came with its own threats to assess and things to experience in below zero by contrast every biome was giving me a sense of deja vu and the deep twisty bridges i saw squid sharks and spiky traps which are those hostile plans in the deep lily pads i saw more squid sharks and spiky traps in the shallow lily pad biomes i found squid sharks and cryptosucus and cryptosucus i found outside of the crystal caves lily pad biome the copper mining site the purple vents biome i mean real they're everywhere they're packed into every single biome in the game and it's not that the game doesn't have a few more interesting creatures it's just that the ones that most directly interact with you are reused a lot in almost every biome and they're not nearly as memorable if a cryptosucus catches you it bites you if a telissary catches you it bites you if a squid shark catches you it bites you it's all very samey compared to the first game the old game had leeches that would stick to your face and slugs that would stick to your vehicle and leech their power and peels with electric attacks crab squids with their emp that would be attracted to lights warpers that could teleport you out of your vehicle and warp in hostile enemies to attack you even smart basic creatures that only just bite you had unique behavior like the territorial mushroom snakes or the sand sharks that lie and wait and ambush you so that the creatures that ultimately just bite you still felt very different because the rest of their behavior was different below zero doesn't do that or at least not nearly enough anyways the stalkers from the old game dropped their teeth if you gave them wreckage parts to chew on and you needed those teeth for enamel glass which was a cool interaction this game only really has c monkeys which have a chance to bring you some resources but beyond that there isn't much in the way of interaction which is weird since you'd think that they would double down on neat interactions like that if they were going to pull back so hard on the horror elements but the interactivity in this game actually feels a little bit worse it's a huge missed opportunity even the way enemies react to being hit is different bone sharks and ampules would strike back before fleeing if you hit them in this game everything runs as a rule when hit squid sharks chalycerates cryptasukas they will just run into infinity i was trying to kill a chiliceret one so i could farm and it swam off into the void and just never came back this is supposed to be this game's big dangerous leviathan and this is the direct result of them intentionally trying to move away from tension and danger rather than opening up the game to more opportunities for open-ended exploration and interactivity it gives you a really bland linear experience with enemies that don't fulfill their roles and biomes that fail to impress and the sound design is it's okay there aren't as many memorable creatures and calls the cryptazookas noises are fantastic and the chiller circuits have sound effects that wouldn't seem out of place at all in a silent hill audio library the problem with the sound is that while it is designed fairly well the volumes are all over the place namely cryptocircuses are just too loud you can hear them from three biomes away and if you know that they're in every single biome there's nowhere in the ocean you can go without hearing these things screaming at you i made it a point to kill every crypto circus i found in every early access playthrough and again in the final version just to keep them from making so much noise there's also just weird volume bugs where telisers and squid sharks would be quite a ways away from you but if they bite onto another creature the sound effect is right in your ear these were known issues in early access but they just didn't get ironed out i can recall precisely how crab squids warpers reaper leviathans and many other creatures from the original game sounded but there just wasn't as much room for memorable sound design here because there just isn't enough wildlife so moving on before we can move to the land sections we'll just quickly cover another smaller issue just because it's an underlying issue that adds to that background radiation of i'm not really enjoying myself and i'm not sure why which is the inventory management the old game had issues with this as well so mentioning it here is more me being disappointed that they didn't deal with it it's just a missed opportunity plenty of other games have the same issue but with sonardica because the items don't stack i'd say that you feel the tedium of inventory management a lot more than in other games to put it into perspective it took longer to build my base than it did to complete the entirety of the game's story content and exploration by a long shot granted my base is it's a little extra for a random dude given that most of it is just for show but the time it took wasn't because of how expensive it was was just the failings of the inventory management it didn't need to be that time consuming sorting out all the different kinds of resources and transporting them can be an absolute nightmare even with storage modules i feel like it can take a hundred trips to get any considerable amount of resources moved i spent ages farming with my sea truck and my prawn suit and every single trip it just felt like nothing was getting done and this is a petty complaint but every time you open the inventory robin whips out the pda in your face when you're quickly trying to craft a decent amount of stuff and then sifting through multiple inventories which you will have to do in order to keep things organized and just look at it it's something you'd think that they would want to try to keep at a minimum but they went the opposite way and made it even worse case in point is the c truck specifically look at the storage modules you'd think on paper okay great storage i can attach a full trains worth of inventory modules and comfortably move large inventories and farm with ease except that the inventories themselves are split into five separate lockers in each unit why all combined it only barely adds up to an inventory's worth of space anyways but now you have to interact with five separate interactable boxes to use it all it's tedious for the sake of being tedious and the name played on these lockers takes out the majority of the real estate here so you click the locker to open it instead you interact with the nameplate all your locker is going to be named gibberish because you're going to be mashing your keyboard trying to get out of the interface to then open the locker instead thankfully i had thought ahead and i built my starter base right next to where i planned to live permanently otherwise i'd have lost my mind again the original game had this exact same problem where base building felt way more punishing than it needed to be but then instead of streamlining it they wound up inadvertently making it more tedious it should have either had one large inventory or had the option to combine inventories it's just another missed opportunity to edit the pile since we're kind of on the subject anyways let's talk about the vehicles for a second the cyclops and the seamoth from the original game are gone and i might be in the minority here but i almost think this could have worked frankly the map is not large enough for a vehicle as fast as the seamoth and because most of the biomes are cave biomes and the cyclops is too large anyways and if we're being honest the cyclops and the bronze suit both trivialize the game to the point where it can almost ruin the experience replacing them with more dynamic vehicles with drawbacks would be the right choice and having less sturdy vehicles would place the player in more consistent danger rather than immediately feeling invincible except as we've covered they didn't want the game to feel dangerous so the prawn suit is still in and everybody knows that once you get a prawn suit you basically win the game it's just too damned good for what it is it's powerful it's fast it does tons of damage it has a huge inventory once you have the grappling arm you've even got better mobility than the other vehicles so on the one hand you lose the overpowered cyclops but then you get to keep the overpowered prawn suit i'm not sure what the point was the millisecond you get a prawn suit the game's over you can kill everything nothing can kill you it easily reaches the deepest depths and even protects well against ice worms you genuinely can't have tension at all in a game where the prawn suit exists especially since most of your tension is deflated due to it being a sequel and especially because there's already too little tension to go around replacing the seaboth is the sea truck and i actually kind of like the idea of the sea truck it's a seamoth substitute that's a little bit slower and a bit more vulnerable but with some increased utility to compensate you can attach fabricator modules storage modules and even a docking module to take your prom suit with you on trips so it's kind of like a cyclops light almost the only problem is it's awful it's too bulky for its own good and it's too slow you take a huge speed hit with every added module to the point where it almost renders the vehicle non-viable there is an upgrade that will reduce the speed penalty of having multiple modules to a degree but consider the full picture here let's say i want to go out and farm for resources in the sea truck i'd bring a fabricator to condense titanium some storage and a docking module for the prawn suit i'd have to pack food and resources some extra power cells and then make the journey all the way over there and as i'm farming i'll constantly have to stop empty the inventory of the prawn suit dump it into five separate containers in each storage module process the titanium in the fabricator go out and repeat until we're full of what is ultimately still not that much stuff then make the immensely slow trip home and then empty all 30 separate inventory slots and manually sort them into separate containers inside the base and so on and so forth it just feels really clunky there's no other word for it i kept stopping myself and thinking you know i'm getting more resources per trip but my hourly rates are terrible it would probably be faster for me to just turn on my scandal rooms at home and just hit random rocks which of