I agree 100%, however do need to point out that there are 2 maps in this game that you can get really early on. One's literally on the wall of the first base you explore and scanning it will put it in your PDA. I feel like a lot of the problems with this game came from 2 major problems at different stages of production. I think the overall concept of the game is neat but falls apart the moment you put any thought into it, so that's a major problem that's been there since conception. The other major issue is that the head writer left the studio halfway through development and they legally had to scrap most of the story and find a way to rework it with the assets they had. The massive rewrites ate up a lot of their focus and they weren't able to finish the game, and it really feels like they got close to their release date and shoved what little time/attention they had left into improved textures and less lag. Both of which are things fans of the first game would've happily overlooked if it meant fixing some of the dodgy writing and not being interrupted by bland scripted dialog every 5 minutes. The look of disappointment of Jacksepticeye's face upon realizing that the final release was just the early access with an interactive cutscene says it all.
I was saddened by some kind of fragmentation in the game. The first game was integral, with clearly structured events intertwining into a single plot. There is no such thing here. Everything that happened reminded an old soviet cartoon of how a boy lived in a village. At some point, he writes a letter to his parents in the city. Makes a couple of lines, then gets distracted by something and runs away. His cat comes, sees the letter, writes on his own behalf. Then the dog comes, finishes and sends the letter home. Parents read the summary and faint.
It's actually worse than that. Here's from the transcript of my other favorite CZcams review of BZ, that I just edited and added punctuation to by hand, because maybe I have OCD or something. Let's see if it will fit in single comment: "Let's let's go on this journey together, everybody. Okay, so Robin, an allegedly intelligent xenologist, steals a life pod and drives it directly into a meteor storm with nothing but a bottle of water and a couple of cereal bars with the intent of crash landing onto a hostile alien planet in the coldest biome it has with no cold suit or habitat builder, then shortly after landing she has a misunderstanding with an alien about her iPad and it invades her cerebral cortex after the power in his base runs out, when every other alien base is just fine on power, and then he demands that she builds him a body that he doesn't need, using components and alien bases built at the bottom of the ocean for no reason, all while explaining that he's a hive mind, while behaving as an individual, claiming that he doesn't know what music is but then describes the hive mind as an orchestra, and he says he doesn't know what dreams are but when he gets his body he describes it as waking from a dream... He says you either work for the collective or against it, and behaving as an individual is a foreign concept to him, before admitting that he worked against the collective as an individual to stick a Sea Emperor inside a box, which he didn't need to do, to speed up the hatching of eggs, which actually stopped the young from growing, so the Sea Emperor broke the entire facility to such an extent that he responded to that by choosing to immediately give up and download his brain to a computer and presumably just wait for the power to run out so he can f***ing die. But this is completely unrelated to the main plot. So you ignore all this and you investigate to come into contact with a grandma in a power suit whose only plan is to, I guess, intimidate random strangers and get them to f*** off the entire planet, because she's apparently so badass she can single-handedly scare away an entire transgovernmental corporation. Then, when she leaves, your f***ing iPad tracks her 800 meters to her home base where she tells you to break a satellite tower you don't need to break, because Altera already knows where both of you are. But then it still disables the satellite somehow, so that you can go investigate your sister. Who builds robot penguins for a living single, yet single-handedly cures the Kharaa bacterium, using a combination of spicy food and f***ing iodine, which is a combination the entire precursor race couldn't figure out... But then instead of immediately just using the cure to cure the bacterium, which would have immediately solved the problem, which was her whole f***ing plan despite, there being zero indication that they were using the bacteria for weapons at all... She stuffs the cure into a hole in the ground travels halfway across the ocean to team up with a geriatric eco-terrorist who by all accounts shouldn't