Below Zero is a great game. The only downside of this game is that its predecessor is way too good.

Loved Subnautica bought it in beta now playing subzero in beta I have been a SCUBA diver since I was 18 now I am 61 and these two games are as close to getting wet as you can get plus i'm a sy-fi fan so even better.

It's Diet Subnautica, not Subnautica 2.

Had I not played the original Subnautica first, I would have thought this was a pretty great game, and likely wouldn't have had any issues with it at all. But I did play the original first, and that set the bar for my expectations -- especially given that the two games are the same price.

It's gorgeous. The coding is tighter, the animations are smoother, it is WAY better optimized -- no more chugging and chunking while distant objects struggle to render. The weather effects are great, and the addition of temperature as a survival mechanic is neat. There is a lot of new lore (with an interesting cast of characters), plenty of new flora and fauna to scan, great new base building pieces, and a lot of new decor options.

Now here comes the bad:

The map is TINY compared to the original. And extremely shallow -- you can go almost everywhere that matters with the first depth module for the seatruck and a bit of free diving.

The survival elements feel poorly balanced. I got the tank upgrades very quickly, and never felt concerned with hunger or thirst thanks to slightly overtuned edible plants being so easy to access, and food/water being in so many of the numerous crates scattered across the map.

The progression curve feels flat compared to the first game -- the upgrades come too quickly, and don't feel as rewarding. The Cyclops allowed you to go DEEP. Well, there is no "deep" to explore, here. And no reason to do so anyway, as all the endgame crafting materials are very plentiful and are able to be picked up very early in.

You unlock some things at weird times. Some too early (like the multipurpose room), some too late (like the decorative plant walls -- which you can only scan from one specific area, despite encountering them in more than one place).

You are able to scan a lot of new plants, but the ones you can actually take seeds/samples from and grow for yourself are EXTREMELY limited. Why? Even if they were just decorative elements at your base, with no other use, that would still be SOMETHING. There aren't many creature eggs to find, either. It almost feels like the game was pushed out early, with less content than originally planned.

Props from the first game are used as decor in the second game, but are unable to be scanned or picked up (all the lab equipment, many island plants). This makes no sense to me. The assets are already there, in use in the game world. Slap an inventory icon on it and let us use them!

There aren't many uses for the spy pengling. At all. It could have added a lot of exploration value, but it's mostly a waste of inventory space. Same for the snowfox, which I used approximately once and then discarded -- it really needed to be able to hover on water, to make it worth zipping around on.

There aren't as many leviathans, and they aren't as scary. The game in general isn't as scary. I never felt alone. I never got lost in an utterly black void, a cave system some 1000m down, unable to orient myself and running out of air, water, or flashlight battery.

The player character legit sounds like she is edging a big fat orgasm when she eats (UNNHHHH, MMMMM, AAAHHH). There is no way someone didn't bring this up during playtesting. It is absolutely ridiculous.

Overall, it's fun and polished enough (and I got it cheaply enough) for me to give it a thumbs up. But if you pay full price for this and expect it to be just like the first one, you're gonna be disappointed -- there just isn't enough of it. Once they finish backporting the building elements from this game into the original and fixing up the older code, I'll never touch this game again.

tl;dr - Super pretty, but it feels like a DLC, not a sequel.