course i tried and as it turns out it was faster mostly due to the fact that there is no shortage of resources in this game it's like they're encouraging you to build bases while also making it as painful as they can to do so this entire portion of the game is something that i really wish they had taken the time to polish rather than leaving it as is the sea truck by itself is fairly fast and agile as long as you don't have any modules attached and surprisingly it goes all the way to the bottom of the map once you have a few depth upgrades online in fact you don't need the prawn suit at all which is kind of a weird choice this game has a tendency to make a lot of its own technology redundant and because as we've talked about earlier you swim a lot deeper in this game with the oxygen plants and so on you'll likely have all the materials you need for your depth upgrades fairly quickly so rather than feeling like considerable portions of the map where locked behind depth requirements you can cover it all in just a couple trips it's another issue that just clashes with the quality of the exploration when you've already got so much less to explore you definitely don't want to make it even easier to explore it all and despite being a lot slower the c truck even sometimes with modules attached is still fast enough to evade almost every enemy in the game meaning that almost all of the vehicles still trivialize the game while also being clunky at what they're actually supposed to do it's the worst of both worlds the perfect example of that is the snow fox which also doubles as a segway into land sections of the game the snow fox is your new land-only vehicle it's a hoverbike you can use to explore the land portions of the game you can probably already tell this thing is a clunky piece of even if you just try to sit still and read your pda the thing's going to move around constantly so if you're prone to motion sickness i would think twice before even using it and weirdly for a hoverbike it's kind of bad at hovering you stay very close to the ground so even just regular travel will have you bumping into the floor and taking a lot of damage it's very difficult to control and it feels a lot bulkier than it is it's kind of tough to explain unless you actually drive it yourself but it's very annoying to use it's not at all the fast agile machine i saw in the trailers it can also only be crafted on a snow fox hover pad which has to be constructed on dry land so if you're playing a subnautica game and you have a c base like 99 of people do at this point you've got to find dry land to build on this is also the only location where you can charge the vehicle and it uses a lot of power so you have to return to your hover pad to charge it which also has to have a source of power it's just very clunky all the way around you can pick it up and carry it but it takes nine inventory slots so if you're gonna go on a land expedition on top of all the other tools and foods that you need you also need nine slots for your snow fox and another two slots for your robo penguin which you'll get to and because the snow fox itself is fairly small all the hitboxes for what you can interact with are overlapping if you want to swap your upgrades or ride the machine or pick it up be prepared to do the wrong thing a few times on accident you will inadvertently wind up picking up your snow fox every time you try to ride it i won't spend too much time on it just know that this machine is clunky and it did not feel good to use which is a problem because the land portions of the game really needed a good vehicle let's talk about the land biomes more generally i might be in the minority here but i actually really liked the idea of what they were going for in the original game islands operate as a peaceful escape from the terror of the sea it's always sunny and beautiful and filled with food they give you a chance to breathe and say yeah you know what i can do this i can survive and below zero tried for what i thought was a really clever inversion of that the surface is advertised as being almost more hostile than the sea in this game it's you've got fast brutal weather shifts with lightning storms and blinding snow hostile polar creatures and a freezing temperature instead of going deeper into the sea to progress the story like the old game you have to step on land and go further into the glacier subnautica strength was always its underwater exploration but i didn't think that the land portions were by default destined to fail and i was pretty excited to see it all in the final version i even made sure to build my base in a shallow portion of the ocean so i could put a nice little observatory above the surface so i could see the new sky boxes and weather conditions which look great by the way the biomes on the other hand look very samey but even if all the stony portions look you know snowy you still have a couple different kinds of caves and what not to explore it can definitely feel bland and i'm not saying they nailed it but i just wanted to make it clear that the land sections were not destined for failure it's still very possible to produce success here what ultimately winds up holding it back is the same flavor of failure that a lot of the rest of the game has where they commit to ideas that they probably shouldn't and fail to commit where they should most of the interesting weather patterns don't last long enough to ever be an issue i'll get a radio warning to get inside and shelter from the storm but by the time i reach shelter the storm is over i know they probably didn't want people to be stuck in caves for minutes at a time waiting for the weather to stop and as with everything they didn't want the game to feel as oppressive or scary as the first game but cutting those weather effects sabotages the experience i think half the time when i get a weather warning no bad weather even comes it had me wondering if the game was bugged at times but i think it was just gutted and then the few times we actually got a real weather event all i ever seem to get was just blinding snow which wasn't really dangerous was just kind of annoying the temperature feature is a non-feature as well part of me is almost relieved to see that because i've never really seen temperature handled as anything other than a tedious afterthought but it could have been used to gait certain levels of story progression behind your cold protection in the same way the death protection gates water exploration but it doesn't if you're inside a cave underground in the water have any kind of roof over your head your heat will fill the maximum there's also pepper fruit plants all over the surface everywhere you go which brought multiple peppers that give you food water and heat there's hot pools of water steam jets and the thermolily scattered around that also dispense heat it was giving me a little bit of deja vu you know the over abundance of oxygen plants under the water and the overabundance of heat sources on land both undermining whatever hostility their environments might have had additionally the act of exploring winds up feeling really terrible and that's a result of more than just a few different factors coming together at once the inventory management is that much more painful on land made worse by how the technology you need is given to you for example let's talk about the cold suit and the spy penguin we'll start with a spy penguin it's a little robot penguin that you can unlock and once it's crafted you can place it and pilot it remotely to squeeze into tight spaces robin otherwise couldn't reach it's uh i mean my whole question with this thing is why what is this thing even supposed to do let's ignore for a second that every single cave the spy penguin can get inside is actually large enough for you to crawl inside as well so this you know machine does a terrible job of justifying itself but the only stuff contained within spy penguin caves are the same resource you can get literally everywhere else and the machine can only carry four resources at a time so presumably like this is how it's supposed to work you are meant to take up an absurd level of inventory space for tools your snowflakes the pangling setup travel to a cave squat there like a clown and gather up resources from inside in increments of four while freezing to death and then walk it all the way home and repeat for what reason there's no resource scarcity anywhere on the map so there's actually only two reasons to ever build this firstly is to get snow stalker fur which is and secondly for a story bit that we'll have to get to later which is also the snow stalker fur is it's just a ridiculous mechanic you need the fur to build the cold suit so you have to make the trip all the way over to get on land to get a cold suit recipe then you have to go all the way home build a penguin go back get snow stalker for go home build your snow suit and then go back yeah technically you could bring a fabricator module with you on your seat truck but you'll also have to luck out and just have the other materials that you need on hand it's just tedious it's also just artificial cutting a snow stocker with a knife doesn't give you fur either and you can't just manually gather it even if the snow stock is dead you really do have to build the paneling it's the only way to obtain the fur besides finding it in certain caves it's just goofy then you build all that get your snow fox and try to cross the bridge to the interior zones but then you have to unlock and craft hydraulic fluid to fix the bridge so you've got like three or four back and forth trips built into the experience right off the bat which given that most people would already consider the land section to be fairly tedious by design it's just a really bad idea it's not great and you know they did try to make the land excursions more enticing but there's really no reason to be on land once you're done with a very very short story in this game yes there's tons of resources and resource veins but managing your inventory while keeping enough space for the snow fox and whatnot is a nightmare and if traveling through the sea for back and forth trips was tedious with the sea truck doing it doing it on land either by jogging it or just using a clumsy snowfox is twice as bad and it takes even more time making it less efficient you could maybe build an outpost on land and then