SUBNAUTICA 2 gets full trailer

Developers Unknown Worlds have unveiled the full trailer for Subnautica 2, their long-awaited sequel their aquatic-based science fiction exploration game/thalassophobia simulator.

The game is set on a brand-new planet, with an entire team of explorers dispatched to investigate the underwater phenomena on this planet. How, or if, the new game will tie into the story and events of Subnautica and its standalone expansion Below Zero remains to be seen.

The game will launch into Early Access in early 2025 via the XBox partner programme. It's unclear what this means for a potential release, for EA or the full game, on Steam or PlayStation. We should get more information next year.

Subnautica: Below Zero

Scientist Robin Ayou is dissatisfied with the official reports about the death of her sister, Samantha. Samantha died on the remote planet 4546B due to "employee negligence," according to Alterra Corporation. With Alterra withdrawing all personnel from the planet for unknown reasons, Robin smuggles herself onto 4546B and finds an arctic zone teeming with life and unexplained mysteries, some alluding to the disappearance of the starship Aurora in the vicinity. Robin's investigations into her sister's fate leads her to meet survivors of other expeditions...some from a very long time ago, and not even human.

Below Zero started life as an expansion or DLC for the original Subnautica but, as is so often the case, developed over time into an original title. This leaves it as that sometimes confusing beast, the "stand-alone expansion," a game that is smaller and more focused than the original but is newer, so has somewhat shinier graphics and improved quality-of-life features, like a better user interface and expanded base-building options.

As with most expansions (standalone or not), it would be very easy to say, "if you like Subnautica, you'll like this," and leave it at that. That is, as far is goes, true. However, Below Zero is something of a different beast to its forebear, being both slightly more difficult and somewhat more focused on its narrative.

The original Subnautica had you (playing Ryley Robinson) as the sole survivor of a starship crash, left initially fending for survival in tropical waters and later having to find your way off the planet whilst also battling an alien infection. The narrative elements were light, mostly appearing only in PDA entries and voice logs. Still, these elements drew players deeper and deeper below the planet's surface, eventually finding a way of curing their disease and fabricating the parts needed to build an escape shuttle.

Below Zero has you arriving on the planet deliberately, in search of your missing sister, although your only way of getting there is to hitch a lift with a passing ship and bailing out when nearby, with no ultimate exit strategy. This time you land in an arctic region, which introduces a major new problem that Ryley didn't have to worry about: freezing to death. Sticking your head above water long enough to breathe is fine, but staying out of the water for a few minutes is an invitation to turn into a popsicle. Building a base and vehicles are therefore more urgent tasks than in the original game, since these provide a respite from both suffocation and hypothermia during your explorations of the planet. However, building materials have been changed slightly since the original game, making building up a base slightly more difficult. Titanium, in particular, is thinner on the ground since you have not got a thousand-metre long wrecked starship leaving a miles-long trail of titanium parts across the biome this time around. A Subnautica veteran will overcome these issues in short order, but newcomers may find a game with a tricky difficulty curve.

As with Subnautica, the early part of the game is spent building up resources and building your initial tools, starting with a knife and expanding to torches, a base-building nano-device and small vehicles, like a "Seatruck," which can be expanded later on with additional modules (thus combining the functionality of the both the Seamoth submersible and the giant Cyclops submarine from the original game). Acquiring more tools and more equipment allows you to dive for longer and travel further across the map, eventually discovering the various Alterra facilities your sister was working at. Finding clues in each base leads you to the next location of note. Below Zero's selling point is that at several points your mission will lead you onto land, onto the massive frozen landmasses that envelop the map around its northern edge. Avoiding freezing is even harder than avoiding suffocating, requiring you to use vehicles (like the trusty Prawn Suit, returning from the OG game, or the new Snowfox hover-bike) or make judicious use of spicy food or standing next to hot springs.

All of this is mostly fun. Things are enhanced by a larger array of base-building options, with large, multi-purpose rooms and control rooms (allowing you to control power distribution and the visual theme of the base better) now available. The developers have also dramatically upgraded the game's engine, with slightly better graphics, far less crashes and clipping and some nice new options, like the ability to pin ingredients to your screen to stay on top of the things you are looking for. A new handheld scanner also makes locating minerals easier, though its range is extremely limited.

The traditional Subnautica gameplay loop - find, build, explore, repeat - remains compelling, but Below Zero does have a few limitations which means it's not quite as exciting this time around. The first is that Below Zero is a smaller game. The area of explorable ocean and seabed is much smaller and it's not as deep a game. Literally. In Subnautica you could drop down about two kilometres below the planet's surface, but Below Zero barely reaches half that, and there's not much in the deepest areas that require you to stay down there. This combination means that there's no Cyclops super-submarine - it literally couldn't fit down the crevasses leading to the deeper biomes - commanding which was possibly the single greatest thing about the original game.