It seems like the game is almost done so I can let out my opinions. I played both Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero from the beginning of their early access launches.
According to Steam I have played:
Subnautica- 100+ hrs
Subnautica: Below Zero- 60+ hrs
It's so hard for me to let go of the hope of this game being something more than what it is turning/turned out to be. To be philosophical for a moment, we are more disappointed with something that gets close to the target than we are with something that misses it completely. To me Below Zero is a large step back from the original in the ways that made the original so special. Which is a heart wrenching thing to see. I will break it down more but first I want to make sure that you, the reader of this knows that Below Zero is a good game. It's beautiful and engaging. Like the first game, it is one that is hard to stop playing. Also like the first game, Its base loop of resource gathering a tool creation is well paced and gets you to explore farther and dive deeper to find those valuable resources.
Where Below Zero falls short is in its understanding of what made the first game amazing. It is a survival game. There are A TON of survival games. But how many strictly underwater survival games are there? When the first Subnautica came out I think it was the only one. Yes it has some out of water roaming in it but it was very minimal. The atmosphere was also incredible. It takes place on an alien planet so there isn't any people roaming around. Aside from some logs there isn't any form of human life. To add to the isolation the radio guy says they are gonna rescue you and then they get blown out of the sky! If that doesn't make the atmosphere seem desperate then sprinkle in the fact that all other survivors are eaten before you get to them and you have yourself some edge of your seat suspense. Next, the first game has a huge open world. For an indie game, it's HUGE. Lastly, the survival loop was great and you really progressed to the point where you felt like a master of your domain. Yes, you need to avoid those leviathans but the game really gave the sense that you started from nothing... and now you are driving around a massive submarine!
To summarize:
1. Isolation
2. expansive underwater world
3. Eventual dominion over that world
When I look at those 3 things, they really are the base of any survival game, except for the underwater part(the unique trait of subnautica)
Now looking at Below Zero.
1. ISOLATION
Your character drops onto the planet on purpose. so right off the bat it's not about survival in the mind of the player character. Then there are audio logs everywhere. The first game had logs like I mentioned but they didn't have audio which adds alot more personality to the characters but takes away from any sense of desperation or dread. Also, there is a voice inside your head that your converses with, again removing a sense of isolation. Lastly there is a human NPC in the game, which makes you physically not alone. So the strange alien world I was in felt a bit more homely that I was anticipating when I started playing.
2. EXPANSIVE UNDERWATER WORLD
The underwater portion of this game is significantly smaller than the original, like 25%-33% the size(my estimation). Also I'd estimate that 25%-33% of Below Zero's entire world is on land. Which means they removed 25%-33% of the world that made the game unique from all other survival games. Yes, the land is still on an alien planet. But there are plenty of run around survival games on alien planets. I can't help but think of what it would of been like if that 25%-33% was put into the underwater world. Another amazing biome or 2 could have been added. Oh man...sweet, beautiful underwater biomes...
3. EVENTUAL DOMINION OVER THE WORLD
I was waiting for a giant sub like machine to be introduced into the game. The sea truck(which is a small sub) is fine, but it hardly feels like a sea conquering machine. While you do progress and climb the ladder of dominance it end really quickly. You find the sea truck withing a few hrs and then you made it. That's it. You get attachments for the sea truck(a cool idea) that lets you explore farther and longer. The attachments are things like more storage or an aquarium for storing food. But by adding attachments the truck its movement speed is reduced significantly so I usually have 1 attachment and go back to my base when I want to swap(cause the underwater world is so small it doesn't take much time). If I really need to have access to food and storage(among other attachments for the truck I wont mention) why can't I use the great base building mechanics and build small bases around the small underwater world? That would eliminate almost all of the benefits that the truck provides!
I walk away from this game confused and sad that the developers didn't see what made the original so amazing. It's almost like they went in the opposite direction. I hope Below Zero does well because they are obviously very talented people and I want them to succeed. I also want them to try again.

Side note. Below Zero is $30!? You guys should rethink that.

Tough call. I agree with the reviewer who said this is a good game, but not the game they wanted and hoped that it would be. It feels like DLC, not in terms of the amount of content but in terms of how quickly you chew through it, and I think if you go into it with that fixed in your mind, it'll have a better 'feel' for you -- maybe play it immediately after playing Subnautica, without a break in-between.

I think I'm sort of the odd one out in that I don't actually hate the sea truck, as many people seem to. If the cabin were slightly smaller and more nimble like the seamoth, less prone to getting clipped on sidewalls and rolling, I wouldn't think there was anything wrong with it at all -- it's mostly the compact, cabin-only mode that frustrates me in that way. And sure, it might be nice if the storage module had more storage, but honestly, the smaller world means that less available storage on the move hasn't felt like a huge problem for me. Being able to drag a fabricator around with me is pretty nice, too.

For me the weirdness comes from two places, and I have a theory as to why they might be related. The first is the pacing: everything is vastly accelerated. The progress you make through the tech tree and the story is really rapid. The biomes are much tighter, so maybe that's part of the reason why -- you're spending a lot less time traveling from one place to another, which could be a good thing or a bad one, depending on how you feel about it all.

