Subnautica Review: Substandard

Don’t you just hate it when you’re that guy? The entire world, apparently, is loving Subnautica right now. I’m left scratching my head, wondering how such a promising concept turned out, at least from this reviewer’s perspective, to be such a total flop.

A first person survival game set almost entirely underwater, in which you play the role of the lone survivor of a spaceship crash, tasked with gathering enough resources to, at first, survive, and then to find a way to rescue.

Subnautica is the creation of Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the team who brought you the interesting but ultimately mediocre Natural Selection 2, amongst other titles of little repute.

Indeed. Originally entering Steam Early Access in late 2014, it’s worth reviewing now because it was only recently released, in January 2018. I picked up an early access copy back in 2015, based on word of mouth recommendations, and back then, it had promise.

The 2015 version had a nice visual appeal, some competent but unfinished gameplay elements, and a sense of polish that was notably lacking from many other early access titles of the time.

So what’s new, almost three years later? I’ve been asking myself that very same question in mild disbelief.

If you’re the type of chap or lass who enjoys holding down one single key for the majority of your gameplay sessions, look no further. Subnautica has you covered. The early game revolves around the idea of heading out from your emergency escape pod, into the surrounding ocean, looking for things that might be useful for your survival.

Unfortunately, your character moves through the water like a sloth through molasses, and the basic gameplay cycle, early on, is: dive to the sea bed, do some stuff, come back to the surface for air.

The immediate problem here is that the diving and resurfacing is around 90% of all the things you’ll be doing in the early game. You can equip yourself with an oxygen tank to get a little more time underwater, but as you find you require “rarer” materials to progress, they’re located in areas of the map with a deeper sea floor.

I’m really not sure if this bothers other people as much as it bothers me, but there is far too much travelling about the place, holding W, watching your destination slowly appear, to actually present anything more than a faint sonar ping of fun.

There’s no denying that Subnautica is quite a looker. The underwater world is convincing, with some nice touches like the bubbles from your character as you move around beneath the surface. When darkness arrives, the sea bed is lit with all kinds of glowing fauna, and although it’s harder to navigate during the night, it’s quite an experience to behold.

It’s not all good news: the islands you will explore during a typical playthrough are lacking in a major way, looking distinctly out of place from the pretty underwater vistas, with a lack of convincing lighting and some seriously dodgy-looking textures.

These areas were a later addition, and it shows. The visuals here feel rough and rushed, as though someone at Unknown Worlds suddenly realised their world would be unknown unless they got it released, and piled on the pressure to “make do and mend” instead of putting in the required effort.

I tested the release version on a GTX 1080 Ti, with an i9–7900. This game chugs. Badly. Even on this powerful system, there is a far-too-frequent stuttering that happens in the graphical engine. With anti aliasing turned off, the game struggled to run at 60 frames per second, even when there was apparently very little to show on the screen.

There’s also some weirdness to be found when transitioning between the surface and a submerged state. The moons (this is an alien world, after all) look great on the surface, but, seen from just underneath, look like 8-bit graphics better suited to a NES game.

These graphical problems are not new. They were consistently problematic back in 2015, but at the time, “don’t worry, it’s early access” was the prevailing message. Occasional stuttering or rendering lag is common in a lot of games, but in Subnautica, it is frequent enough to be a constant annoyance, and another indicator that the team at Unknown Worlds wanted to get this thing out of the door, rather than address problems.

Subnautica is absolutely riddled with bugs. Remember that we’re not talking about an early access title any more. This is a full-blown release title with a price tag to match, and this is inexcusable.

When cracking open resources on a cliff in the sea floor, the resources are designed to fall according to gravity. Instead, what tends to happen is that they clip through the cliff and into the ether, your character unable to reach them, which is massively frustrating if you come across the one rare resource you need to complete your current gathering checklist.

Fish constantly clip through scenery, and are seen doing some ridiculous things. Sometimes it’s not even apparent to these aquatic creatures that walls are solid, clipping into underwater rooms that are supposed to be sealed from the ocean outside.

One of my larger gripes with this title is the woeful inventory system. This is a gathering game: you need to go out and find a plethora of resources in order to be able to construct the things you’ll need, whether that’s a machine to enable you to swim faster, or an underwater habitat for your master plans.

Early on, you only have the emergency escape pod, with its single storage container, but the problem is that in order to break out of the pod and start constructing your underwater lair, you need more items than will fit in the emergency pod and your inventory combined.

There are a few options available, but none are very appealing. You can build more storage containers, but these are tiny at first. You will also need to be a qualified librarian, because you can only build new items if the ingredients are in your inventory, and when there’s a few containers, most of your time will be occupied by foraging amongst them all trying to find that one bit of gold you stowed half an hour ago. But hey, at least you won’t need to keep your finger on the W key for this bit!