In addition, exploring the surface arctic biomes is initially a refreshing change, but rapidly becomes more tedious. It's too easy to get turned around and end up walking in circles, and the various hostile creatures you encounter (the Snow Stalkers and Ice Worm Leviathans) are more inconvenient than actually dangerous. It's also a shorter game, easily completable in under 30 hours, whilst the original game took at least 40 hours to polish off and there was greater encouragement to do optional tasks like building bases in every biome or exploring more for the sake of exploration. You can still do stuff like that in Below Zero, but the much smaller map means you'll exhaust the game's opportunities pretty quickly.

I did enjoy Below Zero's more present story. The original Subnautica could be very obtuse in letting you know what your next goal actually was, whilst Below Zero makes it clearer through voice logs and even (gasp) actual cutscenes and conversations with other characters what your next goal is. The same dual mission structure as the original game is in play here as well, with you originally having to cure an alien plague to shut down a defence system before you could escape the planet. In Below Zero you have to find out what happened to your sister, complete her mission and then deal with a secondary objective related to various alien ruins on the planet. Those who enjoyed the sparseness of the original game (where your character never spoke, unlike here) might feel the story more intrusive here, but in reality the game is still 95% you doing your own thing to 5% story, as opposed to the original game's 99% to 1%. I also enjoyed the fact that there's more friendly flora and fauna, like the Sea Monkeys who are an initial annoyance but later help you find resources.

Subnautica: Below Zero (****) is not Subnautica 2, but it is a fun, enjoyable game that takes the original game's appeal, sands off some of the rough edges and introduces some quality of life improvements that make the game flow better, as well as featuring a better story. However, it does also struggle with a slightly steeper learning curve than the original game, the absence of some fan-favourite creatures and vehicles, and a significantly smaller map. I would certainly recommend that newcomers start with the original Subnautica before moving onto this game. Below Zero is available now for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and X/S, and Nintendo Switch.

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Wertzone Classics: Subnautica

The starship Aurora has crash-landed on planet 4546B, which is largely covered by oceans. The crew has bailed out in escape pods, but only one, Ryley Robinson, has the great fortune to land in a shallow area devoid of hostile creatures. With a functional fabricator, which can turn basic elements into tools, survival gear and components, Ryley sets out to be build a way off the planet...and learn why the Aurora was even there in the first place.

Subnautica is a game that takes great, great delight in putting you in a desperate, apparently insurmountable situation and letting you get on with it, to sink or swim (literally, in this case). Emerging from your escape pod to find nothing but water stretching to the horizon is one of the most striking openings to a video game ever. The only thing you can see is your crashed spaceship...which very quickly explodes, spewing radiation everywhere and preventing you from getting anywhere near it.

Fortunately, if there's nothing on the surface that's of use (which isn't quite as true as it first appears), the same cannot be said of the seabed. The ocean is teeming with fish, fauna and mineral deposits, not to mention a trail of debris from the Aurora which provides a rich source of resources. Your escape pod's fabricator - think of a Star Trek replicator - can create almost anything but requires raw materials. At the start of the game you can easily acquire things like quartz, copper, titanium, silver and gold, which can be fed into the fabricator to create repair tools and a device to help you build a modest habitat. As the game proceeds you can create a radiation suit to explore the Aurora, which in turn provides you with more blueprints to build vehicles and more sophisticated base facilities...and opens up a mystery as to why the Aurora was even in this star system in the first place.

A key thing to understand about Subnautica is that it is a game that expands downwards. Your early explorations will probably end up with you getting an oxygen tank so you can dive deeper without worrying about suffocating so fast, and fins to dramatically increase your speed. This allows you to reach rarer resources, which can be used to craft vehicles. These vehicles can remove your breathing problems altogether and, upgraded to reach greater and greater crush depths, can reach hitherto unknown resources. Rinse and repeat until, around twenty hours into the game, you are guiding a submarine bigger than a bus through caverns more than a kilometre below the surface, trying to track down the yet rarer resources you need to start building an escape vehicle from the planet. Of course, even that is not straightforward, with various other problems cropping up that you need to deal with before you can even think about leaving.

It's a game that focuses on exploration over almost anything else. The underwater landscape is divided horizontally and vertically into different biomes, each with their own resources, unique lifeforms and plant life, most of which can be harvested for resources in one fashion or another. The map feels gargantuan at the start, although once you unlock the Seamoth (a zippy submersible) you soon realise it's not really that massive. It's the combination of horizontal and vertical space that allows the to game to pack in a lot of variety. It's only when you find your way into a huge undersea cavern system that you may find the process of getting back and forth a little laborious, which leads to the fun of building a second base, wholly underwater this time and without the readily-available solar power of your starting location. And from here you can dive even further, into areas that are increasingly strange, dangerous...and rewarding.