farm from it but then you'd still have to transport it all below the sea eventually if you didn't want to live up there permanently so the negatives of inventory management come back to haunt you again while i praise the weather effect and some of the sky boxes the biomes up here can be roughly described as it's snowy and that's about it so there's not really enough interesting stuff up here for me to say okay i'm gonna build a base up here because once you've seen it you've kind of seen it the caves are nice i mean i did like those but again there's just not enough variety up here for me to keep it for me to stay interested at all so you've got tdm and how you explore it lots of back and forth trips to process all of your technology which further increases the tedium the weather and cold mechanics wind up being basically nothing at all and once you've finished your story elements there's nothing to keep you up here and it's not like there's much wildlife up here either so it suffers from the same lack of biodiversity and biome diversity that everywhere else does it was an area that could have been really amazing and is dragged down by a lack of polish in a million different areas which brings us to our second big source of tension or implied source of tension the first was the oxygen deprivation at the beginning and the second is the ice wart once you succeed in fixing the bridge that connects the various land portions you gain access to the ice spires biome inhabited by the gigantic ice worm that is all over the promotional material for the game it might surprise you to hear me after dumping all over the game but my first encounter with this biome was awesome and it's mostly because i did it wrong with all the back and forth and needing separate land base for the snow pad and etc etc i eventually just gave up on the tedium and said it and i went to the ice buyers biome without a vehicle i knew the ice worm was there because i could hear it was just a great job of building tension so instead of having a vehicle to support me i had just had to bring a whole bunch of flares a bunch of food water health kits and i just ran like a madman it was awesome it's just a huge open biome with a gigantic enemy worm popping up and attacking from all kinds of angles hearing it rumble through the floor and chase me through the whole biome you know i would duck in the caves hoping to catch my breath only to have it circle me and poke through the walls it was just constant stress and danger constantly having to stop and heal knowing that i was running lower and lower on supplies instead of being exposed out in the open water i was exposed out in the open air airborne with a leviathan i couldn't escape it felt like a smart inversion of what made the first game work it felt intentional but it wasn't and you can tell that it wasn't because if you go through this biome with a vehicle it's gonna 100 ruin it plenty of people obtain the prawn suit before getting into the ice woman it goes without saying that the prawn suit makes the entire encounter a joke but even with the intended vehicle the snow fox it winds up being so deflated the snow fox keeps your temperature at max somehow so the temperature issue is even more of a joke than it was without it the ice worm biome is not very large either so covering in one go is stupidly easy and you'll know where to go because you get a map that shows you the entirety of the biome yes a map in fact this game gives you two maps but we're gonna have to talk about them later so if you know where you're going your exposure to the ice worm is minimal and like most a vehicle encounters with wildlife even if it hits you he's gonna off and give you plenty of time to repair it before coming back and to be fair this is a problem the original game had as well where if you got hit enough by certain enemies the fear would wear off since you always knew you would survive it and you'd have enough time to repair the original game did handle it better though for one there were often a lot of hostiles in a biome many bombs had multiple reaper leviathans in it so if you escaped the clutches of one it was possible to get picked up by another or even the same one the chance and fear of real death was always present so even if you might not have actually been in any real danger you felt like you were which gives you the illusion of escaping just by the skin of your teeth every time a reaper lets you go in deeper biomes if a warper were to teleport you out of your vehicle you'd always be at risk of death if leeches drained your power or if your cyclops got stuck you could always drown in below zero though by over exposing the player to threats that prove time and time again to be hollow you desensitize the player if you go into this biome with any vehicle at all that's precisely what happens and it's terrible as well because and i genuinely thought that this was a bug in early access but it shipped live in the final version it still works this way if the ice worm surfaces it will knock you off of your snow fox and damage it regardless of where you are meaning it doesn't even have to hit you to deal damage so you've got zero visual feedback for that it feels like which only expedites that desensitization that i mentioned earlier not only is every encounter attack repair repeat but you've got the added layer of it feeling like because it didn't even hit you in the first place it just dismounts you no matter where you are you're already piloting a clunky piece of garbage and now you've got an enemy encounter that doesn't even feel like it's working as intended while also being made painfully aware of how not in danger you are and if it's snowing you can't even see anything it just adds to the tedium it's not great if you needed another reason to not spend much time on land this is it if you do stick it out though and explore you get the technology for thumpers which distract ice worms and an upgrade for the snow fox that reduces the encounter rate with ice worms so an encounter that deflates itself already when dealt with as intended winds up becoming even more of a joke due to the technology upgrades rendering it almost non-existent and i can't confirm it but when i first survived the ice worm a good year ago or whenever it came out it felt a lot more aggressive as well the footage you see now was gathered just recently even on foot just running in circles it seemed to very rarely attack me i don't know if they nerfed it or what but it's just it's it's just not handled well it's another excellent idea that could have worked but it doesn't do to the poor implementation and that theme of desensitization continues for the third and final major source of tension the deepest biomes in the game a bit of a change in scenery but picture this you're at the bottom of the ocean pursuing end game goals you haven't encountered much hostile wildlife in the sea there's only four leviathans totally in the other biomes so you're ready for some crazy and sure enough in the deepest biomes of the game you've got the largest leviathans they're darker they're hostile all you're gonna see at first is their glowing mouths from the sound of their cries it sounds great right we talked about it in the biome section but it really comes in at full force here it's too bright and the biomes are tight caves you're going to experience tension in these biomes for all of maybe two seconds before you realize that because the space is so small and the shadow leviathans are so large and their aggro radius is so huge you genuinely truly cannot avoid them it doesn't matter what vehicle you use they will catch you their aggro radius covers almost the entire cave so whether they see or not it doesn't seem to matter and if they get close enough to you it doesn't even matter if you're on the other side of a crystal or some other object you'll phase right through it and get chomped only to quickly realize that these leviathans only deal around 30 damage per bite meaning you're gonna have to get hit four separate times before your vehicle breaks and of course while there are four of them spread out in the crystal cave and the fabricator caverns they're so far apart that they don't overlap so there's actually no danger at all in this biome you will quickly learn that the best way to travel through here is to just walk get bit repair and then walk some more just take it on the chin it feels like a joke and because you got desensitized by the ice form before this you're already predisposed to being desensitized by these the difference in how below zero handles tension compared to the first is like night and day they really needed to ramp it up and instead it was held back at every opportunity because the developers chose to make it less intimidating where still if you get the perimeter defense module for your sea truck you can zap the leviathans off you the minute they go in for a bite which means they genuinely can't even damage you the big bad end game enemy designed to be intimidating left in its own unique biomes guarding the end game alien bases for the story and you can just flick a switch and keep them off you completely it's like spraying a cat to keep it off the counter i played through the original game many many times without ever really getting over my fear of the reaper leviathans but i wasn't even allowed to become afraid of the things in this game by contrast and for those of you wondering yeah that was it i mean that's that's all the biome and creature encounters that mattered every single one winds up being a letdown the original game had a constant sense of background tension punctuated by moments where you had to actually avoid leviathans and make dangerous journeys this game reduces the ambient tension by a ton which is punctuated by only three major events the first one being oxygen deprivation on your first dives which is sabotaged by having too many oxygen plants and then reusing that mechanic far too often desensitizing you to it the second is the ice warm which because it behaves in a way that is borderline buggy if you encounter it with any vehicle it will be a complete joke that will desensitize you to it and the third one is the shadow leviathan which because you can't avoid them you're forced into realizing how harmless they are and if you have the correct modules they can't hurt you at all the game already has very little setup and