be alive, sane, or even in sector zero, and she instead of just telling Sam to use the cure on the bacteria like she originally planned to and should have from the start, she convinces Sam to use dangerous explosives to collapse the cave containing the virus. Which she wouldn't need to do if she just cured it in the first place, and a collapsed cave wouldn't even stop a massive space corporation anyway, so it's completely pointless and then more than that they conspire to systematically destroy every Alterra establishment on the planet whether it's related to the bacteria or not, placing all of Sam's friends, co-workers, and her ex-girlfriend in mortal danger for no reason, before she leaves to place the explosives in the cave gets caught in the act, and instead of just using the cure which takes all of five seconds to administer... I mean you can literally use the cure yourself, and it happens instantly (which shouldn't really work anyways because the leviathan is dead so it's got no circulatory system to distribute the cure, but whatever) she instead panics and just detonates the explosives killing herself and a co-worker without even fully collapsing the cave... Mind you all while not ever curing the bacteria that she had the cure for. And Margaret who talked her into all this decides to not even f***ing bother following up to see if she succeeded. She f***s off to her underwater base to flick the bean for the rest of time while talking sh** to a dead reaper, instead of just finishing the job and curing the leviathan. And once Robin learns all this, she's completely unfazed and just leaves to make a new body for an alien... Who by all accounts is completely hostile to humanity, willing to use humans as test subjects, is stupid or lied, is contradictory about everything he said so far, while hinting that he was intimately involved with the Kharaa outbreak in the first place on this planet... But she immediately trusts him and helps him without even asking him anything about this, despite being a xenologist aka somebody who studies f***ing aliens and the two of them f*** off to his home planet without even bringing the cure that Allen needed and that he went to the planet to get in the first place... "This plot is f***ing madness. That's not even everything wrong with the story. It's all so f***ing insane. It's poorly written. It's contradictory. We didn't even talk about half of the plot holes in the side characters that made no sense. I was on the floor laughing till I cried through half of the dialogue, because it was just so bizarre, it felt like a fever dream. "So all those times where the game had to make sacrifices to make room for the story... This was it. All those bland biomes, all the problems they didn't improve on from the first game, the total lack of horror... All of it was because they wanted so badly to force a story narrative into a game where it didn't belong, and THIS was that narrative. This is why everything else in the game sucks." CZcams: "Subnautica Below Zero Review - Why doesn't it hold up?" by Ceronesthes
The same game except worse is a good description yeah. I played through it because the core formula is addictive but I also kind of regretted playing it afterwards. It's video game junk food. I didn't really get anything new out of it. The writing is also bad so the story just made the game worse for me. It's weird that you say Below Zero is deeper and darker when it's actually completely opposite. Below Zero has illumination everywhere and the sea is shallower and more confined. In the original game there are deep dark waters that are completely absent in Below Zero. Oxygen plants made the diving sections too easy and stress-free also.
@@Argasz I may sound a little different on stream, I use a different mic when I'm live. The one I use for my voiceovers and reviews is pretty special :)
@@MarksGameReviews in general,recording a video and a live stream are two different things. Yiu should continue doing what you doing because you clearly have what is necessary.
The biggest issues for me, Story telling, the starting story (basically when it was still being made) made more sense with them already being there! Because why on earth would you go to a planet so unwell prepared! Then Altera... They make it look like this is the big bad company, yes in the story they simply do not use that! Where in the beta version they did. The voice acting, first voices without a doubt were nicer! Then the ships... that modular... oef. The sea, just far less open! And it just doesn't end well. Though it is cool you go the home planet, it just all feels random, like it wasn't really a well though out story line. Heck while the original wasn't planned to have a story but it did. But the biggest thing, it didn't keep changing while it was being made like Below Zero, and you can tell! oh and a big schrimp.