Things only get worse as the game progresses, because you need a larger quantity of more diverse resources to continue your progression. The crime here is that there are so many elegant solutions to inventory management seen in other similar games (Terraria, anyone?) and this clumsy, fumbled attempt again indicates a minimum level of effort given by the developers towards player quality of life.

Almost as woefully terrible as the inventory dilemma is the way in which gathering and fighting living creatures is handled. How on earth (or whatever planet we’re on in Subnautica) this never got fixed is a mystery I will never overcome.

Early on, it’s necessary to “catch” certain smaller fish to provide food, and sometimes other benefits, such as water purification. The method by which you “catch” is to get very close to the fish and click the left mouse button. It sounds simple and logical in theory, but in practice, it’s a world of frustration.

The fish move in unpredictable patterns, can move faster than your character (at least early on), and there’s no indication of when you’re close enough. You just either “are” or “are not” close enough, and the cursor will suddenly change to indicate the fish can be collected. But just as it can change immediately to show you it’s possible to collect a fish, it can easily change when the fish darts out of the way, and you click a millisecond too late.

This leads to the most efficient tactic of swimming about like a rapidly deflating whoopee cushion, spamming the left mouse button in the hope you get it right, as the fish rapidly changes direction. Just hope your target doesn’t swim near any other objects, because you will suddenly find your inventory full of a load of crap you didn’t need, as the fish smugly makes its escape.

Again, such a simple problem to fix with a more elegant game design solution, and it’s an indication to me that player quality of life just didn’t feature in the minds of the developers here.

For whatever reason, Unknown Worlds decided that combat is not going to be a feature in Subnautica. This is somewhat refreshing in principle: a game doesn’t need to feature guns or harpoons or other aggression in order to be a complete experience.

In reality, it seems like whoever made this design decision didn’t really see it through with the rest of the development team. You will quickly gain a combat knife, and later on, a stun type tool, but there are no traditional “gun” type weapons in the game.

However, there are plenty of things that will try to kill you. As an example, you will need some cave sulfur to make certain things. This is found in the “nest” of a fish that acts a bit like a proximity mine. If you get too close, it will explode in your face. However, you have to get close because you need that particular resource.

No problem, just use the knife, right? This works in theory but you need the timing of an atomic clock. Knife swings have no impact and no sense of direction or distance. You’re as likely to score a kill by spamming the attack button as you are by timing your blows, so collecting this particular resource becomes an exercise in frustration.

An exercise in frustration… are you seeing a pattern emerge here?

There are later-game ways to defend yourself better, including a sort of titan thing that walks on the sea bed and provides good protection. However, in order to acquire the means by which you can access these gee-whiz devices, you absolutely have to venture into areas of the map with creatures that can and will kill you, before you have the means to defend yourself.

This is as much luck as anything else. Sometimes there won’t be a dangerous creature near the rare resource you’re after, and sometimes you can grab it and flee before you get torn to shreds. Your expertise and skill has nothing to do with this whatsoever, so you just pray to Neptune and hope he’s in a good mood today.

Game design 101: a player should die from lack of skill or practice, not from bad luck, unless you’re making a luck-based game.

At times, Subnautica is compelling, there’s no doubt. It inches you through a cycle of progression fast enough to keep you wondering and reaching for the next milestone, but slow enough that you will not be able to rush to completion. But really, that’s where the good part ends, for this reviewer.

This game absolutely should not have been released in its current broken state. It needs more time on the graphics, to sort out the abysmal performance even on high-end machines. It needs more time in QA, fixing irritating and ridiculous bugs that have been in the game for years. It needs more time in design, ensuring that systems don’t punish or frustrate the player just for attempting to have a good experience.

There are so many problems with Subnautica compared with so few things to like, I’m left bewildered. What looked to be an unfinished but promising and fun concept in 2015 has morphed into… pretty much exactly the same unfinished game in 2018.

It might appear that this review seems as salty as the ocean I’ve been floating about in for the many hours I’ve spent with this title. It certainly seems at odds with the general consensus out there: “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam, and most major review outlets spraying praise through their blowholes.

So take this review on board with those; it’s never a good idea to rely on just one opinion, and I’m genuinely perplexed as to why others are so enamoured with Subnautica. I just wonder if Unknown Worlds might buy me a new W key.

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Although this part of the game had the potential to be the most fun, due to some severe technical limitations, it’s one of the least enjoyable experiences. In comparison to the offering made by Automation, it’s very similar, just many years behind in terms of functionality.