then it also sabotages its payoffs instead of picking up the encounter slack by giving you peaceful interesting interactions with the passive creatures there aren't any more than in the original game so there's nothing to fill the void of these disappointments speaking of disappointment it's about time we got to that story i'm sure you've all been waiting for it and i appreciate your patience i saved it for last intentionally because i'm sure that if i started with it many people would say internally okay but then you can just ignore the story and then you have subnautica 2 so why complain so much and then they would tune out i just wanted to make it really clear that even if you were to ignore the story the game has a lot of problems just with the way that it's designed it's a mess of a game even without the story but here's the thing the story takes all these problems and makes them even worse yes each and every single point here is made even worse by the story and you can't really just say oh just ignore it because for one it's part of the game that's kind of but secondly it gets shoved in your face actually you know what hold on one more thing before the story one last thing the new pda sucks it's a minor thing but the pda in the old game had funny jokes little quips and as you played it would occasionally chime in with something that was really funny or sarcastic detecting multiple levels in class life forms in the region are you certain whatever you're doing is worth it you have exceeded your weekly exercise quotient by 500 data indicates that swimming was your favorite activity be sure to vary your routine for uniform muscle development your pda comment on how great your exercise is when you've been running for your life non-stop since you landed it's it's a bit of a dark comedy that lightens the mood adding charm to the experience it's one of those things that just worked so effortlessly there was no reason whatsoever to change all terra facility beacon detected nearby unique identifier fire robotics center the new pda has a thick indian accent which just doesn't make any sense for the record there's no voice actors here both pdas are a text to speech program that gets put through a modulator to sound more robotic passing 100 meters seek fluid intake parsing 100 meters seek fluid intake if you thought text to speech plus modulator means hard to understand then you're right there were quite a few lines where i had to stop and read the subtitles to understand it finally a device that can put to good use those rechargeables lost to the back of the catch-all draw use beacons to mark traverse territory now with surface support use your xenoworks pda to show or hide the signals of your choice altera beacon signature detected unique identifier delta station dock it's not a major issue but it's just another thing that they made worse for no reason i feel like if they if i need to read subtitles to understand my survival device a device designed to enhance my survival chances then it really isn't doing its job as a survival device i don't see why it wouldn't just come with options to change the voice either because the text to speech program that they use comes built in with 18 separate options there's no reason why you couldn't have just recorded both and then given players the option to switch it there's also no more quippy dialogue it doesn't have any real jokes and on the so you know on the bright side it isn't very intrusive but as a preview for the bad writing for the rest of the game let me just show you one of the two jokes that it does tell in the control room you can change base lighting and colors rename your base and see information about power and structural integrity but not the integrity of societal power structures that's the joke and look i'm a native english speaker but even i get comments a lot that sometimes i can be hard to understand for people who speak english as a second language so i really do try to enunciate my words correctly so that i don't alienate those people in my audience switching the pda to have a thick foreign accent in a cheap attempt to be inclusive ironically boxes out all of those people the most there were many threads on the forum in the early access explaining this but they left it in this way for the full release anyways there's just no reason for it and with that out of the way we can finally talk about the story strap yourselves in too because this is gonna be a trip the game starts off with a main character robin hitching a ride down to the planet to investigate the mysterious death of her sister sam she collides with asteroids on the way down to earth and crash lands on the planet where your journey begins your character also does this with absolutely no exit plan beyond i'll find my way home she doesn't even start with a habitat builder so she intentionally crash lands onto a planet known for containing hostile wildlife deadly bacteria and in an area known for being freezing cold with extreme weather patterns and didn't bring any means for constructing a shelter with her okay mind you she's supposed to be an intelligent scientist by pure luck she happens to land close enough to where she wanted to land anyways which is great because if she had landed over the void or even just a couple miles in any direction she'd have been completely and she would not have even had the ability to fashion up a base but whatever let's keep going you'll notice right off the bat that we've got some issues gameplay-wise namely she talks a lot holy smokes that did not go as planned to the point where it's almost insulting this kind of aggressive in your face hand holding might have worked in the first game when all this was new to people but this is a sequel found the drop pod well sam i guess i might as well gather some tools and resources before starting my search hope that radio tower's as easy to spot as lil said should be able to use this most people playing already know to go make tools and break limestone outcrops for resources it just comes off as very patronizing the dialogue is so frequent that if you're exploring while listening to a pda she'll often interrupt it and you'll just have to start over synthesized hey sam oh hey there penguin but this must have been sam's room so she talks a lot and that's a problem but we'll revisit that point later after you dive a bit and you do some swimming you get a mysterious sos signal from an alien base while investigating you learned it's apparently a storage facility for an alien personality and the station is running out of power so it needs to move storage media excited you offer it your pda but it downloads itself directly into your brain instead and says oh no oh no does your kind perceive a boundary between cybernetic and organic components let's examine this for a second real quick firstly by using two different words to describe two different things he clearly understands that there is a difference between cybernetic and organic components so him playing done here doesn't make sense and robin specifically offered him her pda and he knows what a pda is because he just finished telling us that he recognizes altera signatures and even asks you if you're from the same group as before you also learn later that he's a biologist and he's been studying life forms for over a thousand years so so he should understand that most life forms make a distinction between machines and biological parts in fact i'd probably wager that the precursors are the only ones who don't doesn't really make any sense a highly advanced alien species should be able to understand the difference between body parts even if it did think that your pda was a body part but that's not even the dumb part let's keep moving now that alan is in your head the secondary plot device develops where you have to build alan a new body so that he can leave yours which creates its own narrative problems let me just see if i understand this the precursors needed to download their brains into machines to survive the care of bacterium outbreak which means they can apparently exist and function as conscious entities while also being composed purely of data aled even confirms this so why do they even need bodies in the first game the precursors created the warpers the biomechanical terminators that are apparently immune to the carbon bacterium because they exist hundreds of years after the precursors die on the planet why couldn't they just download their brains to the warper bodies or even just make pure machine bodies and render themselves immune to disease i was wondering if you can transfer bodies why was it important to find a cure when you were infected couldn't you just make a new body that's a good question robin as you can see in the components you have scanned thus far the forms we require hold on stop pause zoom in to say that you require or have non-negotiable need of biological bodies is false and we know this because you existed just fine as pure data before we picked you up you also don't require your old form because you're literally currently coexisting in my cerebral cortex while i'm simultaneously using it the old myth that you only use 10 of your brain at the time is false by the way so this guy's using one of the most important parts of the brain's spare power while i use up the bulk of it and he explains to us that the precursors are a collective species so each one of them is all of them technically essentially stating or implying that you could store the entire precursor race on the biological equivalent of a floppy disk so there's absolutely nothing that says that he he couldn't have just made a cheap temporary body to hold their psyches while they continued to work on the cure before he says that because of all the dna they use in their bodies the bacteria could quote learn to infect all the species that they use in the making of their bodies but i mean that's not how that works for starters and secondly if you made mechanical bodies you'd still circumvent that issue and surely that's a better option than just downloading yourself to a storage container just waiting for the power to run out but whatever we can we can't get stuck on this yet or we'll be here all day we got a lot of we got a lot to cover here okay so alan hijacks the plotline okay if you were wondering why you would need to explore underwater at all when sam's base and the information relevant