This is what happens what a game project is greenlit based off of a BET, and not a genuine desire to create a new game, or make profit. Deeper and darker than the first? I don't know, compare Safe Shallows of the first game at night to the "safe shallows" Twisty Bridge area of Below Zero at night. In Subnautica, biomes can actually become pitch black, and actually dark. In this game, it never reaches that point of darkness except in the void at depth. And when you talk about the sound, "hearing a distant roar and being scared not knowing how far away it is" What are you smoking? There is no depth perception to the sound in this game. A Cryptosuchus roar at 100m away sounds the same as a roar behind you less than 1 meter away blasting into your ear. I say ear and not ears because the creature sounds are at a set static pitch, there is no discerning way to judge its distance at all, and they "never" sound far away with aggro attacks, and "always" sound far away with their normal sounds. I found the visuals under water "acceptable" to a certain degree, but in other regards I find Below Zero more ugly than the first. I also found the voice acting to be adequate. Competant. Nothing bad about to make fun of or criticize, but nothing special or remarkable about it to make it stand out either. You praise them for adding in new vehicles for at least "trying", yet the entire Early Access process, people complained about how garbage and vomit-inducingly disorienting the Snowfox is, and they left it as is. People complained about the Seatruck being too slow, having too little storage, and too little functionality, plus the shape of it was cumbersome, they removed the back up camera without even trying to impliment a screen switch-to replacement, and in general were dead set on doing things their way regardless of communit input. You praising them for trying, while crapping in the face of the fans against these changes, is remarkable. I mean whatever bro, it's your opinion. You're free to have it. But man I can't make heads or tails of it. It makes no sense to me. That's like saying you applaud Hitler for "Trying" to save Germany, even if the results weren't pleasant. At least he tried to do something different, right? (Yes, I did just make that comparison, and yes, I'm serious about it.) The blueprint pinning, battery life indicator, and running with tools are great quality of life improvements, I'd preferred to have had them in the first game. Did you honestly just put "it has a difficulty setting in the options menu" as a pro for this game? Ok see, that's how I know you're reaching desperately to try to be balanced and on the fence about this game, when you reach so far down to the bottom of the barrel to praise the game you have to reach for "it's got an options menu!" I cannot, and will not take the rest of your review/video seriously at this point. In the words of a developer, the Iceworm is more like an animatronic than an existing entity in the game. True enough, it's more like a haunted ghost house ride with a cart on rails. There are "trigger" points, that once the player moves into the trigger zone, it spawns and triggers an Iceworm animation or behavior, and then it goes away when you leave the trigger zone depending on if it was an attack or display. There is no Iceworm roaming around under the snow, unless a player triggers one to appear, they don't exist in the game code wise unlike other creatures. And to be fair, we had Seamoth PDS in Subnautica as well, the Leviathans in that game were also equally made ineffective because of it. However, we have more options for module upgraes for the Seamoth, so it's more likely a player may not choose to take the PDS module, but in Below Zero there is no reason not to eqiup the Seatruck PDS module as there's only enough to fill the max slots, there are no choices or options to make, just equip everything as soon as you get it. These are mostly things I disagree with. Every other aspect of your critique on Below Zero I make no mention of, I probably agree with and you may have even said it better than me.
I didn't play the early access of this, so can't comment on how the game has or hasn't changed from that, but its sad if the issues highlighted by the community during that phase were not addressed or just ignored. I can only judge on the package that was served up as the finished product, as a new purchaser of the game would find at the time of making the video - which naturally is the target audience. As for your point about he "difficulty" levels, I do indeed believe its a positive point because its not just about making the game harder or easier like in an action-rpg or beat-em-up In this case it allows the player to choose what level of "survival game" they wish to take part in. Not everyone wants to have to worry about eating and drinking constantly or likes the idea of permadeath if they make a mistake or their PC freezes, etc etc. Having the choice for any player to set the level of realism (for want of a better word perhaps) is a good thing in my opinion as it will certainly boost the appeal of the game to a wider audience. Where the game does fail in its difficulty is in the lack of real danger from creatures which I think I talked about in the video.
Explained all of my feelings towards this game perfectly. The annoying lack of direction is so bad that I'm not sure I want to keep playing as needing to Google what to do next is part of the game.
