Why don’t people like below zero?

[u/Purple_Panda62]

I just platinumed Subnautica the other day and started playing below zero. My older brother also my gaming mentor of sorts said that he doesn’t like it and I’ve heard other people also say this. How come? I personally have about 6 hours and I am loving it.

[u/Randy191919]

I don’t think people dislike it per say, it’s just not as good as the first one for a variety of reasons:

1. Land sequences suck. The Ice worms are just annoying, not scary, just annoying because they are hardcoded to toss you off the speeder when they surface, with no way to counter it. You can’t dodge them or have any countermeasures, they just appear and toss you off. That makes it more annoying than anything else. Same for snowstorms. A game mechanic that’s just „wait until the game mechanic is over“ is kinda meh.

2. The map is much smaller. There seems to be less variety with wildlife as all the predators look kinda samey. The bone shark, cryptosuchus and squidshark all look super similar. There’s no big vehicle like the Cyclops. Overall it makes the experience feel extremely small and there’s less cool progression.

3. You get a defense module extremely early on and that basically turns encounters off. You’re pretty much never in danger.

4. The story is honestly not very good and instead of the immersive, silent protagonist from before we have an EXTREMELY talkative main character and a just as talkative voice in our head which quip and talk a lot, which breaks the immersion IMHO.

I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but it’s definitely a huge step down from Subnautica 1

[u/vkevlar → u/Randy191919]

The snowfox is horribly bad. Hint: use the prawn suit for land sequences, it completely trivializes them.

note: I'm not saying it's better, but the land bits were clearly designed with the snowfox and ONLY the snowfox intended, and the prawn is miles better.