The major gripe I have here is that this serves absolutely no purpose in the subsequent game. At every point after this, your car will be represented by a string of words on the screen. It’s never animated or even shown in the interface, which means you can literally spend no time whatsoever on the design and it will have no effect whatsoever on the rest of the game.

A lot of this section ties in with my criticism of the awful UI in GearCity, but a lot is also to do with just how much information there is to take in, and how little there is to inform you as to what’s going on.

In one game, I had just finished developing a new type of car, and I forgot that I would need to assign a price for the sale of the car. I had spent quite a while designing the engine, the gearbox, setting up the production lines, even building a new factory to make sure I could make enough of them. The car just wasn’t selling any units, so I had all these vehicles piling up in storage and not getting to customers.

I’d expect the game to tell me at this point, “hey, dumbass, you need to set a price otherwise none can be sold” but there was no message at all. This was entirely my fault, but it’s all too easy to miss a crucial step in the long chain of production and sales, and you’ve basically ruined your entire game at this point because it’s easy to get too far behind to catch up with the competition.

It’s very difficult to discover what people around the world actually want to buy. There’s a number of classes of vehicle from compact cars to sports cars and everything in between, but the UI actively obstructs you from seeing how well a particular type is likely to sell, and it would be nice to have a specific button or menu where you can get this information in a simple way.

As mentioned above, each city has a distinct population and average income, but it’s very hard to know what effect this has on the number of factories you should put there, and what the sales demand will be like if you choose to sell vehicles there.

There’s a comprehensive offering for marketing your business, but it’s almost impossible to tell what effect this is having versus how much you’re spending on it. Is £6000 a lot for newspaper advertising? Am I just advertising in one city, all cities where I’m selling, or all cities around the globe? I don’t know, and I don’t know how to find out.

Combine this with the fact that graphs and charts look like they have been produced in an early 90s version of Excel, with a lovely Times New Roman typeface, and the whole experience is confusing and not at all fun.

I criticised Automation heavily for focusing too much on engine and vehicle production and not enough on the factory, sales, and marketing aspects, much to its detriment. GearCity takes a much more well-rounded approach to this, and is a fully featured game. It’s set up and ready to go from the moment you fire up a new game, and there’s a small degree of fun to be had in configuring your new business and launching some vehicles to the world markets.

That said, it feels like resources have been spread way too thinly across all this stuff. That’s not to say the time would have been better spent polishing just one aspect of the game: we’ve seen the effect of that with Automation and we’re left with an early access game that isn’t really a game at all, just a bunch of ideas, some of which are comprehensive and most of which are wafer thin.

Instead, I feel there’s just too much going on here. Each individual feature, such as the R&D department, the economics simulation, the world growth simulation, the marketing structure — these all need significant development time in order to be polished and balanced in a way that the options and information are very clear to the player.

4 years after its initial early access release, it’s still a huge mess, and looks unlikely to get polished any time soon. There is an entire game here; it’s just that each individual element has been implemented so poorly that the overall game is more frustrating than fun.

It’s not looking good for GearCity at this point, especially since its developers, VEAT, have mentioned that Aero Mogul will be their next game and that development will begin once GearCity is finished. This suggests they expect it might be finished sooner rather than later, which begs the question as to what “finished” actually means.

The team needs to hire a UI designer. Very, very urgently. The entire UI needs to be destroyed and it needs to be redesigned in a way that actually makes sense. It’s far too confusing and horrible to use at the moment. This cannot go into a finished product if that game is going to have a shred of credibility.

Beyond that, I think the game has some potential. It’s never going to have mass market appeal, just due to its subject matter. It is a very complicated simulation although it does work, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have a simplified version, with some features automated by the computer, so that it can be more accessible for those without the time or desire to learn the intricacies of the game’s design.

I cannot recommend this, even to the most ardent petrolhead, in its current state. It’s a horrible experience to learn and play this game at the moment. I do hope this will change in the future, and the key to this change will be introducing a usable UI. Beyond that, clarity of information and sensible user feedback are key.

While both Automation and GearCity are barking up the same car manufacturing tree, and a tall tree it is at that, neither are looking to be viable options to scratch that particular management itch any time soon.

The other option, Production Line, is much less involved, and lacks the automotive industry inspiration found in the other two titles. Although Production Line is easily the most polished and fun game of the three, it’s never going to be a very detailed simulation, or offer the kind of business management options that the other two have planned.

It’s a sad state for the very niche car manufacturing genre on Steam right now. If you absolutely have to go out and get one game from this bunch, it’s definitely Production Line. If you absolutely have to run a full-blown car manufacturing business simulation, keep your money in your wallet and wait to see how both Automation and GearCity progress in the future, although don’t hold your breath.

Originally published at www.britgamer.co.uk.