I went back to the first game after finishing it too, mainly to play around base building rather than go all the way through again. It was just such a fun and intriguing world.
This review is completely off. Especially the part of "If you wanted them to take this in a different direction you are going to be disappointed". Because that is exactly what they did. They made a completely different game, focusing on exposition, narrative and story instead of immersion, tension, world and exploration. The studio clearly had no idea why original was so good and they wanted to just go against everything that made it good in Below zero. Making it into too easy, not at all scary with a narrative that makes zero sense, just to shoehorn in whatever the writers wanted to push. There is a bit where the main character explains the concept of hope by a poem, which was so out of place and cringe that I paused the game and thought that there is no way they just did that. So I had zero connection to the main character... that I was supposed to play as. Just horrible degradation all around.
It feels very much like what it is: A DLC that was pushed into a full length sequel, but didn't have enough content or scope to stand alone. The map is tiny, there is no reason to build about half of the things in the game, there are two different "main stories", one of which can be totally ignored. Unbalance is everywhere (spicy fruit salad, perimeter defence) and there is never any sense of danger or risk. The big beasties make a lot of noise but they're all harmless. The Snowfox is complete garbage, the land sections are boring and confusing with nothing to do but run around. I know Below Zero had production problems (staff leaving, multiple complete re-writes of the main stories) and it really shows in the flawed final product. Having said that, it's still a perfectly fine survival game.
Really? I guess some people just don't want to hear any sort of criticism, constructive or otherwise, against their baby. Just to clarify, I haven't seen the comments so don't know if they are indeed racist or not ;)
@@MarksGameReviews big one was some people had trouble understandng the PDA and asked it to be changed back to last games one anyone who said that was called racist and pretty much chased from the forums
@@MarksGameReviews Yeah, I tried to play it again with my old saved game. Completely broken unfortunately. No animations for bulkheads or hatches. Such is life when games auto update.
@@bingbong7807 I think it "ruins" it in the sense that people won't be as excited or interested in the follow-up to this game (if there is one). Like when CDPR released Cyberpunk it actually hurt their entire future range as gamers will not be as confident or trusting in them in future. Also like when you watch a movie and love it, then the sequel comes out and its poor - you start to ask yourself "Can I be bothered to check out the next one?" But let's hope the next game manages to recapture the joy of the original :)
I liked Below Zero. The way I look at it, is, would I rather have Below Zero or no subnautica sequel.. well, as it is, Below Zero has all the stuff I liked about the first game. It's a very pretty game and exploring it made me feel relaxed and cozy. Some stuff was kind of dumb, I do like the first game more. But, some of the updates in Below Zero made their way into the first game. I'm really digging the large rooms for Subnautica 1 and the cloud saves. Below Zero is perfectly worth playing just to explore the biomes. The story is kind of dumb though, rather than focus on the planet we're on, we're chasing ghosts and doing fetch quests. Eh. Game was still a good time.
Your review is spot on. Compared to Subnautica, it's an okay game. I would wait to buy it on sale.
Loved that first game so much. Especially the humour in it.
I agree 100%, however do need to point out that there are 2 maps in this game that you can get really early on. One's literally on the wall of the first base you explore and scanning it will put it in your PDA.
I feel like a lot of the problems with this game came from 2 major problems at different stages of production. I think the overall concept of the game is neat but falls apart the moment you put any thought into it, so that's a major problem that's been there since conception.
The other major issue is that the head writer left the studio halfway through development and they legally had to scrap most of the story and find a way to rework it with the assets they had.
The massive rewrites ate up a lot of their focus and they weren't able to finish the game, and it really feels like they got close to their release date and shoved what little time/attention they had left into improved textures and less lag. Both of which are things fans of the first game would've happily overlooked if it meant fixing some of the dodgy writing and not being interrupted by bland scripted dialog every 5 minutes. The look of disappointment of Jacksepticeye's face upon realizing that the final release was just the early access with an interactive cutscene says it all.
