The sound design remains excellent all-around, from the ripple of air bubbles escaping your breather, to the churn of the Seatruck’s propellers. Speaking of surprises, performance is much better overall in Below Zero.
The usual cuts are present in both ports – lower texture resolution, more muted lighting, super low LOD – but both appear to run at a decent resolution at 30 frames-per-second.
Subnautica game notes update#
UPDATE MAY 12th: I’ve now seen footage and reviews for the Switch port of both Subnautica’s and they’re both impressive. I hope Unknown Worlds nailed it, but I have my doubts. As for the Nintendo Switch port, well, I’m just as curious as the rest of you. I don’t feel confident claiming the same for the older Xbox One and PlayStation 4, since the first game infamously ran like dogshit on both consoles. I can’t speak to console performance directly, but I imagine the next-gen consoles handle Below Zero without issue. Having too many items floating about outside your inventory or storage still causes the game to slowdown a bit, but I noticed virtually no stuttering this time around, and the framerate was much, much more stable than it was in the first game.ĭo bear in mind that I reviewed Subnautica: Below Zero on PC. Performance is improved, and sound design remains amazing. There are even a number of polar biomes above sea-level in Below Zero than feature more to do than the islands from the first game. It is a much denser and deeper map, with more caves to get lost within. The trade-off is Sector Zero feels better to traverse (mostly) the the Crater. Once again the world is hand-crafted, but it’s smaller. In many ways Subnautica: Below Zero further refines these idea. Players still needed to craft food and water to stay alive, and free-form exploration remained a key tenet, but Subnautica made it simple for players to grasp the basics of survival. Rather than rely solely on the will to survive to push engagement, the team decided to tell an engaging story with a definitive ending. Instead of using a procedurally generated map, Unknown Worlds opted to meticulously shape their underwater world.
The first Subnautica was a bit of an outlier within the survival genre when it debuted in Early Access back in 2014. Does Subnautica: Below Zero feel like a tired repeat of already established tricks, or is it capable of fabricating new thrills? Subnautica: Below Zero is equal parts refinement and experiment. That first venture outside the Safe Shallows and into the waiting maw of a hungry Reaper leviathan was an eye-opening shock, one that’s difficult to replicate.
Below Zero has some tough fins to fill, since part of the first Subnautica’s magnetic charm was arguably created by how little we knew about the world we found ourselves in of not knowing what illuminating or terrifying discovery awaited us.
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