Subnautica 2

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted May 14, 2026 on Steam The game is running perfectly on Proton, for all fellow Linux users!
• Recommended Posted May 14, 2026 on Steam TLDR Summary: The base building is incredibly intuitive and the best it's ever been, the new Tadpole vehicle feels great, and the isolated, creepy vibe of the first Subnautica is totally back. However human models look uncanny, and the map feels a bit empty and restrictive right now. The biggest issue is that the devs removed all forms of lethal self defense due to a forced pacifist design philosophy. Against giant leviathans, your only options are throwing useless flares or running away. But there is massive potential. Going into this with the recent Krafton news I was honestly pretty worried but I was actually surprised. It's very much an early access title right now: it's a little raw and the map feels small when you start out. If you swim in some directions you hit the void wall in just a few hundred meters. I know the map stretches for thousands of meters east, but even in those huge areas there's barely any fauna or detail. Hitting those sudden walls makes the immediate playable space feel pretty restrictive. There are no real main objectives yet so you can't really "beat" the game. Afaik the only real things to do are track down a few blackbox distress signals and terminal scans which you can do fairly quick. But what is there is very playable and enough to just have fun exploring. Visually the game looks gorgeous. The new UI is futuristic and pretty and the music is actually pretty sick. But honestly where the game really shines right now is the base building. You can dynamically scale things like walls and rooms and the whole system just feels super intuitive and fun to mess around with. I also gotta give a massive shoutout to the Tadpole. Even though it's the only vehicle right now it hits a really good sweet spot. It has that fun modularity from Below Zero but keeps the normal smooth functionality of the first game so it doesn't feel terrible and sluggish to drive. [strike]There are definitely some issues though. BE AWARE OF TROILITE SOFTLOCKS (one of the mid-late game resources). Troilite currently does not respawn in the world. If you mine the available nodes and use it all up making ingots, your entire save gets completely softlocked and you cannot progress.[/strike] The devs dropped a hotfix adding more Troilite to the late game region so this is less likely to happen now. On the less severe side the human character models look horrendous right now. They are super uncanny and honestly look AI generated lol. I also really wish we could enter the new lifepod from below like in the first game even though the new design itself looks pretty cool. Speaking of things that miss the mark I have to mention the game's new seaglide called the Wakemaker. I like the design but it is extremely slow and honestly just feels useless right now. The FOV is also a tad too low which is nauseating for me so I really wish we had a FOV slider. And then there is the performance. I originally thought it was just a bit demanding, but honestly it is horribly optimized. It relies way too heavily on Lumen, to the point where it brings even the best rigs to their knees. I saw a Zwormz benchmark where the game couldn't even hold 60 FPS at 1080p on Epic settings with DLAA... using an RTX 5090. That is just unacceptable. To make matters worse, the upscaling is currently just bad and suffers from really noticeable ghosting. They just rolled out a hotfix targeting performance on Epic visual settings which is a step in the right direction, but optimization still has a very long way to go. One of the first things I noticed was the new PDA voice. I didn't like it at first but it kinda grew on me and feels a little more intimidating when it warns you about things. But what is most notable is the new "NOA" ai assistant. It acts like the radio from the older games but gives you cool audio logs to read through. That actually got me to bother reading into the story which is a first for me. The game's vibe is much closer to the original Subnautica than Below Zero. You have a silent protagonist again so there's no constant character narration and the feeling of complete isolation is back since the only voices you hear are NOA and the dead crew's logs. The game does have its own void monster which made me happy (sounds stupid I know). It makes these scary wails and looks pretty terrifying. There's also the Collector leviathan which is a giant squid, but I found the design to be a bit underwhelming compared to the massive ones they showed in the cinematic trailer. Gameplay wise they are also a massive pain. The border between the Shallows and the eastern Observatory is extremely annoying to get across because of the Collector leviathans patrolling it. It is completely impossible to combat them in any way right now. There is no way to defend yourself and if you're caught say goodbye. I've found flares to be completely useless. Throwing one feels like slapping them with a napkin. You basically just have to slam the gas and pray you don't get bent over. The most glaring flaw in this game is the absolute lack of self-defense against predators; being forced to either toss a flimsy flare or simply swim for your life is a deeply frustrating design philosophy. I realize the franchise has always leaned away from traditional combat, largely driven by the director’s decision to project real-world political views onto a sci-fi survival setting which is a connection that has always felt completely misplaced. But even with those restrictions the original game still gave you a survival knife and a stasis rifle to hold your ground. In this sequel even those fundamental lifelines have been stripped away, and the development team's justification for it is severely disappointing. The irony is thick enough to cut with the knife they took from us. They act as though removing basic survival mechanics from a video game somehow addresses real world violence. It’s completely contradictory to mandate "peaceful exploration" when the ocean is actively trying to eat you. Furthermore the hypocrisy is staggering. This supposedly pacifist game loop has no moral issue with players feeding endless hordes of innocent non violent fish into a fabricator for sustenance yet completely draws the line at letting us protect ourselves from actively aggressive sea monsters. I fully respect their creative right to build the game they want to build. However if this forced helplessness is the idea for the franchise going forward, I will definitely not be buying the next game. Aside from the Collector and Void leviathans there are only about a dozen other hostile creatures in the game right now like Bulletheads and Needlersharks. Honestly these smaller predators are mostly completely unharmful and act more like a bother than anything else. The only actual threats right now are the two big leviathans, so 13-ish enemies that rarely bother you unless youre up in their face isn't exactly tons of predators. However, digging through the game files does reveal massive untextured prototypes like an "Elusive Leviathan" that is 217 METERS LONG (double the size of the Sea Dragon and four times longer than a Reaper). There are also already ideas for a successor of the Cyclops called the "Trident". So while the game feels a bit empty on day 1 when it comes to the fauna, the foundation for a much bigger experience is clearly already in the works. There is also a massive uproar right now regarding the game's EULA and data collection policies. To be honest the text itself is mostly standard corporate stuff like class action waivers and telemetry that you see in every modern online game but it's worth mentioning. Fortunately it looks like the devs listened to the backlash because a hotfix just revised the ToS and added a clear in game prompt letting you toggle off telemetry at any time. Overall, I think the potential is great, but buy it to build and explore.
