The fall season is upon us folks, and with the change in seasons comes a change in temperature. The once warm weather and clear skies above us are fading away, and what we are left to deal with is wind and gloomy clouds as far as the eye can see. The green which coats our trees will fade to beautiful colors, but soon those colors will transform into brown and shrivel. Crops will be ready, but once the harvest is over there will be no more to supply us for what is to come. People will start off wearing plaid clothing, but soon they’ll be covered in fur head to toe. Fall will transform into winter, and winter will bring torment upon us all. A frozen hellscape that you can enter, but if not readily prepared you will never be seen again. Well that’s what it’s like if you live in the midwest at least. During these times all you can do is get comfy. Grab a cup of hot cocoa, sit around the fireplace, and hope your heating bills have been paid off. What better way to prepare for fall and winter than playing a game about the cold?
Subnautica: Below Zero, a follow-up and standalone expansion to the hit underwater survival game made by indie studio Unknown Worlds Entertainment. Development for Below Zero began straight after the 1.0 release of Subnautica. The project spent four years in early access and it was Unknown Worlds’ next big property after working on the Natural Selection series. Those four years were spent adding new biomes to the game, new creatures, story content, and doing enough to make Subnautica more than just another survival game with an aesthetic slapped onto it. In the end they released a survival title that did enough to separate it from other competitors and the sheer amount of praise Subnautica gained at launch made it one of the best releases of 2018. It may as well be one of the best titles in the genre, and the survival genre is flooded with contenders. Below Zero felt like the next big move to make, and it would reuse assets from the base game so development wouldn’t drag out.
However, Unknown Worlds Entertainment managed to surprise the fans yet again and exceed the expectations placed onto the sequel expansion. There was enough content to make Below Zero an entirely new experience, and even though some fans can aree it doesn’t live up to the base game it’s still an excellent title. It’s a reminder of what made Subnautica great, and at times it manages to fix some of the rough edges the base game has and makes it less difficult for casual audiences to get into. Subnautica: Below Zero is definitely not award worthy material and there’s dozens of other smaller indies from 2021 that you better be off checking out instead, but I’ll just tell you right now Below Zero is a safe purchase. Expect to see a familiar formula and gameplay in a whole new setting ready to hook you in and overcome the fears of the unknown.
I got Subnautica: Below Zero during the winter of last year, and it wasn’t until recently that I finally decided to finish it. At the time I was going through open world fatigue and I’m still going through it. I was having flashbacks to when I experienced Subnautica for the first time and wanted to re-experience that magic of traversing an underwater world again. I reinstalled Below Zero and the last two to three weeks have been spent nailing away at the game. I even managed to snag myself a Platinum Trophy along the way. Don’t expect too much from this review as it’ll mainly be covering info stated during my first review of Subnautica. It’ll be re-explaining what makes Subnautica great, what makes these two games the only survival games I’ll ever like, and why you should be playing this rather than mindlessly bashing a rock against a rock in Rust. Today we’ll be talking about why I love Subnautica: Below Zero, and why it deserves your attention. If nautical nonsense is something you wish then drop on the floor and flop like a fish. Ready? Spongebob- wait, no, that’s not right. Maybe another time.
Story
The game takes place two years after the last one. Upon returning to a human colony, Riley explains how he managed to survive the terrors of Planet 4546B. Alterra is surprised by the amount of exotic resources Riley collected, and the news that phasegates and Architect technology lies within 4546B. One of the main reasons Alterra wanted to explore 4546B and space was to find the Architect's advanced warping technology. They want to know how it was made, and maybe even locate the homeworld of the Architects so they may gather more of this tech. They allow Riley to rest in safe hands, but soon they send another shuttle to Planet 4546B now that it’s safe to enter in and out of thanks to Riley’s actions of curing the virus there.
Now we cut to the events of Below Zero. Our protagonist this time around is Robin Ayou, younger sister of Samantha Ayou a scientist sent to 4546B to research the Architect technology. Samantha has been gone for months, but recently Alterra reported Samnatha died of company discrepancy. Not going into detail of what she died from and how. Robin believes Alterra isn’t telling the entire truth, so she sneaks aboard an Alterra shuttle and launches herself into the oceans of 4546B aboard an escape pod. The sector Sam was stationed in was Sector Zero, a polar region of the planet that doesn’t get as much sunlight and ice caps have begun to form. It’s also where Alterra discovered the most Architect technology. Robin sets up a shelter and begins exploring, and during her ventures she meets two individuals. Marguerit Maida, the only human being left in the area and doesn’t fully trust Robin, and upon exploring an Architect chamber an artificial intelligence is injected into her body, Al-An, who claims to be an Architect. Al-An wishes to know what happened to his people, and in return he’ll help Robin figure out what happened to her sister. Robin agrees and together they explore the depths of Sector Zero and discover the mysterious scerets lying below.