to it is on land this is it it's the desperate answer to the wait a minute this is a subnautica game we have to give them a reason to explore the water question but it's also the part of the story that ruins the game the most and let me just say i am willing to overlook a lot of in a story as long as it's good for gameplay i don't even care if your story is nonsense as long as it enhances the gameplay gameplay is and always should be the most important part of a video game in my opinion the degassi crew of the old game made zero sense on their behavior but the end result was rex to discover technology to gain and mysteries to unravel allen's whole plot line and and his interactions with robin on the other hand aggressively sabotaged the entire experience alan shortly after entering your brain will give you gps coordinates to nearly every underwater alien base in the game under the guise of having you discover what you need to craft from a new body so not only do the biomes have all the pitfalls we went over but now when you find a new biome you can't even say i wonder if there's something important in here and experience a mystery because if alan doesn't directly drag you to a specific biome upon entering it he'll straight up tell you that there's a base inside and spoil all the mystery so you enter a bland biome you're told exactly what's in it you scan it you get some weak flavor text and now you know for sure that you're done with the bio it's awful whatever small value exploration had left is snuffed out plus as you explore and engage with the world allen and robin talk to each other which pulls you out of the experience and ruins the atmosphere even further so that's your gameplay alan tells you to go somewhere you go there you scan the thing and then you leave all while in the back of your mind knowing that he doesn't actually need this new body he's just kind of being picky as for why the aliens decided to scatter separate body parts all over different facilities built in random deep sea locations throughout the world or why the only station that ran out of power was the one containing ellen's consciousness while all the other less important facilities have no power issues and why the only facility they use to make new bodies which would be important to access in an emergency i would think is built in the most inaccessible location of the game your guess is as good as mine it should be noted as well that even despite the hand-holding it's still completely possible to gloss over something crucial for the story and spend ages trying to figure out where to go next the macguffin and the shipwreck for example which had no reason to exist very easy to gloss over and then your story just sort of stops progressing until you eventually give up due to frustration and just google it the original game had a huge problem with leaving people feeling lost and unsure of what to do but to have that same problem in the new game where the underlying exploration is even worse makes that flaw much more tangible so let's go back to sam's plotline when you first land you've got a message from one of sam's co-workers giving you a clue as to where you can start your search delta island between delta island and your life pod is allen's base so you're clearly meant to pick them up almost immediately for those of you wondering about the pacing so you go to delta island and you find an abandoned base there with some hints and notably a map of the entire game just so we're on the same page here alan spoils all the important stuff under the water and the very first place you're told to go after landing has a map that spoils the rest of it it also shows the player just how small the game world is so if you are wondering about the many possibilities and biomes you might encounter the game immediately says nope this is it this is a game about exploration what gives on your way off the island you'll bump into your second voice character margaret yes this is the same market from the degassi crew in the first game apparently she killed the leviathan in the old game with nothing but a knife and then rode its dead body all the way across the planet to sector 0 where you're at now she floated on a dead fish across the entirety of the void filled with hungry ghost leviathans that for some reason didn't go for the gigantic reaper carcass she was on somehow not dying to the car bacterium of which she was almost surely infected while also somehow becoming cured of it and then she swims to an iceberg when she gets up here and somehow fashions a new base and continues life is normal somehow it's but whatever that's we're not at the dumb part of the story yet so she warns you or whatever and then off and your pda your survival tool somehow manages to track her location all the way to her underwater base and gives you a precise gps coordinate for it never mind why your pda would even be able to do that in the first place or why it would want to do that automatically but then her base is located directly on top of the crystal and fabricator caverns those two deepest end game biomes that we talked about earlier so in case i haven't nailed home the point already within your first two story beats you will have the major locations of everything in the game handed to you via maps and gps coordinates in a game that is allegedly focused around exploration and discovery and now you've got two characters to talk to throughout the game do you remember the isolation and immersion the first game had pepperidge farm remembers it wouldn't even be a problem so long as the writing was good but you are expressing optimism but it is not supported by probability hope isn't based on statistics it's born from a drive for something better there's a poem sam loved hope is human hope is uh oh right hope is the the thing with feathers this does not match any faller designation i can find in your pda it's a line from a 19th century earth author emily something hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all i promise we'll get answers one way or another helen adding help to your database it's really really not good ellen and robin have this really cliche set up going on where robin's the hip emotional human allen just doesn't get it it's one of the tropes i hate the most in science fiction because it just doesn't make any sense emotions are a logical survival mechanism nearly every advanced life form has some kind of emotional system to determine what is and is not a good action to take evolving the ability to love your children improves the chances of erasing them to adulthood it's not complicated alan comes from a species of biological creatures that chose to become partially machinated they're allegedly hyper advanced and psychic to a degree he shouldn't have any trouble understanding human behavior but that's the punch line every single time he talks like a machine when he isn't one the writing's not just stupid it's contradictory alan will tell you many many times that his entire species operates as a collective why do you keep saying we how many of you are there one of us and all of us we do not think of ourselves as individual distinct there are no individuals so much so that the very idea of thinking individually is foreign to him what happens when you no longer have the memories of others to combine with you you make your own memories and interpretations you have to experience life as an autonomous being discover yourself that idea is foreign to me i definitely didn't think so we believe that individuals may operate in the best interest of the collective or against the best interest of the connective there is no in between to us so you always saw eye to eye on absolutely everything with your network wait what well which is it are you an individual or a collective it felt like whenever the dialogue needed an individual he was an individual and when the dialogue needed a collective he was a collective it just comes off as really lazy very sloppy one of the big plot points in the story is that you discover alan was the lead scientist of the alien installations of the first game he's a biologist and his primary function was to find a way to cure the bacterium using c emperor enzymes never mind that that whole plot didn't really make sense either but this guy allegedly a member of a collective was responsible for the bacteria outbreak because he disobeyed the collective what that makes zero sense but leave that there for a second knowing who he is makes all of our interactions that much weirder so this guy makes a mistake right he betrays his species by behaving against the collective which by his own words you're either for the collective or against it so disobeying it is kind of a bad thing so he makes this terrible mistake that winds up killing nearly all life on the planet before being forced into downloading himself onto a machine where he's left to think about what he did for almost apparently a thousand years kill all life on the planet up the one source of a cure that has ravaged his species to near extinction in the process and he has to think about the mistake for a thousand years that's one of the most spiritually taxing things you could possibly go through this guy is either gonna succumb to the guilt and emerge completely insane or achieve complete enlightenment by conquering that inner suffering and emerges a modern buddha and just as his life is about to come to an end for good the last of the power in the station that keeps him alive is slowly waning at the last possible moment of his wretched life he saved from total annihilation by a human being that got her just in the nick of time a mercy that he probably didn't even feel like he deserved at that point but he takes it this human being is from an advanced space fearing intelligent species and she studies life forms like him she's a genealogist and he's a biologist of the same thread two intelligent minds connecting after one of the most incredibly demanding experiences you could possibly experience and this is one of their first exchanges together humans function with such a fallible and inferior body excuse you my body is anything but inferior i work hard for my body to be able to do what it does yes but its overall form is not ideal for example consider its use of primitive ball and socket joints is there anything you don't find primitive humans bartered with evolution to get more brain