• Recommended Posted May 15, 2026 on Steam Games a good successor to Subnautica 1. Feels closer to the original than Below Zero. Devs have earned their bonus.
• Recommended Posted May 15, 2026 on Steam Ah yes, relaxing underwater exploration. Proof courtroom drama can’t sink a good game.
• Recommended Posted May 16, 2026 on Steam I feel there's a lack of more detailed yapping here, and I just wanted to write something longer after reading a few other reviews! This game is absolutely incredible, and far more than I was expecting for day one of early access. The graphics are some of the most pretty and comforting (or unsettling depending on location ofc) I've experienced before; I have played with multiple friends so far and really just enjoy floating around the shallow areas with no gear every time. Everything is so vibrant and alive! Each new area surprised me in terms of beauty and shape and just general incredible map design. There are lots of areas that still need to be made of course, but there were several times when I thought I had reached the edge of the map and instead it was just a terrifying sheer drop into a deeper area. I think this game does a fantastic job at making things feel deep; I haven't gone past 250 meters yet and it still feels so vast, like comparable to my feeling of the entire depth in Below Zero. The texture work is also incredible, almost everything is high-res even right up close, and the shapes of the rocks remain high-poly, which is a huge improvement from the previous games for me. It makes the scale of the environment a lot more evident. This was one of my main problems with the first game; the larger late game areas didn't feel as large to me because they were scaled for the Cyclops without as much fine detail in terms of the terrain shape and foliage up close. The storyline has been super engaging and fun so far as well, the voice acting is really good, and the direction things are going feels really interesting and multifaceted, with the story evolving in a way that provides a bit of ambiguity about the true nature of the world, which I find fascinating. I can't wait to see where it goes! I have also so far found this game the creepiest of the 3 games overall, mostly because the atmosphere is done so well and the environments feel so immersive. I also want to touch on some of the other common reviews: I feel a lot of people have rose-tinted glasses looking back at the first game and their nostalgia for it. I too had some of my scariest and most mysterious experiences right at the beginning of the first game, but I think when reviewing it's important to understand that bias and account for it. I'm used to the style of the games now, and am also a bit older, so I recognize that nothing will give me that exact same kick in the same way! I think this game has done a fantastic job at trying to resurrect that feeling as much as it can while also inspiring awe in completely new ways. I am almost certain that someone playing this game for the first time would find it scarier and more awe-inspiring than the original (when comparing fleshed out parts of the game, so like first ~15-20 hours), it's just an improved experience in most aspects. The many negative reviews on the EULA are fair, perhaps brought on in part because the game has a very prominent EULA screen when you first load it, so more people see it and are concerned by it. It is completely fair to demand better from EULAs, and I think voicing concerns is positive here. Just good to put in perspective of other large publishers, it's essentially a switch to a standard AAA EULA rather than an indie one, which is what people were hoping for. I think it is possible to both criticize this portion while separating it from the actual content in the game. We need more nuance these days! Anyway, I am humbled to be able to experience all this hard work so soon for such a low price point. I am a music producer, and over in that land we pay like $30 for basically any random ass tool, even sometimes one with like one big knob in the center that's the only thing you can adjust. And $200 paid software upgrades for the primary software every few years (at least for mine). It's kinda nice to have been out of the "gamer" world for a while so I could come back with some perspective and appreciate how much we can get for so little. I have personally not faced any bugs aside from very very minor graphical glitches and some light player-launching behavior in multiplayer when docking lol but honestly my experience has been more bug free than the original! I'm certainly lucky to have a highly-supported graphics card, so that certainly plays into it a bit, but in general I was super surprised at the stability. The performance was also super reasonable; I'm playing at 4k on medium settings with a full 60 fps, and my computer is working just about as hard as it did for Below Zero. I have a 4070 laptop edition, which is about 10% slower than a 5060, a $360 card even despite the current AI price inflation era. In most cases there isn't even a noticeable difference between Medium and Epic graphics, they've done a great job at prioritizing the general lighting & ambience in all modes and saving processing power elsewhere. Thank you for reading my ramble, I'm going to head to sleep now, stay off the internet tomorrow morning, and then enjoy the game some more :)
• Recommended Posted May 17, 2026 on Steam Incredible start and follow up to the first game. There are several QOL improvements. Sound design is still amazing. Initial map size feels generous enough. The story sections feel obviously divided into two parts. If this whole early access story is the equivalent to the Sunbeam chapter in the first game, then we're off to an amazing start pacing wise. Tadpole is a good enough starting vehicle and incorporates the vehicle attachment mechanic from Subzero which I like. I feel the Seamoth is still more immersive. We definitely need a Prawn and Cyclops equivalent in this game as soon as they expand the map. Looking forward, I can't wait for more biomes, more interesting creatures, more depth, and more scale.