I recently tried Subnautica, a game that sat in my library for years after I picked it up in a humble bundle.
Despite my dislike of survival games I enjoyed the first game from Unknown Worlds, Natural Selection 2. I thought it had a great concept and with a few tweaks would have been a success. They also released a lot of updates and seemed pretty active. So I thought what the hell, I heard good things I'll try it.
Subnautica exceeded my expectations and I genuinely enjoyed it. Upon completion I looked up a few videos for the sequel, Below Zero, and...didn't like what I saw.
I decided to pick up Below Zero for free to try it out and confirm my suspicions before paying for it...and holy shit am I glad I did.
It is such an incredible departure from the original, and disturbingly woke. For no reason. It's a survival game on an alien world, seemingly impossible to fuck up.
And somehow they managed. They made the same mistake Dead Space did and gave your character a voice and personality...except surprise surprise you are now a sassy black female scientist / adventurer who don't take no shit from nobody!
On the surface that may seem small, but the beauty of the original was how minimal the voice acting was. You'd find hints and clues scattered around the world, there was no hand-holding or even a map. It was sparse, you felt isolated and alone considering no other humans are around and you only have dead data logs to figure out what to do.
Now this dumb black bitch straight up tells you what to do. "Oh I need to do ____" "Oh looks like I'll need to go ____" "Sounds like I should ____" and to make things worse it pops up exactly where they are on the map.
So exploration is now a giant fetch quest for a person you can't stand. But wait! It gets worse.
The entire plot now revolves around a dozen characters, 10 of which are women who get 90% of all the voice lines. The two men are both constantly fucking up, being berated, or acting like idiots in every voice log. The 10 women are all scientists in a myriad of various lesbian relationships (I wish I was kidding) but all young and oddly unattractive. Weird how all these young female scientists are all the leads and head of departments while the older men are underlings...
Eventually you even find another human on the planet with you who just so happens to be the classic badass survivalist character who kills everything and drips masculinity...who is also a middle aged woman. Christ I wish I was kidding.
The worst part is despite the addition of all the crap woke elements and disgustingly poor voice acting they managed to somehow make the game worse too. A smaller map...for a sequel? What the fuck, who makes the open world SMALLER in a follow-up? And a huge chunk is on land, which is awkward and defeats basically the entire point of the series.
I looked up the devs and it looks pretty bad:
https://unknownworlds.com/about/
Only a few women but the classic types you'd expect to be working at a game company.
I noticed on a job posting they had this:
We make games that are accessible and engaging for players all over the world. We believe in hiring and supporting the most talented and creative people of diverse backgrounds. That support includes annual professional development and home office stipends, as well as paid time off for volunteer/non-profit work. Join us and be a part of our growing and innovative studio.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc. is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
I have never seen a bigger split between an original game and its sequel before from the same devs. It is insane how badly they fucked up the 2nd one.
Don't give these morons money.
Original: 8/10 great immersive game.
Beyond Zero: 2/10 stay away.
Natural Selection 2: 10/10 give it a shot.
Just...don't pay them for it.
I've known their games since the original natural selection HL1 mod. That was a top notch mod at the time.
They had the talent to keep making good games for a while but it was clear they desperately wanted acceptance from the IDGA type crew and the culture rot set in pretty immediately after they incorporated. I vaguely recall Charlie also penned a pretty vociferous defence of other game devs' IMO predatory business practices shortly after UW's founding, further cementing the impression that the ingratiating themselves with the prevailing industry culture was more important than the players.
NS2 thankfully managed to stay on target mostly, but even with Subnautica they were always harping on in the Dev blogs about how too many games are about killing and that makes them big sad, so they wanted a game where you weren't given the chance to kill the wildlife, only scare them off temporarily. Or some spiel about how they hope their game teaches people how we're killing mother earth.
They've gone full pretentious indie cliche lately and their latest project is a miniature wargame title in early access that tries to style itself as a simulation of a tabletop boardgame rather than a video game, even complete with digitally painting your miniatures, and 2 of the 3 human faction leaders are black women.
That explains their website homepage art, damn too bad like you said natural selection started out as a really cool idea that deserved being fleshed out. Shame that they couldn't keep their own bullshit outside of their creative ideas, hard to find decent devs nowadays.