First Impressions: Subnautica
By: Ryan (@Henchman34)
- Subnautica
- Developer - Unknown Worlds Entertainment
- Publisher - Unknown Worlds Entertainment
- Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS
- Rating - NA
Sucking mouthfuls of water in the ocean last month made me appreciate the fact that we have so many games to mirror so many different real life experiences. Take scuba diving for example. Ain’t nothing cozy about ice cold seawater and pruny fingers. Thankfully, if you’re not too fond of being submerged in the water like I am, or if you just like exotic alien safaris, then come where it’s better, down where its wetter under the sea. (Cue music)
Subnautica dunks you into the fishbowl of your new watery home, moments after your spaceship crash lands into the surface of an uncharted alien planet. From here, it’s a fight for survival, and a race to climb the tech tree in order to thrive in this hostile environment. Like most recent open world survival games, Subnautica is a scavenger’s hunt for raw materials and crafting recipes. Players already familiar with the creative survival genre will feel right at home. A standard set of buildable structures are available to players, but currently lack the creativity and depth of other titles. Though it’s important to note that Subnautica emphasizes exploration the most over fighting or base building.
Some sandbox games quickly determine the size of the universe you inhabit. Others leave the player to fill the empty space with their imaginations. Subnautica draws a line between the two. Discovering new places is always a treat, but areas blend together well enough that it rarely feels old when revisiting them. Furthermore, the biomes are far more unique and varied than titles like Stranded Deep and The Forest.
There’s a breadth of experiences one can undergo in their exploration of Subnautica’s biomes. After all, atmosphere is one of the key selling points of this game. Biomes like safe shallows and the kelp forest would make for some amazing desktop screensavers. Other areas like the Auroras wreck will undoubtedly awe players, and be a source of lengthy exploration. The crushing depths, darkness, and desolation of the deep seafloor and its caves, are fantastically claustrophobic and creepy. In general, the limited visibility of the ocean often leads to an ingrained paranoia, that never goes away. Compound this with the sound of some of the nastier fauna, like the reaper leviathans, and Subnautica’s atmosphere can lead to some truly terrifying, pants shitting moments.
I can’t emphasize enough how pretty this game can be even with the performance issues. Theres still a decent amount of bugs, but not nearly as many as I expected. Environments still have difficulty rendering distant objects, which often removes one from the experience. Yet, when there aren’t tears and unrendered plants and animals in the distance, Subnautica looks phenomenal. The map of Subnautica is hand crafted, and it definitely shows. But because exploration is such a big aspect of Subnautica, the size can often be a boon.
It’s hard to quantify the exact size of the map. But at the moment, between all the possible crafting and exploration, the volume of implemented content only held me for 20-30 hours total. Much of the most ambitious looking content is still in development, though it’s unclear exactly how much of that will constitute the full release. There has been talk floating around about adding a cooperative feature, but nothing has been set in stone. For these reasons primarily, I would recommend holding off on buying the game, until the nearing of the full release. The developers at Unknown Worlds Entertainment are still definitely on to something titanic here. No pun intended. As more content indefinitely trickles down the line, Subnautica will come to look leaps and bounds differently than it’s current state. Keep an eye out for this game in the future.