Recent reviews by eepyhead

Sony failed to ruin this game

It's pure kino

I hate having the Sam Hyde cube show up every time I open up my computer. 10/10 would highly recommend this amazing piece of software

it good

I need to re-write this. I like the game a whole lot more than I used to
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YIIK more like YIIKES hahaa guys im so original amirite upboats to the left xD hahaa nobody loves me
No but really, this is a decent game. Most of my hours are on the switch version, but this review still applies to the steam version.
Alex is a prick but that's the entire point of his character. He talks like he's an annoying, overly drawn out, needlessly complex character in a snobby book but the entire point is that he's kinda the exact kind of person who would monologue to themselves like that. The rest of the characters are pretty cool, though Chondra and Claudio are a bit underdeveloped.
The story is pretty cool, gets a bit iffy at the end but that's about it. If you look into the game, there is a scrapped ending that you can still access with messing with the save files. There is also a video for the elusive third ending floating around.
The biggest cons are that the minigames get on your nerves after a while, and the enemies are a bit drawn out (manageable if you're keeping up in terms of levels). The level up method is also drawn out, but eh I honestly didn't mind since I was usually jamming out to the music holy moly it's so good.
The biggest pros are the visuals, which look amazingly stylized and clean, and, of course, the music. The music is so good I listen to some tracks in my day-to-day life now. The Mind Dungeon theme is a bop, Little Eyes grew on me super hard, Chance Traveler is spacey and emotional, and that's not even mentioning the sheer amount of amazing compositions by guest musicians like Toby Fox (from Undertale fame), Bo En (Lovely Planet, Snipperclips, and solo albums), Garoad (VA-11 HALL-A), and so on, and so forth.
That said, this is most definitely not a game for everyone. I liked it because I was hooked in by the visuals and the music, and the fact that a lot of the characters are somewhat verisimilar and I can definitely see some of my friends acting like the characters if they had the same context as them. Alex is the worst aspects of gamer/ hipster/ liberal arts majors turned up to 11 and I love it, he's such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ person - I think that's actually why people don't like the concept of his character, because they don't like the character as a person and has NO redeeming qualities. People will point to characters like the father from LISA as a good unlikeable protagonist - but at least he has redeeming qualities. Alex is made to just be a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ person with no excuse for it in the beginning (you know, like a real person. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ irl usually don't have some basic trope-heavy redeeming quality).
For people who have weird tastes like me, this was a 8+/10 game, where 5 is the average game (none of that 7 being a bad game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥). For others, this will be around a 7/10.

Subnautica: Below Zero features the same jaw-dropping beauty and mystery as the first game, but, one major difference makes it so that I cannot recommend this game.

[WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS FOR BOTH THE ORIGINAL AND BELOW ZERO]

In Subnautica, a large part of the fear came from the sheer isolation - you had no one to talk to but a PDA, most of the sounds you hear were either the sounds of the monsters of the deep or the PDA, all the while the radio coms gave you hope that you might find someone else (however, these hopes are soon let down when you realize that you truly are all alone). The people who try to help you end up dying. You are alone in this terrifying world full of monsters, dying of a horrible disease.

Subnautica: Below Zero, on the other hand, throws this all away. Featuring a fully voice-acted storyline in which you are in constant communication with your sister and your bosses, there is no real sense of that same isolationist fear from the first game. One might say that the fear due to isolation is replaced by the thrill of preventing the alien robot thing from being discovered, but it pales in comparison to the tension and atmosphere from the first game. Hell, at one point the sister even mentions that they can just send in a rescue ship and get you off the planet, which you refuse because Game, but that just killed the entire atmosphere for me.

That said, the locations are still beautiful (though it falls off a bit once actual sea exploration begins), and sound design is still good (though a bit worse than before). However, if you are looking for the same terror from the first game, you won't find it here.

Even if this is in Early Access, I see almost no way they can fix these issues unless they make up some excuse for why you can't talk to anyone or get rescued later in the game, maybe say that like some super storm or something is blocking communications or rescue or something. This is the only way I see this game reaching the same heights as the first one.

Even acknowledging that the content is lacking because it's in Early Access, I feel that the foundation for this game (i.e the fact that you constantly have people yapping and there is no isolation) makes it so that I can confidently say that, unless they radically change the way the game is going, I cannot recommend this game and I think that will apply for future content withing the game.