wrinkles and opposable thumbs it thumb is excellent but all corporeal forms are temporary the ability to be reborn when a body breaks down is clear my body is my own and i cherish it it grows with me humans have one life we plant trees we can never experience the shade of we build for the next generation noble but again truly inefficient you are incredibly frustrating you know that i have to see the forms of my people again i genuinely started to think i was stuck in a life pod with a couple of psychopaths this guy's a biologist he's at least a thousand years old holds the collective minds and intelligence of an entire alien race spends his whole existence studying life forms he's not actually asking you how do human beings live with being so that can't be real he's actually seriously just talking to the person who saved him after his stupidity killed almost all life on the planet i'm so blown away by this this conversation was so weird and stilted i started to think that robin might be an alien too i mean this guy kills all life on the planet rolls over it's like where humans such dog and robin's counter argument is uh no we have thumbs along with some like middle school poetry and then his unfazed robotic response is just i want to see more of my kind which doesn't even really work as a response to what robin said it's just the weirdest i've ever witnessed and this is the state of the writing in this game if it was me and i knew who he was i would roast this dude to death every single day and then if he ever just talks back just hit him with his history yeah i'm gonna tell you this right now yeah yeah yeah yeah watch your tongue oh okay what's gonna happen what are you gonna do use some of that bacteria you've been doing oh she was disrespectful what a weird game imagine having the hubers to kill an entire planet fail your whole species but then still immediately talk to the nearest living creature you can find and you'd think that robin being a xenologist one who studies aliens would be more interested in understanding a living precursor in her own head but she behaves like a middle schooler throughout the entire game she doesn't ask him any real questions and only has really stupid answers to everything he says you can summarize all of her dialogue as essentially being elementary school pro-humanity poetry it's it's not great i mean if anybody else was in her shoes they would have been asking lots of questions because this guy gives off some incredibly sketchy vibes for one he states that he's a collective but then he's clearly behaving as an individual he doesn't admit that he was responsible for the bacterium outbreak at first but he does say that it haven't done his watch plus there's this weird dialogue exchange where he says that precursors would feel comfortable keeping humans as pets while also saying that precursors frequently use their pets in scientific experiments some really weird implications there right it's really sketchy especially considering that the precursors were basically the villains of the first game robin is completely unfazed by any of this and is completely not interested with even learning more about the precursor in her head because when assembling allen's body she asks him more about the outbreak of the bacteria and alan refuses to answer and he does it in the shiftiest way possible he basically says i won't tell you what happened until you construct my body with all the context clues here tell me i'm not the only person here who expected a twist i was getting diablo 2 flashbacks with marius and bale this guy pleading for us to build the body and even with our suspicions we can't help but help him despite it all and when he was finally formed i i straight up expected this man to turn around look me dead in the eye and say it was me robin i released it on purpose humanity is next before teleporting away and leaving me saying holy what have i done and then spending the rest of the game trying to keep him from escaping the planet except no alan just made an oopsie and he's a really nice guy and all that's left is go to his homeworld so he can make up for his mistake how sweet following this he gives you a gps coordinate to the warp gate you join him there and the two of you teleport through space to go to the precursor home world and the credits roll which if you're thinking uh pardon it's a little sudden didn't it but then i'm going halfway through the cinematic and i thought to myself wait a second wasn't i supposed to figure out how my sister died wasn't that my whole point for being on the planet and ella never developed a cure for the bacteria to bring with us either so if his home planet still needs a cure they're and then we would just show up and get infected and die he'd let down a species again i mean what was his plan i'm deeply sorry sorry like a mess what was robin gonna do aren't they half machine do they even have food for her is their atmosphere breathable i mean none of this even makes any sense no i mean why'd you bring him it's just really weird that you can leave the planet without dealing with any of the major plot points or even the ones relevant to alan's quest that said i'm almost glad that i missed sam's story the first time because this is where the story gets really stupid so i reloaded my save and i got back into it margaret the person that he bumped into on delta island is obviously meant to be the next step in sans plot line you track her down to her underwater base and i expected a castaway situation where she had slowly gone insane from isolation and the stress of being dreaded across the void i was really hoping to get into her base and see her talk to leviathan skull like imagine you walk in there it's like you think i can't hear you huh you think you're better than me uh hi get out of my head oh no wait it's just you and then she just like spends the rest of the game being this like sort of semi-crazy lady but no she's just a normal boring old lady you ask her about sam and she says that she might know but you have to disable the altera radio station to stop them from spying on her before she's gonna help you a problem and this isn't the dumb part but it is a problem okay firstly you can find pdas on the planet that show altera knows both robin and margaret are on the planet so they already know where you are and if my pda my survival device i must stress that was able to track her all the way back to her base i'm certain that altera can too disabling a single radio tower wouldn't stop them from scouting around and once it's disabled she says the altera satellite just stopped flying her overhead as if they would just lose her approximate location on the planet just like that and just stop striving it's as if the entire altero corporation is like a skyrim npc that loses interest six seconds after being shot in the head we knew pretty much where she was but the radio tower turned off so it must have been the wind i guess call off the satellite boys it's dumb but whatever once you do this she'll call you and she'll tell you to meet her at a greenhouse where she still doesn't tell you what happened she just gives you a pda of her talking to sam about it we're going to ignore the fact that indoor grow beds do just fine underwater and there's no reason for her to have a greenhouse so far away on the surface also why is her base so dirty you can ironically get the recipe for a shower from her base or at least she's clean but the pace the place is a pig style combining this pda with the pdas that you discover in the story land bases here's what you learn in their investigation of the planet altera stumbles onto an extinct frozen leviathan that was dead but contained a living car bacterium infection on its skin the same deadly bacterium from the first game don't ask me how the bacteria is alive if the host isn't but we're just gonna roll with it okay sam hears that they're experimenting with the bacterium and fearing the development of a bioweapon asks her co-workers for help in doing something about it which they decline mind you nearly every single pda that we find describing the test shows the bacteria was being used to advance medicine and develop cures all of our co-workers seem like really nice people and there's zero indication that they're using the bacterium for nefarious purposes i could still see a greedy corporation misusing this technology it's just important to point out that there's zero indication of them doing that in game so okay so sam synthesizes a cure for the bacterium you watch by herself despite her area of expertise being the building of robotic penguins she cures the bacterium herself but just hold on to that for a second the plan was to just use the cure to kill the bacterium so it couldn't be used for testing getting rid of the one lie sample that they have so that eventually the threat is neutralized but instead of just using the cure and thus solving the problem she hides it in a cave and then reaches out to margaret for help with sabotaging all of the other research plants on the planet while also using explosives she gets from margaret to collapse the cave containing the bacterium which wouldn't be necessary if she had just cured it in the first place except that she gets caught by pavlov the security guard while setting up and winds up detonating prematurely killing herself and him [Music] okay let me make sure that i've i've got the story straight here let me make sure i understand this okay okay let's let's go on this journey together everybody okay so robin an allegedly intelligent xenologist steals a life pod and drives it directly into a meteor storm with nothing but a bottle of water and a couple cereal bars with the intent of crash landing onto a hostile alien planet in the coldest biome it has with no cold suit or habitat builder then shortly after landing she has a misunderstanding with an alien about her ipad and it invades her cerebral cortex after the power in his base runs out when every other alien base is just fine on power and then he demands that she builds him a body that he doesn't need using components and alien bases built at the bottom of the ocean for no reason all while explaining that he's a hive mind while behaving as an individual claiming that he doesn't know what music is but then describes the hive mind as an orchestra and he says he doesn't know what dreams are but when he gets his body