The other weirdness for me -- and maybe this is just me, idk -- is the feeling that the biomes themselves have, maybe as a side effect of how compact they are. They're really beautiful environments, and I think a lot of love went into them...but I've hit a weird wall in my playthrough. I can't figure out where to set up my Big Main Base, the one I'm going to pour a lot of time and resources into, because all of the locations that look like grand set-piece locations, all of the places you might want to put your base and build it out so that you have some cool stuff to look at through the many new glass ceilings and other transparent elements, aren't designed with your base-building in mind. Every time I run into a spot with a killer view or a convenient location there's another structure there already, or it's too narrow and tight to accommodate player structures in any way that makes sense, or there are significant predators that are going to casually destroy my stuff every time they swim by.

It's a weird feeling after the last game, where my late-game base was located in a spot I felt was custom-made to give players a fantastical spot to live. Combined with the dizzyingly rapid tech progression, it almost feels as though Subnautica was designed from a place of envisioning how the player would experience the world for the first time, and Below Zero was built from a place of constructing a world for the player to experience, thinking mostly about the world itself.*

*I'm not a dev and I'm not going to pretend that I know whether or not this is true, or what approach was taken -- I'm just saying that in thinking about the differences, this is the closest I can get to articulating what feels different to me.

The bottom line is that this game still has most of that great Subnautica flavor, and if you liked Subnautica you'll enjoy most of what Below Zero is. It's beautiful. It sounds great. But you'll be happier if you don't expect it to be the same expansive, slow unfolding of mysterious mysteries, and resolve to enjoy it for what it is -- a variation on a theme, compressed in many places, but trying to offer you a few new things in exchange.

Honestly fantastic. The classic subnautica released to early access and has grown into a very complete and well made game. Take this game, early access, is releasing at, imo, an even better state than compared how the original did. I can see this game being taken very far and I am very curious to see how it will turn out.

The artic setting is beautiful and even though the food fish and crafting items seem to be very similar, it seems to breath in a completely new life to the game. Great stuff

So far this game is awesome, but I have to say that there is one element that I am highly disappointed about. When I think of an underwater ocean game, I think of going deep under water because it makes things tense. In the original subnautica you could go around 1800 meters deep without going to the border drop off. Once I saw that they were making a new game, I was expecting them to make the game a ton deeper but instead they pretty much halved the maximum depth from the original game. This was so disappointing to me because it doesn't give me that feeling of being so far separated from the surface like the original game did.

While both games are terrifying, I personally think the original wins because that feeling of going so deep down was one of my favorite aspects of the game and they took it away on the new one.

Below Zero was a truly wonderful experience for me after Subnautica, but you may want to be prepared for some differences. Without going into spoilers, I think the important ones are:

1. The story is very different. Do not go into BZ expecting the same emotions as Sub. As an analogy, Alien (1979) was a horror film, but Aliens (1986) was an action film. Both are exquisite, just not the same genre of story. BZ is not "action" to Sub's "horror", but the stories are very different energies like that.

2. The setting and technology is not the same. BZ is not just another story in the same setting. It is the same planet, and there are a lot of familiar elements, as a result, but the location and technology are different in many ways. I won't give specifics, just don't expect to navigate the map in the same ways, or experience the same kinds of dangers.

With that said, I want to talk about some of the other reviews and address many of their criticisms for folks who haven't played the game yet, to give you some context. I feel that many other reviewers are unreasonably expecting a sequel to magically recreate an experience that was dependent on everything being new. If you played Sub, then you already know so much about the setting. BZ fundamentally cannot be the same experience, but that does not mean it can't be incredible in its own way. That said, many of those other reviewers sound like they really power gamed or min/maxed Sub, and if you're that kind of player then their reviews may actually be helpful for you. But if you are in it for the story, and aren't trying to unlock literally everything before completing the game, then my comments may be helpful. My points above already address several criticisms, but here are some more specific ones (very mild spoilers):

1. "These vehicles suck. Sub vehicles were better." -- for Sub vehicles, I can't think of a single bad thing about the seamoth, it was wonderful, but the cyclops and prawn suit were pretty awkward and restrictive. But I didn't even care. They were just what they were. I loved my cyclops and prawn suit. I lived with the awkwardness and embraced what was wonderful about them. BZ vehicles are no different. There are good things and bad things about them. I don't think their shortcomings are any different than Sub vehicles, they're just different.

