Played Subnautica. Good start, but falls off by the middle and towards the end.
Initially it's great, exploring and stuff is fun. Felt a lot like underwater 3D Factorio in that you are simply dumped into a world with no direction of what to do except surviving by gathering resources, building a base, and learning how it all works on your own. The issue is that rather than build on the starting mechanics to increase the depth (har har) of the game over time, the core game mechanics become trivialized over time.
At the start you have 45s of air. You quickly craft a tank to give you a few minutes. Exploring with this is good, you have to pay attention when diving down to look through wrecks. But then you craft your first vehicle. All vehicles have infinite air inside (which also replenishes your tank) so long as they are powered. Same for bases. There's a buildable entity that can pipe oxygen down from the surface to wherever you want underwater but its only for personal use, which is irrelevant when hopping in any vehicle fills your tanks in seconds (confused me, I went half the game thinking you had to jam it into the bases). Similarly, power becomes completely irrelevant on the surface as soon as you craft a solar panel and at any depth as soon as you get the bio-reactor, since you can simply grow plants in the same room of your 1-room habitats to dump in the reactor and form an infinite energy loop to charge your vehicle's batteries. By the mid game there's basically no survival pressure left, just simple exploring and resource gathering.
There's also a lack of interesting stuff to do while exploring. When you find a new area you generally find a new resource. The problem is that because there is only tedious hand-gathering of resources all of the recipes generally require only 1 or 2 ores per craft, meaning you reach a huge area, pick up the first 5-10 of the new ore that you see, then immediately stop exploring. There's huge caverns and stuff where exploration becomes irrelevant since all you want out of them is a paltry few resources before looking for the next area.
The devs really should have just copied Factorio more closely. Make things that costs hundreds of ore to create, make bases that mine resources for you (so that there's a reason to make more bases and stay in new areas longer, the base-building features are great but there's little reason to build much), make supplying bases with electricity and oxygen an interesting challenge, don't make vehicles easymode infinite oxygen everywhere. Unfortunately without any of this the endgame is just kind of sad. Some dude calls you up when you finish the main quest, tells you about plans to build a giant rocket to get into space, you do so with the resources that fit into 1 or 2 backpacks, and the game ends as you sit in the cockpit to blast off.
Other random thoughts:
+ Prawn and Cyclops are great. Former is a mobile suit with a grappling hook to swing like spiderman, latter is a giant sub mini-base. Unfortunately in practice you'll just use the Seamoth for the majority of the game since its the earliest unlock and the fastest/most maneuverable, and it's not that interesting. Where the Prawn and the Cyclops feel very simulation-y in that they are quirky and require skill and attention to use, the Seamoth effectively has perfect Descent-esque 6 degrees of freedom which makes it too simple to use. It's also fast enough to just run past any hostile monsters, so areas that should be very hostile aren't. The only reason to stop using the Seamoth is when you have to dive deeper near the end of the game, far below the max depth the Seamoth can take.
+ Absolutely no in-game map is a good idea. Figuring out the lay of the land on your own and potentially making your own map is something few games do nowadays. I ended up planting bouys and trignometrically calculating my position from the escape pod with a distance and compass for direction in order to place locations on an X,Y plane.
- A complete lack of random map generation or even random item placement makes for low replay value. I get that it would be incredibly hard to do something like that with the complex 3D-connected world, but it's the kind of thing a game like this could really make use of.
- Inventory management is an absolute PITA. You can only craft with stuff on you and with a fabricator in a base. Problem is your inventory size is complete shit, and tools you carry on your will take up half of it. So you end up needing to build dozens of lockers everywhere (which also don't hold nearly enough) and manually sorting and retrieving what you need yourself. There's a mod that makes fabricators able to take resources from any locker in the base rather than needing it on you and I'd say it's mandatory.
- UI is awful in the form of hotkeys. You'd think we'd figured this out by now, but in Subnautica you can't bind stuff to number keys. When you equip something the game just decides to put it in a bind somewhere. If your bind slots are already full (there's only 5 and you'll have 10+ tools), the game just stuffs whatever you want to equip into the #1 quick slot and then shifts everything around. So effectively you can't hard-bind anything to a slot, it all just shifts constantly and pisses you off. There's a mod to expand the quick bind slots to 12 which is again basically mandatory to play the game.
