Subnautica 2

Commercially it ran the table; critically it's conflicted

Start with where this game sits in history. On the commercial side, its success is close to unarguable. More than 2 million copies in the first 12 hours of Early Access, a Steam concurrent peak of 467,582 that crashed into the platform's all-time top thirty, a cross-platform peak past 651,000 — about nine times the original's concurrent numbers. Factor in that it limped to the start line through a publisher walking away mid-development, and the figures look even more absurd. Few games arrive carrying that much baggage and still post numbers that rewrite the studio's own record books on day one.

Critically, though, it is a far more divided picture.

The Steam user rating sits at a sky-high 91% across more than 100,000 reviews, Metacritic and OpenCritic both park the Early Access average at 80, and IGN handed it a 7 — all firmly in "this is good" territory. Yet almost every review, having praised the foundation, taps the brakes on the same point: the content is not finished. Bullish on the potential, unwilling to vouch for what it is right now — that is the game's truest situation.

The split between those two numbers is the whole story in miniature. The 91% from players runs high because the people willing to pay into Early Access already accepted the half-built premise going in — they are grading the potential. The 80-and-7 from critics runs lower because a review has to score what is actually on the disc today and cannot sign a check for content that does not yet exist. Same game, two vantage points, two honest verdicts. That gap is the eternal problem of reviewing anything sold as a work in progress; Subnautica 2 simply stretches it to its breaking point.

Who should dive in now, and who should wait on the shore

So who is this for? If you are the kind of explorer who is happy to grow alongside a world, who does not mind eating the construction phase, who treats "watching it slowly become whole" as the fun itself — then diving in now pays off. You get to catch this ocean at its most imaginative, open-ended stage. On platforms, it is playable on PC across Steam, Epic, and the Windows Store as well as Xbox Series X|S, and the day-one Game Pass arrival is the cheapest way to taste it; anyone planning to invest for the long haul, and to support the developer along the way, can simply buy in.

But if what you want is a complete, tight, high-danger experience with a story told from beginning to end, there is genuinely no rush. Wait for the content to fill out, wait for the full release — projected for 2027-2028 — to tear that wall down, and the dive will go down a lot easier. And here is the reassuring part: because solo and multiplayer saves convert freely and every update lands in the full release, waiting costs you almost nothing. You will not miss permanent content by sitting this phase out. The only price of patience is seeing this ocean a little later, and skipping the cheapest on-ramp the game has — that day-one Game Pass arrival. In the end, the loop at the heart of this game — building fear from oxygen and the unknown deep rather than from weapons — still stands alone at the front of its genre, and its foundation is arguably better than its predecessor's. It just has not surpassed that predecessor yet, because the original is a story that was finished, and this is still a world being written.