Subnautica is a game that gets under your skin. There's a fairly linear progression of unlocking new equipment and options that eventually leads to the endgame, but it's startlingly easy to get sidetracked. Building bases is fun, even if there are only a few useful rooms you can construct. Creating your own multi-level aquarium is utterly pointless, but looks really cool. Constructing a luxurious bedroom is a bit of a waste of time (apart from being able to rest to speed up the day/night cycle, and once you're a hundred metres below the surface, that becomes immaterial) but making a cool pad with posters and a cuddly toy you've recovered from a wreck just feels fun. You can build a coffee maker that serves no useful purpose whatsoever, aside from the fact your character is probably feeling an urgent need for caffeine at all times. Subnautica is a game that rewards creativity and creative thinking, and sometimes going off-course for tens of hours to fulfil some random urge (like building a base in every biome, or constructing an underwater tunnel from one end of the map to the other, or putting out every fire on the Aurora) can be as satisfying as eventually completing the game's story.

Subnautica is a richly atmospheric game. The sparse soundtrack is excellent and the graphics are evocative, such as your first glimpse of an underwater volcano surrounded by lava, or diving into the shallows at night when everything is lit up by bioluminescence. Your first foray into the underwater caverns is a hair-raising moment when you realise how far you are from the surface if something goes wrong. But the game makes a great virtue of first making you feel utterly helpless, but then giving you a way of dealing with every situation. Having to dodge the ocean's apex predators near the start of the game is nerve-wracking, but coming back later on to deal out some payback via a mech suit loaded with micro-torpedoes and packing a massive skull-drill (well, actually a drill for minerals, but it's versatile) is incredibly satisfying, even if combat is not a particular focus of the game (and you never need to fight anything at all to complete the game, if you prefer a pacifist approach). Subnautica evolves from being a survival game into something of a power fantasy, first by making you feel like an utterly inadequate victim of the environment to eventually feeling like the absolute master of it...at least until some trivial mistake or a run-in with a predator at the wrong moment can take the shine off that smugness, at least a little.

As survival games go, Subnautica might be the very greatest by the way it gives you a punishingly hard situation but also the tools to overcome it, and a goal to work towards. The presence of a story with several major sub-strands is also a welcome change for the genre. The story elements are low-key, mostly advanced through reading codex entries and finding certain locations later in the game, but give you an objective beyond just "survive."

As far as negatives go, there are a few. Subnautica was created by a very small team on a very low budget, and the game does have a few bugs that have not been corrected, despite it being eight years since the game entered Early Access and four since it was given a full release. Particularly annoying is that the game sometimes fails to recognise that you've switched from an underwater environment to a dry one, sometimes leaving you "swimming" through air or "walking" through water, unable to travel vertically. This only happened three or four times in a 40-hour playthrough, but it was slightly annoying. There are also clipping issues, and some weird work-arounds to save memory (for the console versions) which come across as bizarre. For example (spoilers!), there actually are landmasses on the surface of the planet and pretty close to your crash site, but the game hides them in masses of cloud which feels weird and artificial. Vertical descents to the sea floor can also see a lot of sudden texture pop-in.

Other issues have to do with plausibility: the fact there isn't an in-game map feels really silly, since you can fabricate multiple huge bases and a fairly big submarine, but not a piece of A4 paper you fill in as the game proceeds? As it stands, vertical navigation can be a bit of a pain, especially with your big submarine, when all you have to go on are some vague directions from a voice log and a few beacons you can drop. The developers apparently thought a map would make the game too easy, or the ocean less mysterious and threatening, which I understand, but it also makes the game a little too irritating at times.

But all of these problems, as present as they are, ultimately pale into insignificance compared to the game's riches. Diving deep to grab a resource you urgently need to complete a vital project and making it back to the surface with seconds to spare. Fending off a crab-squid to make it into an undersea wreck containing the next piece of an important puzzle. The first time you build a Seamoth and are suddenly flitting about in seconds distances you used to need half an hour to cover. Building a sprawling base and sitting outside to watch the sun go down. The first time you find a peaceful cave in the hazardous undersea caverns and realise you can build a new base down there. Or the first time you scare off an huge leviathan of the deeps, having always hidden from them in terror before.

Subnautica (****½) is a game rich in atmosphere, superb in its design and compelling in the creative freedom it gives you. As far as survival and exploration games go, this is one of the very best, and a worthwhile gaming experience for everybody who doesn't have a crippling fear of the deep. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. A stand-alone expansion/sequel, Subnautica: Below Zero, is also available. A revamped "Subnautica 2.0" is also currently in development, for release in the next few months, which should remove most of the lingering bugs and will add new UI improvements and expanded base-building.

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