he describes it as waking from a dream he says you either work for the collective or against it and behaving as an individual is a foreign concept to him before admitting that he worked against the collective as an individual to stick a c emperor inside a box which he didn't need to do to speed up the hatchling of eggs which actually stopped the young from growing so the c emperor broke the entire facility to such an extent that he responded to that by choosing to immediately give up and download his brain to a computer and presumably just wait for the power to run out so we can die but this is completely unrelated to the main plot so you ignore all this and you investigate to come into contact with a grandma in a power suit whose only plan is to i guess intimidate random strangers and get them to off the entire planet because she's apparently so badass she can single-handedly scare away an entire transgovernmental corporation then when she leaves your ipad tracks her 800 meters to her home base where she tells you to break a satellite tower you don't need to break because altera already knows where both of you are but then it still disables the satellite somehow so that you can go investigate your sister who builds robot penguins for a living single-handedly cures the carobacterium using a combination of spicy food and iodine which is a combination the pre the entire precursor race couldn't figure out but then instead of immediately just using the cure to cure the bacterium and this immediately solved the problem which was her whole plan despite there being zero indication that they were using the bacteria for weapons at all she stuffs the cure into a hole in the ground travels halfway across the ocean to team up with a geriatric eco-terrorist who by all accounts shouldn't be alive seeing or even in sector zero and she instead of just telling sam to use the cure on the bacteria like she originally planned to and should have from the start she convinces sam to use dangerous explosives to collapse the cave containing the virus which she wouldn't need to do if she just cured it in the first place and a collapse cave wouldn't even stop a massive space corporation anyway so it's completely pointless and then more than that they conspire to systematically destroy every alternate establishment on the planet whether it's related to the bacteria or not placing all of sam's friends co-workers and her ex-girlfriend in mortal danger for no reason before she leaves to place the explosives in the cave gets caught in the act and instead of just using the cure which takes all of five seconds to administer i mean you can literally use the cure yourself and it happens instantly which shouldn't really work anyways because the leviathan is dead so it's got no circulatory system to distribute the cure but whatever she instead panics and just detonates the explosives killing herself and a co-worker without even fully collapsing the cave might you all while not ever curing the bacteria that she had the cure for and margaret who talked her into all this decides to not even bother following up to see if she succeeded she off to her underwater base to flick the bean for the rest of time while talking to a dead reaper instead of just finishing the job and carrying the leviathan and once robin learns all this she's completely unfazed just leaves to make a new body for an alien who by all accounts is completely hostile to humanity willing to use humans as test subjects is stupid or lied as contradictory about everything he said so far while hinting that he was intimately involved with the car outbreak in the first place on this planet but she immediately trusts him and helps him without even asking him anything about this despite being a xenologist aka somebody who studies aliens and the two of them off to his home planet without even bringing a cure that allen needed and he went to the planet to get the first place [Music] this plot is this plot is madness that's not even everything wrong with the story it's it's all so insane it's poorly written it's contradictory we didn't even talk about half of the plot holes in the side characters that made no sense i was on the floor laughing till i cried through half of the dialogue because it was just so bizarre it felt like a fever dream so all those times where the game had to make sacrifices to make room for the story this was it all those bland biomes all the problems they didn't improve on from the first game the total lack of horror all of it was because they wanted so badly to force a story narrative into a game where it didn't belong and this was that narrative this is why everything else in the game sucks and you know what i get it they scrapped the original story halfway through development so they had to find a way to tie in all these assets together in a way that made sense so a lot of fell through the cracks i mean this story doesn't even explain where everybody went i mean originally they evacuated due to the meteor shower in the beginning but there's no mention of it in this storyline they're all just not there i thought margaret killed them all but it doesn't state that either and you know the original story wasn't even that bad in my opinion the reason it got so much negative feedback in the early access was because it featured a voice protagonist and a lot of dialogue so players felt that it ruined the isolation and immersion that they'd grown accustomed to in the first game so their response to that was to scrap it entirely and replace it with total nonsense that still has a voice protagonist and tons of dialogue they essentially threw the baby out instead of the bathwater it's the worst of both worlds it just felt like throughout the development of this game it's like they deliberately took everything that worked from the first game and threw it out and then they ignored everything that didn't work instead of improving it and then they grafted this ridiculous story on top of it like a cherry on top of a sundae sunday the perfect analogy for this which popped into my head a lot while i was playing was that spongebob episode where he tried to get into acting or performing or whatever it was when all anybody wanted to do was be a fry cook who was asking for a narrated story all we wanted was subnautica 2 the stuff that worked from the original but more of it but unknown worlds is so high on their own farts that they're off trying to create some grand adventure series without any respect for what gave them the success in the first place to highlight this before they release the final in-game cutscene that ending room was cut off so with nothing else to do but play the game for the game's sake this is where i had most of my fun in this game exploring for the sake of exploring building more of my base just for the sake of it reading the pdas of the various life forms and of course building outposts with the sole purpose of supporting my effort to slay every leviathan in the deep it didn't take long to exhaust all that content though but keeping with the spongebob analogy this is where spongebob went back to cooking this was the game that i wanted and unfortunately i was just left wanting more even once you decide to just ignore the story as we've covered in detail the underlying game beyond that just isn't good enough it's too much of a departure from the working formula the story content will only take a few hours to complete anyways so this is a very small very short game which makes sense because it didn't start development as a dlc and i think it should have stayed that way trying to sell it as a complete game is a little bit dishonest i think a complete shame after how good the original game was a game where the story and the biomes and the creatures all of it were together so so perfectly and in total harmony to create a fantastic experience and it's not that the first game was perfect by any means but it was a lot easier to overlook the flaws of the original when what it did right was done so phenomenally well which after playing below zero i almost wonder if the original was an accident below zero's flaws can't be masked so unlike the must-play experience of subnautica 1 that i would recommend everybody play at least once i'd give this maybe a four or five out of ten and really hesitate to recommend it it's just okay and that's the whole problem and the thing is it didn't need to be either just scroll through some of the cut content here a semi-functional hovercraft that was scrapped a proper land vehicle would have alleviated 90 of my complaints in those areas look at all the wildlife that was scrapped the whole ice dragon leviathan and an ominously named leviathan trench biome the reason they scrapped it and many other creatures is because according to the wiki the developers decided that they had enough fauna that they had enough biomes which frankly is not even close to being true especially when half the biomes they do have are completely empty i mean you've got buildable phase gates a weather station so you can track the weather changes even just basic stuff like medical kit fabricators from the first game i'm amazed at how much was cut that could have really improved the experience even the story could have been salvaged if somebody had given a i challenged myself to sit down and fix the story without requiring a rebuild of the world and this is what i came up with right bear with me so sam stumbles onto the fact that they're doing tests with the bacterium except she's got the smoking gun she's got proof that it could be weaponized instead of magically conjuring up a cure she uses her background in robotics to begin working on raking a fabricator to cook the bacteria the pdas that you find in the game currently indicate that you can jailbreak a fabricator to do things as indicated by that one guy he used it to make falafel and the investigator also said that extreme heat can kill the virus so using her experience to rig a fabricator to cook the leviathan and kill the bacteria makes more sense considering her background as she develops her schematics maybe make it like a special upgrade for the prawn suits they actually have a reason to build that machine she also gathers evidence of altera's underhanded dealings altera gets wise to what she's doing but they can't legally get away with just killing her due to pr or whatever you know think of a reason so they isolate