Blueprints are acquired via scanning fragments of wreckage you’ll find scattered everywhere, with each blueprint requiring between one and three scanned fragments in order to unlock it for fabrication. Raw materials are mostly picked up off the ground as chunks of titanium, or copper, or glass, with no specialised tools required for extraction beyond being able to find the damn things in the first place. The fabricator is basically one of the replicators from Star Trek, capable of building any material or technological device you can imagine - if you have the blueprint and the raw materials for it.
The core conceit of Below Zero is nearly identical to that of Subnautica: you’re fired from orbit down to the surface of an ocean-covered planet, with nothing to your name but a few survival rations and a small, static underwater pod with an air supply and a magic fabricator. Now that I’ve finished it, though, I’m not so sure. After giving Subnautica such a glowing testimonial you might think that throwing more of the same at me is no bad thing, and prior to playing Below Zero I probably would have agreed with you. This is a review of the recently-released Subnautica: Below Zero, an expandalone that recycles most of the mechanics, equipment and general structure of Subnautica in a new biome, with a new story and a few new toys for the player to use. This, however, is not a review of the original Subnautica. Really, I can’t recommend the original Subnautica enough. Venturing into the inky blackness of the deep ocean isn’t particularly scary if there’s no risk to it, and this is something that Subnautica very much understood. Compared to the rest of the survival genre Subnautica is quite a nice and friendly game, but it still won’t hesitate to kill you if you get overconfident or let your guard down.
#2017 latest version of subnautica Patch
I have vivid memories of getting lost in maze-like wrecks while my oxygen counter slowly ticked down and I frantically searched for the way out of taking the Cyclops a little too far down into an ocean trench in an attempt to evade angry wildlife and having the structural integrity start to fail, which led to a panicked dash around the ship to patch up all the leaks before the interior compartments flooded and of gazing into the cavernous maw of a Reaper Leviathan as it attempted to devour my Sea Moth with me still inside it - fortunately I had the presence of mind to abandon ship and skim away on my Seaglide while it was preoccupied with the larger craft. However, what I particularly liked about Subnautica was that it still had just enough sharp edges to give it some bite. This was to be expected, as it had had the benefit of over two years in early access when I got around to playing it. So Subnautica already struck me as quite a streamlined, polished survival game. Subnautica bucks genre expectations yet again by actually having an ending to its story, and one which you won’t have to put dozens of hours into the game in order to see - I completed it in just over twenty hours, which is the perfect length for the sort of game Subnautica is.
There is an excellent sense of progression through Subnautica, which is important because the existence of progression implies that you’re actually going somewhere. The way new technology unlocked the ability to survive in ever-deeper areas reminded me quite pleasantly of Metroid, and while the actual survival mechanics in game (food and water meters that slowly tick down) were totally bog-standard and uninteresting to manage, in terms of the exploration Subnautica did at least grasp a core tenet of the genre that I feel a lot of survival games miss: once mastery of a thing has been displayed the game should offer tools to make doing that thing much much easier - or even automate it away entirely - while introducing new challenges for the player to deal with. It almost exclusively focused on the exploration of underwater environments with technologically-advanced equipment, as opposed to having me punch trees to get wood to make a stone axe for the five millionth time and it also took the unusual decision to have that underwater environment be built by hand instead of procedurally generated, which gave the game some much-needed structure and let it tell a story. In this review I am going to try and figure out if the words “streamlining” and “compromising” are inevitable synonyms of one another.Īs somebody who generally dislikes survival games, I found the first Subnautica to be a very refreshing departure from genre norms.
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