Recent reviews by Izzeebowe Jeef

I want to enter this review saying that Subnautica is my favorite game, hands down.
When I heard it would be continuing, I rejoiced.

It is my belief that a sequel should be an improvement over its predecessors. It should be standing on the shoulders of a giant, where all the missteps and mistakes are ironed out and a more streamlined and better product is produced. After all, the team has had a whole other game to learn and perfect their craft on.

Zero failed to meet that ideal miserably.

There are spoilers ahead, but I have purposely made descriptions vague to try and preserve some mystery of this mess of a game so read on at your own risk.

In the original:
There are new creatures to discover, with most areas connecting with one another seamlessly through caverns or overlaps. Biomes and caverns were well made and intuitive so that it was easy to navigate without getting lost or confused. Personally, I found the map on the sea glide to be more of a screen blocking nuisance than a helpful tool.
I was generally wowed and moved by my surroundings, loved the story that was both handed to you and what was discovered through scanning and exploring your surroundings. I felt fear and tension when encountering new areas full of new enemies.
I cried at the end of the first game as I left the planet, because the game did a great job making you care about the inhabitants you left behind.

It broke my heart that hardly any of these aspects carried over into Zero.

Subnautica is forth most an exploration game. In Zero, that element is dumbed down and takes a back seat to a scripted story line which spoils the majority of the experience. It is further castrated because of the subpar biodiversity for the different biomes, and the lack of storytelling via the environment and the scanning tool.

The biggest and saddest example of this is the deeper and further you go into the game, the emptier the world becomes. To compare, the final volcanic biome of the original game had a medium sized predator, a small predator (the leeches), a passive/decorative animal, a breathtaking leviathan that not only could grab you, but could fire off projectiles, and prey fish you can’t see anywhere else in the game….In the final biomes of Zero, the ONLY threat is a new Leviathan that, when caught, forces the player into a tedious cutscene when it deals ANY damage to you. The other entities are two prey fish that occur in other areas of the game… and that’s literally it. No rays, no other dangers, nothing.

To make this lonely area worse, it’s empty. Your scanner is practically dead weight because there is nothing to scan. No skeletons or relics, no little pieces of story or reasons why certain monsters are in the locations they are, or simple interesting facts about the world you are exploring… It’s just you and your prawn suit in an endless slog downwards getting confused about your location because you passed the same 3 crystal models and the same mottling of plant life all the way down. This not only makes for a less enriching experience, but also creates the necessity of the map and compass. When there are no points of interest in a lazily made cave where everything looks the same, it’s hard to discern location and your progress unless you are staring at your compass or using the sea glide map. This is frustrating as I never used the compass in the original game because truthfully, I didn’t really ever need it. I had landmarks and to discern where I was and where I needed to go. But again, for whatever reason, they chose not to build any meaningful set pieces under 700 meters. The same goes for the very simplistic and phoned in architect areas in that region. I literally laughed when I found Al-An’s organs. It was so lazy. They are found within a phoned-in little cubed room about the size of an Ikea elevator, out in the open and exposed to the elements for, if the lore of the game is to be believed, centuries. No ambiance, no interesting lore, no set pieces.

And then there’s the above ground sequences…

One of the flagship creatures for this game are the ice worms. That is not a spoiler. You can see one in a glamour action shot every time you go to the store page or open the game on steam. This simultaneously gets rid of any of the mystery and hypes them up before they are encountered and suggests that the devs are proud of this mob.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why.

On arrival, there was no awe factor or feelings of majesty. They make cartoon rabbit holes that disappear after some time has passed and do a repetitive and choppy unnatural looking animation where they prey on snow stalkers. The player interactions are somehow even worse. I used the prawn suit to do this section of the game, and was met with sudden flashes of color, a shaky camera, and every so often I had to duck under ledges to repair my suit when the worms hit me too much. What’s terrible about taking damage is you cannot evade the blows because of the limited scope of view in the suit, so it never really felt tense...just tedious.

Perhaps it would have been better on the snowfox or on foot, but even if you wanted to play as it was intended, in which you bring tech to distract the worms, the game makes it inconvenient for the player. In the first game, before you ever interact with a Reaper, the transmissions guide you to the creature decoy tech which is located in close proximity to the starting pod. In Zero, I did not find the thumpers until after I got what I was there for and there is no reason outside of ore deposits to return to that part of the game. Ultimately, the tech is utterly useless. It’s also worth noting that even had I found them first, I would have had to hoof it back out to sea, which is quite a long distance away, OR build an on land base near the worm area (which is pointless as the worm arena is land locked and does not connect in a meaningful way to any other places of interest).

And as a final insult, the end of the story is broken...
As of release, there is absolutely no consequence for not finishing the dead sister arc. You can just leave the planet without carrying out your sister’s final wishes. It literally does not matter and there is no reason to do it outside of a steam achievement. You came to the planet seeking knowledge of why your sister died, but can just yeet yourself off the planet with all of that unfinished and unsettled and Robin doesn’t even comment on it.

Final thoughts:
There are a few places in this game that I found beautiful and well out together. The lily region in particular had a lot of loveliness and real thought put into the layout of the caverns beneath it, and the twisty bridges region was genuinely fun to traverse and explore. Those regions felt populated and complete. Everywhere else feels thrown together and hollow. There were places in the first game where you threw down a base just because the area was lovely, and that doesn’t happen outside of very few key areas in Zero.

I still openly recommend Subnautica to people that haven’t experienced it, and several of my friends have purchased and enjoyed the game on my recommendation… but there is no reason I would ever recommend this game as it’s a hollow echo of the first game in almost every way.

This is truly a wonderful piece of software. I cannot express how much of a gift sfm is. I like to think its one of the many reasons TF2 is still relevant after so many years.