Subnautica 2 Early Access Preview

After navigating perilous corporate waters during its development, Subnautica 2 has finally splashed down in early access. As the sequel to the smash hit Subnautica - arguably one of the better Survival games of recent years - Subnautica 2 has to carefully navigate the perilous reefs of high expectations. Does Subnautica 2 manage to sail off into the sunset as a worthy successor, or does the burden of its glorious predecessor cause it to founder and sink below the waves? Okay, enough nautical puns, here’s what we thought of Subnautica 2’s early access launch!

View Full-size

Subnautica 2 doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to setting the stage for your adventure, but it provides more than enough mystery to encourage you to take that first step!

Into the Drink

As far as setting and backstory go, Subnautica 2 doesn’t trend far from genre keystones (a more cynical gamer might call them tropes); after a less-than-ideal awakening, you’re forced into a perilous escape, which leaves you stranded, alone, on an unknown world. With only a chatty AI named NoA and the recordings of your forebears to keep you company, you’ve got to explore this mysterious water-world in search of answers. Where are you? Why are you here? What happened to everybody else? It might not reinvent the wheel, but it’s a good enough hook to get you out of your Lifepod and into the water.

Data in the Deep

We won’t dwell on the story too much - there’s an exploitative yet absent corporation, an AI guide of dubious trustworthiness, and an insidious indigenous lifeform whose influence must be investigated. Your reward and goal in Subnautica 2’s early access release is to explore and find answers to these questions, and in most cases, to find more questions in need of answers. Story is doled out almost exclusively through recordings found scattered throughout the world, and while many of them are optional, your AI overseer, NoA, will guide you to the most important of these data downloads. This, aside from a Databank entry you can read, are the only in-guide guides at the moment, and even then they only pop up after you’ve completed previous objectives and enough in-game time has passed.

View Full-size

Finding resources and scannable objects gives great incentive to explore,

View Full-size

and building bases and crafting upgrades so you can explore further completes a great gameplay loop!

One More Dive!

This light handholding encourages exploration and when you find your progress blocked, encourages you to find solutions, usually in the form of adaptations, vehicles, tools, equipment or base facilities. Finding data downloads might be the goal, but exploration, crafting and building are the meat of the experience. Swimming around and picking up loose minerals, flora and fauna will suffice at first, but eventually you’ll need a Survival Multitool to harvest hardier resources, followed by a Sonic Resonator for even more durable deposits. This dovetails into seeking out higher capacity oxygen tanks and ways to move faster underwater to expand your range and eventually base-building to provide new ports-in-the-storm and superior crafting facilities.

Layer these needs with finding food and water, searching for ruins so you can scan for new recipes among the debris, and suddenly you’ve spent your entire day under the sea. One of Subnautica 2’s greatest achievements is an addictive gameplay loop - instead of “One more turn”, your struggles to quit a gaming session will be to the refrain of “one more dive”. I need gold for this, I need to catch some food, I want to explore those ruins… There’s always an excuse!

No Combat. No Maps.

Where Subnautica 2 does deviate from the Survival genre are the contentious issues of combat and navigation. There’s no map to aid you, nor can you permanently dispatch hostile flora and fauna, and while both of these decisions ultimately feel like the correct ones to have made for the game’s atmosphere and gameplay loop, we do wish there was a way to ward off enemies near your bases. A facility that repels predators, perhaps? Even without this, it’s not a major issue - trying to build your base near a current or geothermal vent might just have downsides you have to cope with.

While there’s no map, the NoA AI you’re burdened with will track some objectives (temporarily), and you can create bases and deploy beacons to help guide you, not to mention you’ve got a robust compass at the top of screen. If you’re not enthralled by exploring, preparing for longer expeditions with the tools you’ll need (including beacons), managing your inventory, and perhaps making notes about points of interest, all without the promise of reciprocal violence, Subnautica 2 may not be the game for you. Fortunately, you’ll know whether this is the case or not within a few hours, as aside from the introductory setpiece, the core gameplay loop doesn’t change much over the course of the available early access content.

View Full-size

There’s a story significant pickup on this screen. See it? No? Yeah, we didn’t either - encouraging exploration is one thing, pixel-hunting for objectives is another.

Some Bugs and Friction Under the Sea

Subnautica 2 does much to turn potential negatives into positives - we’re fans of Survival games but generally dislike directionless games, lopsided combat and… well, any underwater segments. Subnautica 2 manages to turn these into strengths, or at least render them relatively inoffensive.

It’s not all smooth sailing, however, and while we know the game is in early access, that doesn’t mean some points of friction aren’t worth mentioning. A heavy emphasis on exploration with marginal handholding is fine, but one particular objective saw us lost for an hour in a cave. Not because we didn’t know where to go - we followed a variety of recordings to a likely destination - but because the actual black box we needed to find was just so hard to spot, we missed it several times. A map marker pointing us right to the destination would have undermined the exploration, but making the objective more visible when we were already nearby would have been a positive change.

Another issue was with base building, a part of the game we spent an awful lot of time doing, as it’s one of our favorite parts in these games. Building expansive, frequent bases is discouraged simply due to limited resources, which is fine. One big base per biome and a few smaller bases (a humble room, hatch, biobed, processor, and fabricator can make it a lot easier to explore locations far from your base!) worked well, but even that was touchy given that the game - for whatever reason - never wanted us to fully delete a base when created. Using the Tadpole as a mobile base can work in a pinch, but we’re still not sure why that last little strip of room couldn’t be broken down.

View Full-size

While exploration is one of the game’s strong points, some late game quest objectives see you travelling back and forth hundreds of meters between objectives, being more tedious busy-work than engaging exploration.

Finally, while exploration is one of the game’s biggest selling points, there’s a difference between exploring and tedious hauling. This especially became a problem in the game’s third biome, where you’d have to make trips 400-800 meters away from base to collect specific, rare resources and deal with quest objectives. This could take literal minutes, and while a Tadpole and Beacons made the process almost automatic, having to waste so much time transporting loot back to base, crafting newfound recipes, and attending to NoA every time it had a new update wasn’t our definition of riveting gameplay. Perhaps the ability to fully deconstruct bases would have made us more willing to build a second base in that biome, which is something we expect to be corrected in later updates, but being able to build a point-to-point transportation system that speeds up the process would be welcome.

Sea’s Bounty

All in all, Subnautica 2 offers a great experience already, and it’s hard to get truly worked up about any of its shortcomings, considering how many early-game gripes were solved with upgrades. At some point early access had to end, and we suspect some of our late-game gripes will also be resolved in similar ways. As it stands now, Subnautica 2’s early access content is a great foundation for another excellent survival game, and in our opinion is already worth the $29.99 asking price. Anything that comes after this is a bonus.