I was saddened by some kind of fragmentation in the game. The first game was integral, with clearly structured events intertwining into a single plot. There is no such thing here.
Everything that happened reminded an old soviet cartoon of how a boy lived in a village. At some point, he writes a letter to his parents in the city. Makes a couple of lines, then gets distracted by something and runs away. His cat comes, sees the letter, writes on his own behalf. Then the dog comes, finishes and sends the letter home. Parents read the summary and faint.
Lol! Maybe I should get my dog to write the conclusion of my reviews...
It's actually worse than that. Here's from the transcript of my other favorite CZcams review of BZ, that I just edited and added punctuation to by hand, because maybe I have OCD or something. Let's see if it will fit in single comment:
"Let's let's go on this journey together, everybody. Okay, so Robin, an allegedly intelligent xenologist, steals a life pod and drives it directly into a meteor storm with nothing but a bottle of water and a couple of cereal bars with the intent of crash landing onto a hostile alien planet in the coldest biome it has with no cold suit or habitat builder, then shortly after landing she has a misunderstanding with an alien about her iPad and it invades her cerebral cortex after the power in his base runs out, when every other alien base is just fine on power, and then he demands that she builds him a body that he doesn't need, using components and alien bases built at the bottom of the ocean for no reason, all while explaining that he's a hive mind, while behaving as an individual, claiming that he doesn't know what music is but then describes the hive mind as an orchestra, and he says he doesn't know what dreams are but when he gets his body he describes it as waking from a dream... He says you either work for the collective or against it, and behaving as an individual is a foreign concept to him, before admitting that he worked against the collective as an individual to stick a Sea Emperor inside a box, which he didn't need to do, to speed up the hatching of eggs, which actually stopped the young from growing, so the Sea Emperor broke the entire facility to such an extent that he responded to that by choosing to immediately give up and download his brain to a computer and presumably just wait for the power to run out so he can f***ing die. But this is completely unrelated to the main plot. So you ignore all this and you investigate to come into contact with a grandma in a power suit whose only plan is to, I guess, intimidate random strangers and get them to f*** off the entire planet, because she's apparently so badass she can single-handedly scare away an entire transgovernmental corporation. Then, when she leaves, your f***ing iPad tracks her 800 meters to her home base where she tells you to break a satellite tower you don't need to break, because Altera already knows where both of you are. But then it still disables the satellite somehow, so that you can go investigate your sister. Who builds robot penguins for a living single, yet single-handedly cures the Kharaa bacterium, using a combination of spicy food and f***ing iodine, which is a combination the entire precursor race couldn't figure out... But then instead of immediately just using the cure to cure the bacterium, which would have immediately solved the problem, which was her whole f***ing plan despite, there being zero indication that they were using the bacteria for weapons at all... She stuffs the cure into a hole in the ground travels halfway across the ocean to team up with a geriatric eco-terrorist who by all accounts shouldn't be alive, sane, or even in sector zero, and she instead of just telling Sam to use the cure on the bacteria like she originally planned to and should have from the start, she convinces Sam to use dangerous explosives to collapse the cave containing the virus. Which she wouldn't need to do if she just cured it in the first place, and a collapsed cave wouldn't even stop a massive space corporation anyway, so it's completely pointless and then more than that they conspire to systematically destroy every Alterra establishment on the planet whether it's related to the bacteria or not, placing all of Sam's friends, co-workers, and her ex-girlfriend in mortal danger for no reason, before she leaves to place the explosives in the cave gets caught in the act, and instead of just using the cure which takes all of five seconds to administer... I mean you can literally use the cure yourself, and it happens instantly (which shouldn't really work anyways because the leviathan is dead so it's got no circulatory system to distribute the cure, but whatever) she instead panics and just detonates the explosives killing herself and a co-worker without even fully collapsing the cave... Mind you all while not ever curing the bacteria that she had the cure for. And Margaret who talked her into all this decides to not even f***ing bother following up to see if she succeeded. She f***s off to her underwater base to flick the bean for the rest of time while talking sh** to a dead reaper, instead of just finishing the job and curing the leviathan. And once Robin learns all this, she's completely unfazed and just leaves to make a new body for an alien... Who by all accounts is completely hostile to humanity, willing to use humans as test subjects, is stupid or lied, is contradictory about everything he said so far, while hinting that he was intimately involved with the Kharaa outbreak in the first place on this planet... But she immediately trusts him and helps him without even asking him anything about this, despite being a xenologist aka somebody who studies f***ing aliens and the two of them f*** off to his home planet without even bringing the cure that Allen needed and that he went to the planet to get in the first place...