2. "The map was so much more confusing, and important stuff was harder to find or more hidden." -- I literally had to look up a guide to finish Sub because I couldn't find a key item. In BZ not one single blueprint or item that I actually acquired was as hard to find. They weren't just sitting in the open, but it wasn't in some secret cave I wasn't going to find without a scanner room. Both games do have an element of randomness in the form of how much you actually just explore your environments. I got stuck a couple times in BZ looking for some blueprints, but I just went to the places I knew I hadn't explored yet and easily stumbled across the blueprints. Same as in Sub. But hey, you can also just use scanner rooms to find stuff. That's what they're for.

3. "The story is a mess." -- I truly have no idea how people can say this. Maybe they played an earlier build that was different (if early builds were even that different), but the story I experienced in the first 2 weeks of Jan 2022 was perfectly coherent, understandable, and enjoyable. Not everyone is going to like every story, that is incredibly valid, but I think the story is far from a mess. Sub's story was incredible, and I was really affected by the end. Well I loved BZ's story and how it ended, too. As I mentioned above, it's a very different story, so you may not like it, but I think it's wonderful in its own way.

4. "The world isn't as spooky/scary" -- I think there's a minor element of truth to this, but I also think folks are taking for granted that they learned to deal with a lot of scary elements by playing Sub. First time going to many areas in BZ were real scary to me, but once I realized what the dangers were, and got to see all the creatures, I quickly fell into late stage Sub energy, where I could travel around pretty freely without worry. Sub just taught me how to handle those fears. The only exception is the big leviathan you have to contend with late game, which I always treated with a healthy amount of extreme caution.

Hope this helps someone.

Compared to the first Subnautica, I feel like there are numerous minor improvements in this one. The most notable being the fact that it feels far less grindy when gathering materials. Materials are spaced in a much better fashion and are not nearly as annoying to collect. There are also numerous sections that are designed for you to have to navigate without a vehicle early on using plants that give about 30 sec of oxygen and take time to recharge that add a lot to the feel of the game. The AI for many of the creatures also appears to be significantly better than in the first game, although they still run into walls. There's a much heavier focus on story in this one as well, and the writing is quite good at times. I overall think this game has much more interesting designs on many of the creatures (although others fall flat), but it has nothing on the scale of the Sea Dragon or Emperor from the first game, which I found disappointing.

There are also quite a few things this one doesn't do as well as the first game unfortunately. I don't know if there are actually less creatures in the world, but it feels as though there are. Some environments feel just as interesting as in the first game, but others feel very bland once you spend some time in them. The crystal caves at the end have fantastic visual and level design, but aside from the (very cool) shadow leviathans, there's nothing new or special about the area really. It mostly contains the same creatures you'll find in numerous other locations. The following red crystal area is even smaller and more disappointing in that regard. It's just one big loop effectively, with the same creatures as the preceding area for the most part. Squid Sharks are particularly cool in my opinion, but they get heavily overused. The shadow leviathans are awesome, but they effectively just fill the same role as ghost leviathans in the first game. The other major ocean threat leviathan in the game has an interesting design, but doesn't even begin to inspire the fear that the reaper leviathan does in the first game. There are also few less of them than reapers, which leads to most of the ocean feeling relatively safe, which is a shame.

The place where this game suffers the most is the place where it deviates the most from its predecessor - the land gameplay. It's simply not very good. The animations on land are still very stiff and there's no option to crouch. The snow fox is cool, but flips easily and you'll spend half the time getting knocked off of it by the ice worms. The ice worms themselves are too on the nose and lack any real suspense. I was never afraid they were coming - it was obvious they were and they were more of a nuisance than an actual threat. I thought the land environment was very interesting and well designed, but the gameplay just doesn't support it well. There are numerous mechanics that work great under water that just don't translate (or look good) on land.

Overall it's a great game and I would recommend it. But, I would recommend the first one more. During the first part of this game, I was very immersed and was even enjoying myself more than the first game, but after only a short time it felt very small. Without an equivalent for reapers to box you in, there's really not much you can't just go explore very quickly, and it's far less scary of a game once you get familiar with it. There are also no major events like the Aurora exploding or the Skybeam (or whatever it's called) getting shot down, making the game feel less active as it progresses. The later areas are far less mysterious and interesting than the final zones in the first game. The alien sites are much less impressive and much less interesting, which is a shame considering the focus on alien sites in this one. If you like the first game, you'll probably like this one, but if you haven't played the first game and are deciding on one or the other, get the first game.

I have 291 hours in original game.
I have 28 hours in this one.

I'm not going to thumbs down the game... but I'll let you decide what I mean by the above.