Subnautica Below Zero, a fabulous game designed and published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment, was released on the 30th of January 2019, following up on the huge impact that the original Subnautica had on the gaming industry. The game is a science fiction, open-world, survival game with the aim to escape a planet that has almost entirely frozen over.
You (Robin) adventure your way through many biomes and alien research facilities to eventually find a mind-reading alien that gets stuck inside your head. Fear not, though, as this alien named Alen is trying to help you escape the planet as he believes that you can find a new body for him. Claps to Unknown Worlds Entertainment for creating this brilliant new beginning for their game. It gives an unusually satisfactory feeling to the player with the sense of being lost all on your own but finding company, not in the way the player would expect.
Subnautica Below Zero has been modified to be different from the original Subnautica, taking place on land half the time and adding the requirement of keeping warm. This new aspect to the game gives an exciting treat to the new players of the game. Although, there are also many more terrifying leviathans. Such as the Shadow Leviathan, an absolutely terrifying creature found deep within the Crystal Caves.
There are positive improvements as well, such as the new vehicles like the Fox Glider and the Sea Bus. In my personal experience with these vehicles, I believe that the Cyclops was the best vehicle that was only released in the original game. In all fairness, though, I don’t think that you would be able to pilot the Cyclops, seeing as the map in Subnautica Below Zero is much tighter than the original game.
Another great thing about the game is the graphics. They’re immaculate and smooth (most of the time), making the game even more wonderful than it already was. There were a couple of glitches and bugs, but even when the game first came out for beta testing, it still had great graphics. This shows that Unknown Worlds Entertainment has really improved and understood some of the features that needed to be fixed. Players were satisfied with the standards that had been set for the game but were still impressed with the final product.
To conclude my summary of the game, I would say it’s a seven and a half out of ten for gameplay, nine and a half out of ten for graphics, and a nine out of ten for storyline. Therefore, a great eight of ten for Subnautica Below Zero. I think that my rating for how I feel about this game is a little biased because of how much I struggled in the first couple of hours playing, just trying to figure out where all the biomes were. I’m also not considering many of the flaws in the game, for example, how I lost my 13-hour game progress just because I somehow landed behind an Alterra Base and was stuck there permanently. But alas, I still think that Subnautica deserves the eight-and-a-half vote, as Subnautica Below Zero is an incredibly well-designed game.