"This plot is f***ing madness. That's not even everything wrong with the story. It's all so f***ing insane. It's poorly written. It's contradictory. We didn't even talk about half of the plot holes in the side characters that made no sense. I was on the floor laughing till I cried through half of the dialogue, because it was just so bizarre, it felt like a fever dream.
"So all those times where the game had to make sacrifices to make room for the story... This was it. All those bland biomes, all the problems they didn't improve on from the first game, the total lack of horror... All of it was because they wanted so badly to force a story narrative into a game where it didn't belong, and THIS was that narrative. This is why everything else in the game sucks."
CZcams: "Subnautica Below Zero Review - Why doesn't it hold up?" by Ceronesthes
@@a8lg6p If was a Sea Dragon that wrecked the Disease Research Facility trying to recover its egg, not the Sea Emperor, but otherwise, good review.
Seems most people have similar view, it was interesting to watch you and a couple others play.
Always a pleasure to see you drop by the stream.
The same game except worse is a good description yeah. I played through it because the core formula is addictive but I also kind of regretted playing it afterwards. It's video game junk food. I didn't really get anything new out of it. The writing is also bad so the story just made the game worse for me.
It's weird that you say Below Zero is deeper and darker when it's actually completely opposite. Below Zero has illumination everywhere and the sea is shallower and more confined. In the original game there are deep dark waters that are completely absent in Below Zero.
Oxygen plants made the diving sections too easy and stress-free also.
"Video game junk food" - I like that phrase and may have to steal it for future vids :D A good way of summing up this game.
I would like to see you playing some game. Bro you have a great voice! Anf your reviews are cool
Thanks! I stream on Twitch Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays (links in the video description) so if you are around feel free to drop by and say hello :)
@@MarksGameReviews oh i will:)
@@Argasz I may sound a little different on stream, I use a different mic when I'm live. The one I use for my voiceovers and reviews is pretty special :)
@@MarksGameReviews in general,recording a video and a live stream are two different things. Yiu should continue doing what you doing because you clearly have what is necessary.
The biggest issues for me, Story telling, the starting story (basically when it was still being made) made more sense with them already being there!
Because why on earth would you go to a planet so unwell prepared! Then Altera... They make it look like this is the big bad company, yes in the story they simply do not use that! Where in the beta version they did.
The voice acting, first voices without a doubt were nicer!
Then the ships... that modular... oef.
The sea, just far less open!
And it just doesn't end well. Though it is cool you go the home planet, it just all feels random, like it wasn't really a well though out story line. Heck while the original wasn't planned to have a story but it did. But the biggest thing, it didn't keep changing while it was being made like Below Zero, and you can tell!
oh and a big schrimp.
Yes its a shame the original vision for this game wasn't maintained, you can certainly feel where the story or events have been chopped and changed.
This is what happens what a game project is greenlit based off of a BET, and not a genuine desire to create a new game, or make profit.
Deeper and darker than the first? I don't know, compare Safe Shallows of the first game at night to the "safe shallows" Twisty Bridge area of Below Zero at night. In Subnautica, biomes can actually become pitch black, and actually dark. In this game, it never reaches that point of darkness except in the void at depth. And when you talk about the sound, "hearing a distant roar and being scared not knowing how far away it is"
What are you smoking? There is no depth perception to the sound in this game. A Cryptosuchus roar at 100m away sounds the same as a roar behind you less than 1 meter away blasting into your ear.
