I would have probably preferred less of this to make room for more water areas. Subnautica has won the Golden Joystick’s Game of the Year award Tom and Scott were on hand on the night in the UK. Even with the addition of the agile Snowfox hoverbike, it still felt like a side area. Subnautica wins Golden Joystick Game of the Year - Unknown Worlds. The game's unique elements and story have granted it worldwide fame and admiration. It is the studios first project since it was acquired by PUBG developer Krafton late last year. Subnautica is a water-based survival game that pits players against the dangers of planet 4546B. It's a nice change of pace, but it doesn't really match up to the underwater adventures that make Subnautica so cool. Not only is a new Subnautica game in development. There's a good helping of new stationary base modules, too, for building and decorating your own deep sea research station or party pad.The other big addition is the glacier that takes up the Northwest corner of the map, where you'll have plenty of oxygen but constantly battle hypothermia and a variety of land predators. This lets you operate an entirely mobile base, while also giving you the option to detach the cabin and pilot it independently when you really need speed. Instead, you get the rugged Sea Truck, a modular vehicle that can be equipped with extra storage, a crafting station, and a docking bay for the trusty Prawn Suit. Gone are the zippy Seamoth and the colossal Cyclops submersibles. I got to the point that I could close my eyes and make a rough mental map of what kind of creatures were around, including their relative position and distance – which is not only useful but pretty damn impressive that it's possible at all in such a huge, 3D environment.īelow Zero's gameplay feels instantly familiar, but has gotten some nice touch-ups across the board. The icy, oppressive, yet beckoning feeling of the Arctic sea really comes alive when you can hear the distant calls of massive oceanic life forms and the bubbling of your rebreather through the shimmering gloom. The sound design and music are also just as awesome as ever.
It’s a testament to how enticing those secrets are that I’m willing to face my fears and plunge my submersible into the darkest corners of its unforgiving ocean again and again." - Leana Hafer, JanuScore: 9.0Read the full Subnautica Review Even with more than 50 hours sunk, I have yet to discover all of its secrets. It’s fantastical, fresh, and frightening from surface to seabed, with a story that kept on surprising me and a cast of sea monsters that quite literally haunted my dreams. Getting to the good stuff though requires exploring ever more dangerous areas, which demands specialist diving equipment and not getting eaten by the horrible great sea monsters that lurk outside the shallows."Subnautica is a template for what open-world survival games should strive to be. Give it the right raw materials and it can make almost anything for you, and so the backbone of the game becomes trawling the ocean depths to find animals, vegetables, and minerals to transmute into something more useful.Ĭreating anything technological requires you to search out salvage, but eventually you’re able to start churning out various kinds of submarines and even whole underwater sea-bases. Luckily, most of the gadgets in your escape pod still work, most importantly a device that is essentially the replicator out of Star Trek. And if there’s one thing your new ocean home has it’s a lot of fish. Although that turns out to be reassuringly easy because you just have to catch the right fish. You’ll soon learn that while all those grotesque-looking fish are fascinating when David Attenborough is narrating them, when you’re swimming along in the murky depths, and about to be eviscerated by them, it’s a very different story.Īll of that comes later though, and since this is a survival game your first priority is ensuring a steady supply of food and water.
The basic structure is reminiscent of a cross between No Man’s Sky and Minecraft, but the horror element is emphasised to the point where it can go toe-to-toe with dedicated survival horrors. The next game from the Subnautica devs isnt Subnautica 3, but it does launch next year Subnautica players found a developers time capsule hidden in the game Subnautica dev fired over a series of. While it is accurate to describe Subnautica as an open world survival game, it’s actually a pleasingly difficult game to pigeonhole. If you haven’t heard about it before we don’t think you’ll alone in that, but we certainly expect that to change now that it’s a proper release.
Only the PC version is out of early access at the moment, but the Xbox One version is due to follow later this year, and a PlayStation 4 edition sometime after that. Subnautica has been in early access on the PC since 2014, and on Xbox One since last year, so this is a game that has been in development for a long time.