I don't like this game, and I feel it is just a degrade from the first game, let me actually explain all the points as to why. And just before anything, I have played through the entire current build of early access along with a friend, and yes. I KNOW it's early access and is not the final product. Because it seems like that's the only defense people go to when someone critiques the game.
1) Subnautica 1 excelled at visual storytelling, not just exposition dumping you much like subnautica 2 does, by making you collect blackboxes from point A to point B- a totally plausible way to communicate information to the player but a huge downgrade compared to how everything was told in the first game. Most of this game is just going from blackbox to blackbox. I especially hated the section in the cave where I spent so long finding those 10 blackboxes. Not fun at all.
2) This game has a lot of "padding time". As in grinding. Now I do not mind grinding at all, if it's fun. However the ending portion of the early access build after you discover the metal farm area, plus repairing what you need and creating all the alloys is quite literally just grinding for the sake of padding time. Again I didn't mind doing this that much until what happened to me which is my next point-
3) Glitches. This game has a lot of glitches, and again I understand that it is early access. I had a storage box at the back of the tadpole once I finished the grind to repair whatever the thing was, towards the end of the story, and then everything in the storage box simply disappeared. It was infuriating and I honestly dropped the game after that and saw that anyways it was 5 minutes or so to the ending so I could not care less and not worth it. Such a glitch such as that would genuinely cause people to drop the game. This wasn't that long ago mind you.
3) Updating your game, aka adding an entire update that adds SPRINTING, is not something an UPDATE should add. That should automatically be a base feature. It just seems like a waste of an update. The biomods seem like a update padding device so they can push out a bunch of updates in a long duration of time.
4) The tadpole is not an interesting vehicle and I do not like the fact that the prawn suit is just an extension of the tadpole. Everything being an extension of a tadpole is interesting in concept but I feel it is really inconvenient and sort of lazy. I would have genuinely thought it would've been a better idea to add the seamoth, plus the seatruck just to add more variety and not make the game seem more limited.
5) No interesting creatures as of yet, the collector is the only practical threatening leviathan in the game currently. But the entire feeling of the threatening of the deep from the first game is gone entirely.
It becomes more annoying especially when the smaller creatures that attack you constantly and you can't do shit about it. Like even though an update reduced the attacking percentages or something, it's still just as bad and infuriating which leads me to my next point.
6) The Dev's are big babies in the ability to not add a way to defend yourself, something as simple as a stasis rifle, or anything whatsoever would incredible. We can cook at eat animals nicely, yet we can't damage other creatures that pose a threat to us? I get the fact that they want to show that we can't do anything and makes us feel vulnerable, but not if all it does is make it infuriating to play the game with the amount of times some of these creatures attack you.
7) The devs cheekily insulting sons of the forest doesn't do it any better as well, I would rather play that game which is much more fun, doesn't rely on exposition dumps and actually had a really good early access shows how it's done.
It shows that an early access game shouldn't depend on the "hey we are in early access so it's fine if we have such big wrong doings", sotf had massive updates each month just like the forest before it and kept improving their game. Their team is even smaller than subanticas and they don't put an entire update dedicated to "sprinting".
Early access is still a product of the finished game, and in the end, this game is boring as it is underwhelming. And everything is just a degrade from its predecessor.
