izigame.me

I really truly wanted to love this as much as the first game. I do love some aspects of it.
But I can't really recommend it.
The game play itself is fun and similar to the first game, but my biggest issue is just how easy it is to accidentally sequence break the story line and completely spoil any sense of drama or surprise you may have had.
Without spoilers; The character starts out with a very clear goal. "I am going to go do A. A is what I am coming to this planet to do and I will not rest until A is done." But you can beat the entire game without ever stumbling across almost anything to do with A. It's so easy to miss essential bits of information and blueprints while accidentally finding huge reveals.
There is an end game area with automatically triggering voice lines maybe 200 meters from the starting zone and at sea level. So any new player could just explore an area they think might be a little neat area to find starting blueprints, only to have one of the biggest reveals spoiled for you maybe 1 hour into your play through. Nothing prevents this. It is not dependent on any prerequisite triggers being met first.
On the other end, there are so many waypoints the game gives you that point you in any direction other than the main plot point to an extent that they themselves become the more fleshed out and detailed story line instead. I don't mean that these are like the lifepod radio signals in the first game that flesh out the world and lore.
They are pings that boil down to "You have scanned this thing. Here is another location to go scan." with little to no additional details on the world, characters, or anything. No new blueprints to build tools with, no new resources, no vehicles. They are literal set dressing of "go look at this. Now this."
A voiced protagonist can work, but I feel that act on it's own undercuts one of the most valuable assets of the first game. Riley being completely silent outside of grunts allows them to be an amazing self-insert. In many ways, it feels not like you're playing as "Riley, the survivor" but rather that your own avatar is the one going through this. You are the one telling your story. When you take that away by having them voiced, you are now taking more of the agency from the player and hoping they like where you are going. Obviously thousands of amazing games have voiced protagonists, but this doesn't work in how its applied here. It comes down to writing and performance and I know the game when through MASSIVE overhauls in its life that affected both aspects and you can unfortunately feel it.
The game map is significantly smaller both in diameter, creature sizes, and depth. Roughly 1/6th the size of the Subnautica map. The character dialogues are often stiff and generic. You move...so...slow. It feels like every seacraft is as slow as the cyclops and just as bulky.
I truly hope the teams take all the criticism the community has given them about this specific game and learns to avoid the pain points for Subnautica 2.