Gameplay
It’s the same old Subnautica we grew to love. Underwater exploration, gathering materials to craft and keep ourselves fed, forging equipment to dive to deeper biomes, and trying not to get killed by the bigger fishes with razor sharp fangs and tongues getting ready to suck us down their throats. It’s more of the same if you played the previous game, and that’s good enough for me as Subnautica always had a design philosophy that works compared to other survival games. It gives us a reason to explore and gather resources, and it uses hidden goals to keep the player pushing through the story despite the main gameplay loop being going on a scavenger hunt.
The first biomes you start off in are quite safe. You have the equivalent to the Safe Shallows of the first game, a kelp forest, and this time around there this huge colorful descent where you’ll be gathering the basic ores of the game. You’ll be collecting copper, titanium, quartz, lead, and occasionally gold and silver if you can find the rarer mineral deposits. Here’s the catch though. Rarer minerals are harder to come by in shallow areas and you’ll have to dive into deeper terrain to uncover more rare mineral deposits. You can only breathe underwater for so long and if you drown you not only respawn back at your Sea Pod or base you also potentially lose some of the resources you had on hand. I only died once during my playthrough and I got the lucky end of the coin toss as I managed to keep all my supplies and only lose progression I had diving.
To have an easier time diving deeper into the world you can forge equipment. A bigger oxygen tank so that you can stay underwater longer, a rebreather so that oxygen depletes much slower, a Seaglide to traverse quickly underwater, or maybe forge a vehicle which will require a lot of resources to forge and a Vehicle Bay but can act as a portable vessel of air. You can even forge tools like a Flashlight to navigate dark caverns, a Mineral Detector to quickly point out resources, or a knife to defend yourself from foes. However, to have any of this equipment you need the blueprints to them and the only way to obtain the blueprints is to scan the fragments of these items. You can forge a Scanner right from the get go and you are going to want to have a Scanner on you at all times. You can scan not only fragments but plants, living creatures, and even the secret artifacts lying deeper in the world, but that’s for you to discover.
Not every resource will be available in the starting biomes of the game, and they’ll be located in far off regions. Places that are much deeper, have more dangerous species, and your Seaglide won’t be enough to get you down there and back up. This is what fuels the gameplay loop of Subnautica. Explore, collect, craft, and eventually you’ll have what you need to get further into the story. That or you can choose not to. The game isn’t railroading you down the main story and you are allowed to take up as much time as you want. Go when you feel like you are prepared, and what makes this even better is that the game will never force you to forget certain equipment and tools immediately. You have to learn the rules of the world yourself, because if you can’t realize that you need a knife or scanner immediately to the dangerous species then you will not get far into the game. You will not be able to escape the planet or build a base to resort to.
Speaking of having a base, you are occasionally going to want to devote time into building a shelter so you may take a break or prepare for future travels. The starting Sea Pod isn’t enough to act as a base of operations and store collected supplies. There are many compartments you can forge while constructing a base. You can forge a huge chamber to act as either a resting chamber, a place to forge equipment, or maybe just assemble a supply storage and organize what you collected in lockers so that you may never lose your stuff and always know where your crafting materials are. You may even pick up posters, scan blueprints to furniture, or find decorations. Allowing you to customize your base even further and make it feel more like home. Just be wary that your base has a hull integrity. It can only be so big and have a certain amount of rooms and hallways. If the hull integrity exceeds the maximum amount then water will start leaking into your base. Making it viable to live in or interact with certain workstations. You can empty the water out, but to do that you must break down rooms of your base. Don’t be worried though, because there are ways to increase base hull integrity. Like building an iron platform so that the base has a stable ground to sit on, or applying reinforced walls so that the base may withstand pressure. There’s a bit of depth to base building and you can spend a whole hour just building.
Besides that there really isn’t much else to Below Zero. What is new is the climate system. There are a couple of locations you have to go to that are on land, but seeing how this is the polar arctic you may freeze to death. Construct a Cold Suit to withstand the cold temperatures longer, or build a Snowfox which is a hoverbike that allows you to traverse ground faster. There’s also a lot of other things the game has added, but it’s minor stuff and I want to talk about it in the next section. Hopefully you can survive the dangers of 4546B and find out what happened to Sam.
