I'll be sticking to Subnautica 2 throughout early access
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Alarms, warnings, and panic surround you as you make your way to an escape pod to quickly blast from the plunging depths of an unknown ocean to the surface. Then you stick your head out of the pod to be greeted by a vast expanse of water stretching into the horizon.
So it’s business as usual for Subnautica 2, following in the footsteps (or should that be fin flaps) of its predecessor; sea-based survival game Subnautica. Only rather than the burning wreckage of a giant ship in view, Subnautica 2 has a mushroom-shaped coral structure as its focal point, suggesting things could get a lot more weird.
For a start, you're no longer a lone survivor; rather you’re awoken by AI system Noetic Advisor (NoA) and designated as a ‘Qualified Investigator’ tasked with working out why you’re not on the intended planet your colony ship was targeting, why there’s no colony established, and finding out if you’re not the first to be awakened from an artificial slumber, then to establish a foothold on this watery planet for the colonists still asleep leagues below the sea.
All that’s quite an ask for someone in a tiny pod with only a few bits of kit. Fortunately, you're armed with a fabricator that can make quite a bit from harvested materials.
You’ll plunge into the drink to collect basic materials, like scrap metal and bits of flora and fauna, returning to the escape pod and its fabricator to make basic tools and kit, as well as food and water. Subnautica 2 is still very much a survival game where you have to keep an eye on your QI’s hunger and hydration levels unless you want to slowly creep towards death.
I found the process of accumulating stuff to be a little more intuitive than that of the first game, with a feeling like you know what materials you’re going to get when you swipe or grab at a plant or rocky outcrop.
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Poking around more of the starting area reveals blueprints for new items for the fabricator to… fabricate, eventually leading you to a scanner.
From here you can scan pretty much anything and everything, revealing more information about the various plants and aquatic life around you. More importantly, this lets you scan other objects and equipment left by previous colonists who were also trying to survive on an unexpected and unknown planet.
Doing this soon unlocks base building, which is a key to really getting into Subnautica 2.
Base building has been improved and streamlined in that you can now modify components like rooms and corridors, stretching or narrowing them, as well as having the means to move and relocate modules, which should prove to be a nice upgrade for players coming from the more rigid templates of Subnautica.
As base building moves the game forwards, I definitely appreciated the flexibility to building; not least of all because I borked the layout of my initial base by missing a blueprint for a room module and trying to fudge together a structure of corridors.
I will say that knowing how to advance objectives might not be immediately clear to newcomers.