4/5 ★ – usagichann's review of Subnautica: Below Zero.

Below Zero is the DLC'esque follow up to the smash hit Subnautica. Coming out a few years after the original Subnautica, the game returns you back to the watery planet of 4546b and puts you in the shoes of a new protagonist, now both named and voiced. The original Subnautica also put you in the shoes of a named protagonist, but it wasn't obvious and you had to work a bit to find out his name. The previous game, the only voices you heard were those of distress calls and some PDA blogs, but this time, right from the start, the game puts live voices in your view. You get jettisoned out of a passing ship to go find your sister, crash on the planet unceremoiously and have to go find a life pod. If it sounds familiar, its because it very much is the start of the original subnautica. There are some differences of cousre, but its not all that different. This new DLC game (its a standalone game, but its contents are much smaller than the original subnautica) puts you in the Arctic region of the planet, and thus everything is cold. Temperature is now a factor in the overland regions, of which there are several. There are multiple ways to keep from freezing, food, a type of heating plants, and of course, your trusty vehicles like the prawn suit. Entering any buildling or cave also preserves temperature, so the mechanic isn't as drastic as it might first seem. The designers clearly wanted to make sure that overland exploration is without any dangers like running out of oxygen, and the temperature mechanic is not a terrible way of doing it. Below water however, its a balmy 30c, and temperature never comes into play. This was a bit disappointed and makes no sense, but ok, for the sake of gameplay. The arctic region is apparently as life filled as the nice safe shallows in the original subnautica game and partly its for the asset re-use. You see mostly the same plants, the same fishes, and 99% of the same buildling material used in the first game. The map is also a whole lot smaller underwater. The game tries to make it up with more overland sequences, but really, no one plays subnautica for the overland region. Its a novelty, and not much else. Back to the story. The original subnautica had a story, but required you to work quite a bit for it, with both PDAs and scanning objects until you found the requisite quest path. This time, the quest path is pretty much throwin your face. You don't even need to build or fix the radio and you already have a quest. Finding your sister, and investigating her cause of death. Halfway through, another quest pops up and that one is much more satisfying. Both quests basically involve you going back and forth between various locations, finding materials, and surviving whatever environments are thrown at you. The game play loop is just as satisfying in that respect, but part of the appeal of the previous game was base buildling. However, due to the small size of the map, I never had to build anything more than a tiny base. and only in 3 locations. I never bothered with having a mobile base to scan for materials and objects, and there are only 2 wrecks to explore this time. Partly this is explained by the fact that we've done it all before. There's really nothing new that Below Zero brings in besides the overland portions and the new Sea Truck. The sea truck is basically the cyclops and sea moth bundled into one modular package. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but after you do, you appreciate how useful the sea truck is. It can tow modules that are flexible like the fabricator module, the storage module, the sleeping module, and the docking module for your prawn suit. The only thing you can't do is build inside the sea truck, mostly as a means to make sure you really do need to build a base once in a while. Otherwise you'd just have a blank module where you build everything you need in there. When you're not towing, the sea truck has basically the same manuverbility of the sea moth, if not the speed. It can fit in tiny spaces and you can upgrade it to withstand deeper pressures. All in all, having played both games back to back, I appreciate the difficulty that the deveolopers had with this DLC. How to make something new, that's not just remaking subnautica, and in a new environment without re-creating everything. These set of compromises made the game difficult for the devs to balance and make sense, and they did the best of it. I still recommend it, but maybe play this game with some gap between subnautica and below zero. Oh, cramped spaces. the whole game is full of cramped spaces. There's not a lot of space for you to bulid a super nice base underwater, and you'll end up doing a lot of it above water in the areas you do care about. Still recommended though! Its just not as good as the first one.