Recent reviews by Jimonions

For price paid to hours played this game is at the top, and its still early access.
Straight to the point of being fun and engaging. Would recommend for anyone

I really wanted to like this game but at the end of the day I was just asking continually feeling let down by poor gunplay, tedious stealthing, along with various other issues.
- Fog is not a fun mechanic yet its prevalent everywhere.
- Why is running around with a hammer more effective than actually standing on the objective??
- My flashlight unable to light any further than a few meters. Please my eyes hurt from squinting.
- Bullets have very poor feedback when you're actually hitting something compounded by the lack of light.
- extremely tiring stealthing which never changes. Crouch, bonk on head, repeat, boring.

It feels like a game where the point is not to have fun

Its a good game but if you were to compare the experience to the first I'd say it falls a bit short.
This one is a lot more story focused. There was a lot of much needed exposition to follow up the events of the first and continue the story of the Architects / Precursors, but on the other hand the environment and exploration seem to be very lacking.

- Size
To start with the map is slightly smaller in diameter compared to the first (2km / 2.5km) but the maximum depth at which you can go is far shorter at just around 1000m compared to 1700m.
As such most of the game takes place in relatively shallow water.

- Biomes
Biomes are few and mostly empty of gameplay objects (Wrecks, scannable objects, etc). First game had maybe double the amount of biomes/subbiomes.
That said the biomes that do exist are visually superb. A lot of the open water exploration in the first game was moved aside for more tight smaller cave searching hence the seatruck and its detachable modules. You may as well use the prawn though as its far better suited.
I cant say the same for the last 2 deep biomes though. While visually one of them appears to have a lot going on with a smaller sub biome integrated into it, the very last and deepest one basically just serves as an area to progress story and contains nothing else at all. Not even some small points of interest.

- Glaciers
The glacier above ground stuff was an interesting take but upon actually starting to try and explore it I found the same problem as in the water, large empty areas devoid of "things" outside of some few environment static objects. There is a vehicle called the snowfox to explore with but you may as well skip it as it has no battery life and certain enemies can easily just knock you off or outrun you anyway. You are far better off just building a prawn suit with jump upgrade and using that. Also to mention but this above ground areas plays no role in the main story line, it is purely optional and what you find up there has very little impact on ocean survival outside of cosmetics or additional resources should you be lacking (no major vehicle components or things that can help you in a significant manner)
After a while I found myself getting real frustrated at endlessly running around empty ice caves, outrunning worms, and getting hopelessly lost in blinding snowstorms.

- Base building
Not much on this point but it seems they did work out a lot of bugs or issues that were present in the first one. As for what you can build though its still the same. there are no new components or cosmetics (other than a bunch of different cosmetic beds and some desk ornaments).

- Vehicles
There are two main vehicles
- Seatruck
- Prawn

The seatruck replaces the seamoth from the first. It has these detachable modules that you can pick and choose to use. E.G you could have 3 storage modules for massive resource gathering and transportation. The more modules you attach the slower and less easy it becomes to maneuver.
This effectively replaces any purpose that the cyclops submarine had in the first game but does not replace the Cyclop's coolness being a double decker behemoth that you could construct base building components inside. You are limited to building individual modules to suit those needs.
I built all the modules but found very little use for anything outside of the storage and prawn modules. From an efficiency standpoint the other components are not worth it but they are still very much enjoyable to play around with.

The prawn is exactly the same tried and true mech suit that I love. Although picking up moving ore is still nigh impossible.

- story
You are not alone in this one unlike the first, you have a disembodied being in your head and your character talks. She seems to portray emotions at time but (spoilers) when she finds out that her sister is actually via a PDA entry she has no reaction whatsoever and never brings it up... pretty jarring to say the least. Story has never been a strongsuit in subnautica though so at least that trend has been carried over from the first.

Its easy to focus on the negative points but overall the experience is still very much worth it. It is an enjoyable game in itself and relatively bug free (experienced one bug where a needed story component failed to give me the blueprint and had to spawn it in via console).

Blue Screen of Death after every game exit

Its good fun in the beginning, kept me occupied for quite a while. However it is far too reliant on randomization in the later stages when you start advancing into the more difficult tiers. You can expect to be restarting your run over and over in the start just to get cards that don't leave you dying in the first few rounds. And then after just cross your fingers and hope to god the game decides to throw something decent your way so you can build something that wont leave you lost at the final boss. (This final boss by the way is also randomized with some versions being insanely powerful while others just seemingly no different than if he didn't have any modifications.)

Deck building games should not randomize the order of your cards. This kind of defeats the purpose of settings up your deck to do specific things.

Lots of fun, lots of bitter disapointment and feeling of resentment/helplessness as you are fed bad rolls upon bad rolls.

casual fun, sometimes challenging, can be good for taking turns with other players locally

all the boss fights have super inflated amount of adds to offset boring mechanics with artificial difficulty in the form of more boring targets to shoot at.

Have fun trying to focus on an infinite amount of multiple enemies in Every. Single. Fight.

Other than that the level design is bland and uninteresting, many times I've wandered in circles because every single hallway looks the same, something that should definitely not exist in a non-procedural linear world.
Not to mention weapons, you wont find many main weapons to use but don't worry about that. none of the main weapons have anything really unique about them and are extremely generic so you wont feel the need to diversify and spend time upgrading alternatives.
side weapons you will have an abundance of, but really the only worthwhile ones are the spitfire and submachine gun both of which are acquired in the first act.

quality of life completely sucks in this game, have fun going through hours of dialogue, trying to manage inventory, and reloading saves because of misclicks

I was only able to play until about the second to last chapter. When you see a wall unload to your left when going up some stairs, ignore it completely or else you will fall into a pit you cannot recover from and will have to restart about 2 chapters behind. Other than that its a free game with nice visuals if you're looking to kill time for about a half hour

It is still a very shallow game full of repetition and the most boring encounters / objectives you could possibly experience.

Also still not optimized, constant mini hitches and wildy inconsistent FPS (GTX 1080 / i7 8700k 5ghz)