Thoughts
Below Zero may play and feel exactly like the base game, but it does enough to stand out on its own. This could just be coming from me, somebody who just loves Subnautica, but we rarely get games as unique as this. I don’t want to keep hitting trees or hunting animals for food. I want to do something different, and that’s what Subnautica offers compared to other survival games. It does something different and by applying the genre to a different setting it can escape some of the problems that arise with these types of games. Give a reason to explore and collect resources without it transforming into a grind. Have a story with a begging, middle, and end that signals how close you are to finishing the game. Subvert expectations by having unique biomes rather than the stereotypical grasslands, canyons, and different types of forests.
Subnautica is just good, and Below Zero delivers more of this goodness. To be honest I still like the base game more, but there’s enough new content to not make Below Zero just a cash grab sequel. It’s equally as good as the base game and there are a few areas where it’s much better. The protagonist is one of the few areas where Below Zero exceeds. Subnautica doesn’t have a tremendous story, but what it does have is good lore and world building. What drove me through the base game wasn’t the want to escape, but figure out what was really going on. Dive deeper to discover the truth. While the mute protagonist allowed players to insert themselves to the setting easily it felt like more could have been done. Robin is not only a protagonist with personality, but her story adds to the drive to explore. Not only are we trying to find the ruins of an ancient alien race, but we are trying to guide Robin into figuring out what happened to Sam. There’s a main plot and a subplot, and this drove me more than the main game.
Another improvement from the base game was the vehicle progression. Not many people talk about this point, but the vehicle progression was probably one of the biggest flaws the first game had. You start off with the Seamoth which is fast and easy to move around with. Then you get the Prawn Suit which was slower, clunkier, and while it can be used to harvest resource clusters it felt like a downgrade from the free mobility we started with. Then we get the Cyclops, this giant submarine which is extremely slow and can’t fit into tight caverns. It made sense that bigger and more powerful vehicles are harder to control, but what was terrible was that you needed a fully upgraded Cyclops and Prawn Suit to reach the lowest area in the world and beat the game. It was this annoying journey to get both of these vehicles there, and it made the game more grindy as you have to search for the resources for three vehicles.
In Below Zero you have two vehicles. The Prawn Suit is still here, but the new addition is the Seatruck which is a combination between the Seamoth and the Cyclops. You have the free mobility and control of the Seamoth, but you can forge and attach compartments to transform the Seatruck into a portable base. Attaching loads of compartments will slow down the Seatruck, but you can always attach them to quickly go down to an area and then come back up for them when you are ready. It’s great that they made a vehicle which questions whether you want to transport more supplies, slower movement, or just leave them behind if you really don’t need them. What makes this better, for mee at least, is that you can beat the entire game with just the Seatruck. Yeah, the Prawn Suit is still there but you reach the deepest areas in the game with the Seatruck and Seatruck alone. It makes the grind towards the end less annoying, and without giving spoilers I’ll just say you don’t have to grind to forge an escape shuttle.
Another small addition I really like are the underwater air bubbles which you can consume to stay underwater longer. The base game had these small vents which emitted air bubbles, but they were often hard to spot and the game didn’t do a good job showing you could get air from them. Now you have these green glowing orbs and they provide a lot of convenience when you are just simply exploring a small area for resources. The world is much smaller in scope, but I found it easier to memorize than the base game. With that smaller scope comes less to process, and can I just say my performance with this game was crisp and smooth for the most part. I played this on a base PS4 and it just ran wonderfully. No framerate drops, no glitches, and the only thing I really had to deal with was just loading into the game which didn’t take too much. They fixed all the bugs found in the original and recently they added an unstuck button when you open up the options menu just in case someone were to get stuck in the world. Glad that they were willing to listen to feedback on technical issues.
Below Zero is really good. It took me around sixteen hours to beat which is ⅗ of the time it took me to beat the base game. It’s much shorter and this is the biggest criticism people have with the sequel, but I appreciate the shorter runtime. They could have made the game grindy, but instead they just placed a focus on providing a streamline small packaged experience. This is an easy recommendation from me, and the only problem I really have that isn’t much of a problem is that it’s more Subnautica. It’s more of the same game with a few re-adjustments, and there’s a lot of other games you could be playing that do something new and extraordinary. Yet, Below Zero succeeds on what it planned to deliver and I cannot wait for what Unknown Worlds has in store for us next. In the end I’m giving Subnautica: Below Zero an 8.5/10 for being pretty good. May seem low for everything I just said and I really want to give this a 9/10, but this is one of the better 8.5/10s I have given out. Play this if you love Subnautica.
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