I say ear and not ears because the creature sounds are at a set static pitch, there is no discerning way to judge its distance at all, and they "never" sound far away with aggro attacks, and "always" sound far away with their normal sounds.
I found the visuals under water "acceptable" to a certain degree, but in other regards I find Below Zero more ugly than the first.
I also found the voice acting to be adequate. Competant. Nothing bad about to make fun of or criticize, but nothing special or remarkable about it to make it stand out either.
You praise them for adding in new vehicles for at least "trying", yet the entire Early Access process, people complained about how garbage and vomit-inducingly disorienting the Snowfox is, and they left it as is. People complained about the Seatruck being too slow, having too little storage, and too little functionality, plus the shape of it was cumbersome, they removed the back up camera without even trying to impliment a screen switch-to replacement, and in general were dead set on doing things their way regardless of communit input.
You praising them for trying, while crapping in the face of the fans against these changes, is remarkable. I mean whatever bro, it's your opinion. You're free to have it. But man I can't make heads or tails of it. It makes no sense to me. That's like saying you applaud Hitler for "Trying" to save Germany, even if the results weren't pleasant. At least he tried to do something different, right? (Yes, I did just make that comparison, and yes, I'm serious about it.)
The blueprint pinning, battery life indicator, and running with tools are great quality of life improvements, I'd preferred to have had them in the first game.
Did you honestly just put "it has a difficulty setting in the options menu" as a pro for this game? Ok see, that's how I know you're reaching desperately to try to be balanced and on the fence about this game, when you reach so far down to the bottom of the barrel to praise the game you have to reach for "it's got an options menu!" I cannot, and will not take the rest of your review/video seriously at this point.
In the words of a developer, the Iceworm is more like an animatronic than an existing entity in the game. True enough, it's more like a haunted ghost house ride with a cart on rails. There are "trigger" points, that once the player moves into the trigger zone, it spawns and triggers an Iceworm animation or behavior, and then it goes away when you leave the trigger zone depending on if it was an attack or display. There is no Iceworm roaming around under the snow, unless a player triggers one to appear, they don't exist in the game code wise unlike other creatures.
And to be fair, we had Seamoth PDS in Subnautica as well, the Leviathans in that game were also equally made ineffective because of it. However, we have more options for module upgraes for the Seamoth, so it's more likely a player may not choose to take the PDS module, but in Below Zero there is no reason not to eqiup the Seatruck PDS module as there's only enough to fill the max slots, there are no choices or options to make, just equip everything as soon as you get it.
These are mostly things I disagree with. Every other aspect of your critique on Below Zero I make no mention of, I probably agree with and you may have even said it better than me.
I didn't play the early access of this, so can't comment on how the game has or hasn't changed from that, but its sad if the issues highlighted by the community during that phase were not addressed or just ignored. I can only judge on the package that was served up as the finished product, as a new purchaser of the game would find at the time of making the video - which naturally is the target audience.
As for your point about he "difficulty" levels, I do indeed believe its a positive point because its not just about making the game harder or easier like in an action-rpg or beat-em-up In this case it allows the player to choose what level of "survival game" they wish to take part in. Not everyone wants to have to worry about eating and drinking constantly or likes the idea of permadeath if they make a mistake or their PC freezes, etc etc. Having the choice for any player to set the level of realism (for want of a better word perhaps) is a good thing in my opinion as it will certainly boost the appeal of the game to a wider audience. Where the game does fail in its difficulty is in the lack of real danger from creatures which I think I talked about in the video.
Can't wait to watch you play through when i get some time :) btw Mark test did this work and my vpn did not be over the top?
It worked! Welcome back :D
Explained all of my feelings towards this game perfectly. The annoying lack of direction is so bad that I'm not sure I want to keep playing as needing to Google what to do next is part of the game.
