Subnautica is now out for the PS4.  I’d been looking forward to the promise of playing this game for some time after having watched a stream or two; as a former SCUBA diver, the idea of having to live under water isn’t necessarily something I’d object to.  Add in a decent story with mostly open play and some survival elements, and you’ve got my curiosity.  However … all is not well on the console port of the game.

Please note that as I wrote this, there was supposedly a stability update available that had been released that day that I hadn’t been able to play yet.  I’ve added EDITs for issues where game play seemed impacted by the update, but I really hate the idea of rewriting the whole thing to hide the bad, when things were so bad – but have gotten much better.  This is one of the reasons why –

I usually hold my negatives until the end of a review.  Thing is … you can’t ignore the negatives in the PS4 release of Subnautica.  Flat out, the game is not yet worth the $30 its going for on the PSN Store.  The issues I’m encountering are symptomatic of what I would consider an “early release” – something Sony tries to avoid most of the time with any title on its platform.  Those issues?

• No auto save.  This is minor and something forgivable in a good game, but also something a vast majority of the PlayStation games have; something that PS4 users are so used to they almost expect it.  The thing is …
• Saving stops the game for a significant amount of time.
• Saving the game also causes the game to crash more often than I’m comfortable with, especially when I’ve been playing for 30 minutes since the last time I saved and the crash wipes out my progress.  Thankfully, I have not personally experienced what others reportedly have: A crash while saving that wipes the save game.  EDIT: Have not encountered this since the update.
• The game needs some heavy optimization updates, as there’s a lot of pop in if there’s a biome that’s got a lot in it.  This is somewhat forgivable when you go from a “busy” biome to another “busy” biome in a short period of time (say, in your Seamoth at full speed).  But it’s still pretty bad.  EDIT: Might actually be worse after the update.
• Another lack of optimization is the sudden drop in frame rate for no known reason.  And I’m not talking dropping from 30+ fps to 25.  I’m talking dropping to 1 fps … or worse.  EDIT: Seems to be a lot better after the update.

So say you’re willing to deal with these issues.  What kind of game is Subnautica?  Well, here’s the first four minutes of my “Survival” gameplay:

So … you know starting out that you were a passenger on a space ship.  Something happened, and you had to abandon ship.  You get whacked in the head and you are all alone and you find yourself not too horribly far from your crashed space ship, but it’s obvious that it’s not going anywhere any time soon.  And actually … being that close to it may not be such a great thing, after all.

From the character’s point of view, it gets better for a while.  You start off in the “Safe Shallows”.  But it becomes apparent that you’re going to have to figure out how to stay underwater (either with a bigger O2 tank or by use of some kind of vehicle) for longer.  And to do that, you’re going to need to go places (by following beacons brought to your attention by your radio) and collect resources, very few of the more important ones being available in the “Safe Shallows”.

Your goal in this would be to survive and hopefully get rescued.  That second part … well, let’s just say you’re going to have to rescue yourself.  Leaving the planet is going to have to involve a bit more than just finding resources to build a rocket (which that alone would be challenging enough).  You’ll find that you’re not 100% healthy, so at some point you’re going to have to fix that.  Then you might be able to remove one of the major impediments to leaving the planet …

But I haven’t gotten that far yet, so I don’t know how that’s going to work.

There are three game modes:

• Survival: You need food.  You need water.  You will take damage if something decides you’re looking pretty tasty.  And you will drown if you run out of air.  You need resources before you can build stuff, and don’t know how to build everything right off the bat.
• Exploration: Food and water are not an issue … so I guess you’re a kind of android.  But you still need air and you still will look tasty to some of the natives.  You need resources to build stuff.  And again, you’ll need to figure out how to build stuff.
• Creative: You can build anything, go anywhere, and won’t die.  But the story won’t necessarily progress too far.

I would recommend avoiding “Creative” until after you’ve played at least a little bit of one of the other two.  It will spoil you when you can just thunk down any item and go all out, only to switch to “Survival” and you start drowning and can’t build crap because you don’t have enough scrap.

I am working my way through “Survival”, but I have died to both starvation and thirst (though I have a handle on both now) and I’ve drowned (usually because I’ve gotten lost inside a wreck – remember kids, responsible wreck divers don’t dive without a buddy and a reel … which while reels kind of exist in the game, aren’t 100% necessary there – just get better at remembering how you got in so you can get out – and as for a buddy … everyone’s dead so far).

I haven’t died to a creature yet (well, maybe once, but I think I just quit and reloaded because “I didn’t want to go that way anyway”), but I’ve noped out of many an encounter by running away.

The punishments of dying are minor, but potentially aggravating:

• If you’re carrying more than just the default gear, such as resources, it will all be where you died.
• If you were swimming outside of a vehicle at the time … the vehicle will still be where you left it, which may be significantly farther away than you could get to without a vehicle.

A fun game, and I’m still working my way through it.  If it were significantly more stable and less prone to hardware limitations experienced by potentially poor coding, it would be a bargain at $30.  EDIT: worth at least that now, but still needs some optimization.  As it is, $15 would be a bit much to ask.  I’m hoping for a stability update soon (I really just want to be able to save without the game crashing and wiping significant amounts of progress), and hopefully some graphical/object optimization in the near future.  I obviously haven’t considered it “unplayable” yet, but at the very least (maybe a little more than) “occasionally annoying.”  I can recommend it if you love the survival concept and the environments (which are well thought out and constructed), but if you’re just looking for a new game … you might want to look elsewhere first.  Or, at the very least, wait for another update or two.