her in outpost zero which would instead be moved to the lily pad islands where the other lab is now she gets paranoid since she knows that they know too much and they'll find a way to kill her eventually so she starts hiding breadcrumbs for robin to find it knowing that she's probably gonna come looking for if she disappeared you know maybe put some clever hints in the calls that she leaves for all those pdas that she left behind so she makes sure to leave copies of the proof that she's found at undersea bases and hidden caches at the bottom of the ocean where altera is not likely to find it it's around this time that margaret floats to sector zero battered ptsd ridden and desperate she's going to reach out to altera for supplies and altera being the chief guest they are they offer her food and a habitat builder if she agrees to hunt down sam and use her mercenary background to help which she is just desperate enough to do it saves them the trouble of having to find somebody to do it and she gets the stuff that she needs to survive this will explain a lot of the destroyed underwater bases because she's going to be chasing sam and going after her living spaces sam will continuously go deeper and deeper into the ocean and try to keep developing the technology and avoid margaret and while she eventually develops the prawn suit fabricator capable of cooking the bacteria she doesn't have access to a strong enough power source to complete it and tragically before she can find one margaret catches up to her and kills her altera pulls their team from the ground to replace them with a more professional team that's being paid good hush money to keep quiet about their working with the bacteria especially now that they know that they're working with bio weapon materials but that team is a ways off enter robin who has to land during a meteor storm because she doesn't know when the next altera crew will be coming so she has to act fast she doesn't have a choice when she lands you could even say that the meteor storm is delaying the altera crew and like work it into the story there once she's there she's gonna be investigating the abandoned bases finding caches left by a sister with damning proof of valterra's dealings that will be valuable to the other trans ghosts and swimming deeper to find more clues as to how she died and finally developed the technology she needs to kill the bacteria herself before altera gets back eventually you make contact with margaret and the guilt of her failing her original security detail in the first game and killing sam catches up with her and she wants to make amends so she gives you her bronze suit technology which you need to go deeper to follow sam once you have all the tech for what is effectively a prone suit ray gun you need the power source and you're allowed to explore for a while and just try to find some kind of power source on the planet but to no avail eventually alan contacts you and we're going to switch the body fabricator base with the allen storage bay so that allen is at the bottom of the ocean instead of at the top the base isn't running out of power or anything but he reaches out to you first he wants a body so that he can leave the planet and rejoin his home world now that the enzyme is all over planet and you can use it to develop a cure in exchange for helping him make a body he'll give you access to a special ion cube to power the pronzu laser alan doesn't enter your head he's not a hive creature either he's just an ambiguous alien with dubious motives and as you talk to him his role in the car outbreak is kept vague but you'll learn over time that he was involved in some way but it's never actually explicitly told you how he was involved as for the body itself many games are even built around this premise but like if you were to download your consciousness into a machine that's not really you is it it's a copy of you the real you would still be a separate entity allen's an alien but he's still a living creature and is afraid to die even though his species has the technology to download and replicate personalities it's still basically death so he wants the best body possible to give his next incarnation the best chance at life so that it hopefully won't have to be downloaded into a machine again or some other terrible outcome so you build the body he gives you a power source you never really know if alan's a good guy or what and you're left to wonder if you made the right choice letting him go with the technology complete you cook the bacterium fulfilling sam's wishes and keeping it out of the hands of altera who you know is actually using it for nefarious means and then you and margaret hack the radio tower so that margaret can contact the people in the independent mongolian states that she used to work for to organize a rescue before altera gets back so she gets her own little redemption arc helping to make up for the mistakes that she made with sam by rescuing you and helping you during your quest and the mongolian states pick you up in exchange for all that dirty proof of altera's attempts at making a bio weapon out of the carobacterium which they can then use for political pressure or business dealings or whatever it would just have value to them all the characters have a clear reasonable motive nobody magically cures any deadly viruses the precursors aren't ruined by terrible shoehorn dialogue that turns them into a joke you don't go to their home planet at the end and prematurely spoil the explanation of the big mystery of these games nobody has to intentionally act like an idiot for the sake of the plot alan has a good reason for wanting a high quality specific body because he wants his next personality to live as long as possible and margaret actually has reasons for being there in the first place and being involved in the story with her own redemption arc sam is an intelligent capable character and not completely insane robin doesn't do anything out of character either and she needs help from margaret and sam's plans to complete the prawn suit and upgrade the bacteria so she doesn't just like magically understand how this all works and finally both the alien and the murder mystery plot blend together in a way that encourages your exploration of the planet and gives you organic reasons to swim deeper and deeper everything makes sense and it uses all the assets that are already there it's not perfect there's still plot holes there's still a lot left unexplained there's still a lot of stupid problems there but at least it isn't completely insane and the point is you know i tossed that together after thinking it over for like two hours it did not take very long to throw that together if you had a competent team of writers sit down and try to figure it out you'd probably get something a lot better than that so yeah i understand that he had to scrap the original story and start over but that doesn't mean that it had to be straight nonsense it's purely due to laziness nobody gave a inventory management could have been very easily improved one inventory per storage unit on the c truck and the docking module should have had the option to empty the prods inventory into the storage containers automatically at the cost of power so that way you can just buy materials then deposit and continue there should have also been an attachment for the sea basis that does the same allowing you to very easily transfer your resources from the ship to the base fabricators should be able to draw resources from the nearby containers as suggested in joseph anderson's critique of the original game there's no reason why an atom reorganizing space age piece of technology needs me to physically feed it resources there's just no reason for it half of my farming was spent farming resources for decorations since every table and chair took titanium and glass and so on which is just needlessly tedious decorative pieces should be made out of construction components which are made from either glass or titanium at a one to three ratio or so that way it doesn't take six farming trips to build a small decorative area in your base a chair should not take it half as much titanium as the gigantic tube you can stand in again these are very simple changes that would have improved the quality of life a ton and frankly a lot of that scrapped content should have been kept and they should have left it in early access a little longer and actually use that time to develop more content i mean nearly every single creature you interact with is a shark you've got the squid shark dog shark the shrimp shark regular shark you have glow whales which are basically just whales panglings which are basically just penguins the biodiversity just feels incredibly lazy the deep sea has an immense amount of inspiration for interesting creatures siphonophores that look like tentacled christmas trees and they can string together until they're longer than 180 feet across we found blind lobsters that use bait to catch fish with their claws all kinds of moving and bizarre floor instead of just the static stuff that we got squids that mimic other life forms and sneak up on their prey more interesting leviathans instead of just everything being a shark or a worm i could probably fill an entire extra video with just creature ideas but i'll stop out there because this video is long enough in the end it just wasn't good enough everything the original game did right this one does wrong and what it does differently just doesn't work it feels like it was made by a completely different studio or that the original was a mistake either way my final rating for below zero is that it really it's just okay and while i still help to see more subnautica in the future some dark desperate part of me almost hopes that another studio just steals the idea at this point and does it proper because i'm not sure if i can handle another narrative driven subnautica experience but like i said this video is long enough as it is so we'll cut it there if you made it this far thank you for watching folks [Music]

Channel: Ugly Fish

Views: 113,883

Keywords: Video Game Review, Long Review, Review, Subnautica Review, Subnautica: Below Zero Review, Below Zero Review, Long Video Game Review, Subnautica: Below Zero, Unknown Worlds, Survival Games, Survival Games 2021

Id: P-AWFjBONp8

Length: 82min 16sec (4936 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022