I guess it was always going to be hard to follow up such a great game as Subnautica was. If you have played Below Zero, what were your thoughts on it?
It feels like they took Subnautica and just made everything a little worse
Thats a very accurate way of summing the game up I think!
I played the first game through 3 times. This one, I won't bother finishing. It's "meh". A solid thumbs down.
I went back to the first game after finishing it too, mainly to play around base building rather than go all the way through again. It was just such a fun and intriguing world.
This review is completely off. Especially the part of "If you wanted them to take this in a different direction you are going to be disappointed". Because that is exactly what they did. They made a completely different game, focusing on exposition, narrative and story instead of immersion, tension, world and exploration. The studio clearly had no idea why original was so good and they wanted to just go against everything that made it good in Below zero. Making it into too easy, not at all scary with a narrative that makes zero sense, just to shoehorn in whatever the writers wanted to push. There is a bit where the main character explains the concept of hope by a poem, which was so out of place and cringe that I paused the game and thought that there is no way they just did that. So I had zero connection to the main character... that I was supposed to play as. Just horrible degradation all around.
It feels very much like what it is:
A DLC that was pushed into a full length sequel, but didn't have enough content or scope to stand alone.
The map is tiny, there is no reason to build about half of the things in the game, there are two different "main stories", one of which can be totally ignored.
Unbalance is everywhere (spicy fruit salad, perimeter defence) and there is never any sense of danger or risk. The big beasties make a lot of noise but they're all harmless.
The Snowfox is complete garbage, the land sections are boring and confusing with nothing to do but run around.
I know Below Zero had production problems (staff leaving, multiple complete re-writes of the main stories) and it really shows in the flawed final product.
Having said that, it's still a perfectly fine survival game.
few people tried to point out problems on the steam forums but most of the time they got shouted down for being racis/bigot or hater
Really? I guess some people just don't want to hear any sort of criticism, constructive or otherwise, against their baby. Just to clarify, I haven't seen the comments so don't know if they are indeed racist or not ;)
@@MarksGameReviews big one was some people had trouble understandng the PDA and asked it to be changed back to last games one
anyone who said that was called racist and pretty much chased from the forums
@@Spardin Oh because of the accent, right?
@@MarksGameReviews yeah i think it was mainly from people where english isnt there 1st languge and it made it harder to understand
If you think hunger and thirst goes too quick in this game, play any other survival game.
Shame they ruined this franchise, it was awesome back in the day.
Yeah its a shame they went in this direction. The original game is still fantastic.
@@MarksGameReviews Yeah, I tried to play it again with my old saved game. Completely broken unfortunately. No animations for bulkheads or hatches. Such is life when games auto update.
Bit over the top here. Not sure that releasing an apparently underwhelming sequel is ruining the franchise.
@@bingbong7807 I think it "ruins" it in the sense that people won't be as excited or interested in the follow-up to this game (if there is one). Like when CDPR released Cyberpunk it actually hurt their entire future range as gamers will not be as confident or trusting in them in future. Also like when you watch a movie and love it, then the sequel comes out and its poor - you start to ask yourself "Can I be bothered to check out the next one?"
But let's hope the next game manages to recapture the joy of the original :)
I liked Below Zero. The way I look at it, is, would I rather have Below Zero or no subnautica sequel.. well, as it is, Below Zero has all the stuff I liked about the first game. It's a very pretty game and exploring it made me feel relaxed and cozy. Some stuff was kind of dumb, I do like the first game more. But, some of the updates in Below Zero made their way into the first game. I'm really digging the large rooms for Subnautica 1 and the cloud saves. Below Zero is perfectly worth playing just to explore the biomes. The story is kind of dumb though, rather than focus on the planet we're on, we're chasing ghosts and doing fetch quests. Eh. Game was still a good time.
4645b 🥴🥴🥴🥴