Subnautica Review (Verdict: Excellent)

Hello folks,

Those of you who read my blog (thank you) will know that I've said the next sentence time and time again: I'm very wary of spending full game price on VR games, because the quality is so varying.

Prior to the Steam Summer Sale (see previous post), I only purchased one VR game. I did this after having pretty much exhausted the most obvious free games and experiences on Steam, and only after a lot of research.

The game I bought was Subnautica and I paid £14.99 for it. It is currently 50% discounted on Steam at the moment, so until July 5th you can buy it for £7.49.

Technically Subnautica is in "Early Access" release, which means it is not a finished game. However, as you can see in the Subnautica Blog, it's been in development for a few years already, so even though there's still a lot of polish that can be added, it is already a great in-depth experience that you can spend many many hours enjoying and exploring.

So What's Subnautica About?

The basic premise of the game is that your space ship has crashed landed whilst you were in the vicinity of a water planet. Luckily, your life pod ejected before impact and saved your life, managing to absorb it's own landing and successfully inflate the bouyancy aids. This is where you begin the game, you have literally just landed and you need to start working out where you are and what you need to do to keep yourself alive.

As soon as you venture outside, you realise that water effectively covers 100% of the planet surface and therefore all life is in the sea, returning back inside your life pod and checking the replicator, you can start to learn what resources you need to gather to construct basic survival tools.

The game has various modes to suit the type of gamer, but in the default Survival mode, you need to eat and drink to stay alive, and also you need to breathe, which as this game is mostly underwater, is probably the biggest challenge out of eat/sleep/breathe to manage.

How the Game Plays

Food and water, whilst being an important factor in survival mode, is not such a great task to manage. As long as you keep a check on your levels and make sure you keep a stock of water specifically, you don't really need to worry too much about staying on top of these. Before you set out for a long expedition, as long as you've fed and watered yourself and you keep a small stock in your inventory, you'll be fine.

It's really oxygen that defines how you play this game. To start off with, you can hold your breath for 45 seconds, which really means you begin by swimming in the shallows and the range of your exploration is taking expeditionary dives underwater to explore specific areas of the sea bed or to gather resources. Pretty soon you can craft a basic oxygen tank, which whilst only giving you an extra 30 seconds, makes a big difference to your underwater scuba diving. The next big initial step is that it is not too long before you can build a small submarine vessel. The vessel produces oxygen for you, which means now you can go deeper and explore much more, and only need to worry about your oxygen level when you leave your craft to gather some resources or enter a confined space.

The limitations of oxygen and this slow-but-steady development of your abilities really define how the game works overall. Initially you are presented with a very limiting factor, by exploration and trial-and-error you can understand how to overcome that challenge, then that part becomes easy and you move onto the next task. Thus, you can start to explore more and more of the world and get further into the game.

The other main method of advancement is technology. Using a tool you create fairly early in the game, you can start to gather blueprints based on stuff you find lying around when you explore, and this lets you build better and bigger things.

The Subnautica World

The Subnautica world is a beautiful and exciting place to explore in VR. The world is made up of different biomes where different flora and fauna live and there are several times when you get a new sense of wonder at new creatures you find as you explore further and deeper. I won't give up further details on this because it will spoil the game, but there have been several times when I have stopped what I was doing and just swam around a new creature in amazement because I'd never seen anything like it before in the game.

There is also a genuine sense of danger in exploring the seas, something that I think VR enhances. When diving into the deeper spaces, concern for oxygen is genuine. That cave over there that looks like it twists and turns, how far do you explore before you worry about if you can get back in time? Also, not all the sea life is friendly and there are creatures in this game that will either have you instantly concerned if you spot them first, or will put you into a panic if they manage to creep up on you.

Your space ship was large and other life pods were ejected. You get a helping hand in the first hours of the game as your lifepod computer picks up on signals from the surrounding area and invites you to explore them. It's possible that there are some other survivors and even if there are not, there might be some tech you can scavenge to help your own situation. Plus, the space ship crash landed in shallows and is always in view, perhaps you can visit what's left of the hull and find out why it crashed.

There is a basic plot to the game, which you are gently nudged along in the early parts of the game thanks to the signals your lifepod picks up, but really you are never pushed to follow it. Furthermore, after you receive a bunch they just stop, and then you are really left up to your own devices. Personally, although I like being able to explore freely and not be confined to the story, I can't help but feeling it is a bit too light in Subnautica. Exploring or not, I always like to know what I need to do next to get further along in the story, and after a while you are really left just to work it out yourself.

Graphics and Sound

The sound in Subnautica is spot on. Various creatures have their own sounds and the audio cues in the game are sometimes even more important than seeing things. In particular, hearing the sound of a predator will have you checking around so you are sure you know what it is doing. Also, the rush of water around your ears when you dive underwater really makes you feel like you are submerging yourself thanks to how the world around you genuinely sounds like you are now hearing it through water. Overall the sound effects and music give a very immersive feeling of really being in the world.

As I said before, Subnautica is undeniably beautiful. However, this is sometimes thanks to the overall immersion rather than the technical quality of the graphics. Sea life tends to always be rendered well and moving realistically, but distance pop-in is a real problem. The Length of Distance view in this game is actually quite short, and not only will you see things popping into view all the time, but sometimes you need to more closely explore an area just so you are close enough to see what you are actually looking for. It's an issue but one that can be lived with.

The other major issue with the graphics is that this game is quite unoptimised. I don't have a beefy VR rig, in fact mine is technically entry level, but nonetheless, I don't typically have too many issues with frame rates in games. With Subnautica, however, frame rates do chug all too often, and not always with any apparent good reason like there's a lot going on. In the worst cases, you can see the SteamVR busy/loading graphic pop up and really I think there is no space for this to be happening in any "proper" VR game. I suspect this is the main factor with the game being in early access. The graphics are beautiful, but the game engine needs a lot of polish. Still, I find I can easily look past these issues and stay genuinely immersed.

Overall

Despite any issues with the graphics and the plot, I heartily recommend Subnautica to VR headset owners. There is a full scale world to explore, the graphics and sound are beautiful even if the game engine needs polish, and I especially like the underwater survival element of the game.

I bought this game at full price and having probably spent 20-30 hours on it already (and feeling like I am nowhere near the end), it is definitely value for money. The game being early access might put some folks off, and it did me originally, but the developers don't give any signs as to when they'll make the 1.0 release and really I think you are doing yourself a disservice if you hold off buying Subnautica just for that reason.