After years of turmoil and uncertainty, Subnautica 2 is finally in early access but is this deep sea survival sequel worth the wait?
The early access release of Subnautica 2 must be a great relief for developer Unknown Worlds. It follows last year’s firing of the studio’s chief executive and founders, a move engineered by the CEO of the game’s publisher Krafton, against the advice of his legal team. He reportedly used ChatGPT to construct the lawsuit that ousted them, in a bid to avoid a promised $250million payout to staff triggered when Subnautica 2 entered early access.
The original management team countersued and were reinstated, while Krafon’s head honcho remains in his post, which must create a rather frosty atmosphere at company away days. Fortunately, playing the game, you’d never suspect so much drama had been swirling around its development, since it remains true to the franchise’s sub-aquatic survival and exploration roots, established when the original Subnautica began its early access more than a decade ago.
It had you crashing landing on an alien water world where you had to fend for yourself, gradually exploring, crafting, base-building, and extending your reach with a range of equipment and submersibles. Eschewing the jollity of Minecraft, and the dry land that features in every other open world survival game, its gorgeously realised ocean-scapes led you away from the shallows where your life pod splashed down, into deeper, more dangerous territory.
The slow pace of life under the waves perfectly complemented the game’s rhythms, which had you looting materials from the ocean depths to turn into ever more complex undersea bases, your access to the depths increasing along with the technology you’re able to craft. As you strayed further away from your initial entry point, the vistas got steadily more alien, as did the fish and larger monsters you encountered.
The follow-up, Subnautica: Below Zero transposed that process of crafting and marine exploration to an icebound ocean, your time spent on its modest surface landmass limited by the extreme cold you encountered there. This month’s early access release of the Subnautica’s first numbered sequel, initially tells you you’re on your way to a desert planet, which is quite the surprise for players of the first two games.
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It turns out that’s actually an indication of a newfound playful sense of humour, because far from the promised Tatooine-style desiccation, you do in fact find yourself on another entirely maritime world, the game’s freshly minted dedication to black comedy evident in your interactions with your AI companion. Like Satisfactory (and long before that, Portal) you’ll regularly be reminded of your own fundamental expendability by its icily calm, computer-generated voice.
Adapting to the environment once again requires an escalating tree of component manufacture, using materials you purloin from increasingly far flung expeditions, but this time you can also upgrade your under-specced human body using alien DNA. Finding huge, glowing purple flowers dotted around the seascape, lets you permanently add powers to your survivor, extending your reach into the abyss.
That’s handy because you quickly find parts of the ocean infested with viral blooms. They block underwater passageways and make fauna more aggressive, which given that in this outing there seems to be more stuff out to kill or injure you, is a noticeable change of pace. Luckily the damage they inflict is initially relatively light and the game’s survivability is generally higher, at least until you start getting really deep.
The ocean depths are where Subnautica like to place its leviathans, who prove to be a threat even once you’ve unlocked the games’ larger submersibles, their aggression and imposing scale making them foes to be reckoned with, even in the late game.
Along with the dark humour, another readily apparent change, even in early access, is the far more coherent technical standard. While Below Zero regularly crashed and featured wearyingly frequent pop-in, this outing delivers a refreshingly bug free experience. There are odd moments when a texture suddenly shifts as you exit a cave, but on Xbox Series X at least, its quality control is noticeably more accomplished.
That polish extends to the beauty of the subaquatic landscapes, which are even more impressively colourful. The sea’s surface is more oceanic looking, as is the way the sun dapples the sand in shallow water, shifting with the waves above you, but it’s only when day turns to night that the game’s full glory hits. Up top, you’ll find twin suns (the nearest you’re going to get to Tatooine) and a beautiful neighbouring ringed planet, while underwater the phosphorescent sea life sprawls away before you.
It’s inspiring stuff and means your exploration is never curtailed by the day/night cycle, it just changes the scenery and the sea life you encounter. It can make it a lot harder to find your way of cave systems though, the lack of sunlight glinting down at you making it tricky to navigate your way to an exit before your limited oxygen supply expires, the screen slowly darkening until you finally drown and get reprinted into a fresh human body by your serene, slave-driving AI supervisor.
Ocean currents are now a feature, both sweeping you along in their powerful flows and providing potential for limitless turbine-driven electrical power for your bases. Crafting has been made simpler, with resources now automatically drawn from nearby storage containers, obviating the need to empty your inventory and sort through multiple lockers looking for that last chunk of rare mineral needed to craft whatever widget you’re working on.
Perhaps the biggest change is the ability to play in four-player co-op, collaborating on everything from resource gathering to base construction. It’s worth noting that you absolutely don’t need to do that, the game playing perfectly well in single-player, but like Satisfactory, there’s a different feel to the process of ranging around its world and building complex structures when you’ve got friends to chat to.
There’s even an interesting mystery to unpick. You regularly stumble across evidence of a large but now vanished human population, their dilapidated, partially flooded underwater settlements carrying clues about what eventually wiped them out, and how Alterra, the franchise’s sinister megacorp, may have had a hand in that downfall.
Subnautica 2 is already enormously compelling and along with the steady progress unlocking new technology and the increasing ease with which you can survive in its ocean, provides ample motivation to continue exploring. In terms of plot, setting, and gameplay loop, this may not be exactly – if you will excuse the pun – a sea change, but it remains a promising return for one of gaming’s most captivating and unusual open world survival games.
Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £25.99
Publisher: Krafton/Unknown Worlds
Developer: Unknown Worlds
Release Date: 14th May 2026 (full release TBA)
Age Rating: 12
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