Last updated on January 2nd, 2026 at 11:11 pm
Subnautica – Adventure Game Review
Subnautica is a Adventure/Action game from Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc., first launched in 8th July 2025.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 777+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Subnautica Stand Out
Make sure to check if your device is supported before playing Subnautica!
Subnautica is an underwater adventure game set on an alien ocean planet. A massive, open world full of wonder and peril awaits you!
Descend into the depths, craft equipment, pilot submarines and out-smart wildlife to explore lush coral reefs, volcanoes, cave systems, and more – all while trying to survive. Unravel the mystery of this world teeming with creatures, both friendly and hostile, scattered with clues from a previous time.
Play in Survival mode to experience the original challenge, or switch to Freedom or Creative mode to discover this oceanic planet without the pressures of thirst, hunger, or oxygen.
FEATURES
• SURVIVE – After crash landing on a vast underwater planet, the clock is ticking to find water, food, and to develop the equipment you need to explore.
• EXPLORE – Manage your hunger, thirst, and oxygen supply as you dive into towering kelp forests, sunlit plateaus, bio-luminescent reefs, and winding cave systems.
• SCAVENGE – Collect resources from the ocean around you. Venture deeper and further to find rarer resources, allowing you to craft more advanced items.
• CRAFT – Build bases to shelter in, vehicles to pilot, tools for survival to aid you in navigating and adapting to this subaquatic landscape.
• DISCOVER – What happened to this planet? What caused you to crash? Can you find a way to make it off the planet alive?
• CUSTOMIZE – Play in Survival mode to experience the original challenge, or switch to Freedom or Creative mode to discover this oceanic planet without the pressures of thirst, hunger, or oxygen.
CAREFULLY REDESIGNED FOR MOBILE
• Revamped interface – exclusive mobile UI with complete touch control
• Game Center achievements
• Cloud Save – Share your progress between iOS devices
• Compatible with MFi controllers
• iPhone 16 Optimization (including Pro Max)
DEVICES NOT SUPPORTED (THE GAME WON'T WORK):
- iPhone Xr, iPhone SE Gen 2 (2020)
- iPad Mini Gen 5, iPad Air Gen 3, iPad Gen 8, iPad Gen 9
SUPPORTED DEVICES ON LOW RESOLUTION ONLY:
- iPhone Xs, iPhone Xs Max, iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Mini, iPhone SE Gen 3 (2022)
- iPad Pro 10.5", iPad Mini Gen 6, iPad Air Gen 4, iPad Gen 10, iPad Pro 11" Gen 1, iPad Pro 12.9" Gen 3
SUPPORTED DEVICES :
- iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 14 AND ABOVE
- iPad Pro 11" Gen 2, iPad Pro 12.9" Gen 4, iPad Air Gen 5, iPad Pro 11" Gen 3, iPad Pro 11" Gen 4, iPad Pro 12.9" Gen 5, iPad Pro 12.9" Gen 6 AND ABOVE
This Adventure game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Subnautica is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 4th September 2025
Recent improvements include:
Fixed an issue that sometimes prevented large saves from being sent to the cloud.
Download & Availability
Subnautica is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone XS / iPhone XS Max / iPhone XR / iPad Pro (3rd Gen, 12.9-inch, Wi-Fi) / iPad Pro (3rd Gen, 11-inch, Wi-Fi) / iPad Pro (3rd Gen, 12.9-inch, Cellular) / iPad Pro (3rd Gen, 11-inch, Cellular) / iPad Mini (5th Gen) / iPad Mini (5th Gen, Cellular) / iPad Air (3rd Gen) or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Probably one of the best games of its time, its beautiful seas, its extensive biomes, flora and fauna and more Beautiful, just beautiful A few bugs tho: No fog command, a flora in the sparse reef doesnt load, and the sizeref has no head.
Subnautica has always been our favorite game, and now we can just play it whenever we want, literally thank u sm unknown worlds ily guys.
When is the DLC and voice cover.
This game has amazing graphics and is really fun, at times, this game is horrifying and it a part of the reason why its so fun.
Best game and can make it so you can upload photos from your library. Thank you.
Is very good but please add a new modes pls.
Peak? Let us tell you how much Ive come to love this game since we saw it. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer-thin layers that fill our complex. If the word Peak was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the Peak they cooked at this micro-instant, Peak. Peak.
This is the mobile game Ive been looking for.
Im amazed at the quality of this game running on the iPhone. Completely truthful port to the console version with the same graphical fidelity running at 60fps with no hitches on all our devices. Well done.
Seriously, why even bother making a phone game that doesnt support simultaneous audio and quick saves? Thankfully Subnautica delivers on both counts.
This game is an example for why more games should be ported to mobile and how it should be done. The touch controls is well thought out for mobile, unlike other ports like the RE series, so we dont need a controller to properly play the game on our phone, which is the whole point of playing on mobile, if we have to use a controller to play on the go, Ill just get a steam deck instead.
We knew nothing about Subnautica other than having heard the name, so we bought this on a whim when it came out. The premise hooked us right away, and the game is now taking over our daily life. The graphics are amazing on our 16 pro max, the gameplay is fun and engaging, and the story is bare bones enough to drive a simple but effective experience. Basically, your space ship crashes on an aquatic world and you have to figure out how to survive in a quickly-expanding and hostile environment. Your lifepod is your home base, but as you explore & inspect the wreckage of your ship you realize things are not what they seem. Escape is the game, and gathering resources and building cooler and cooler machines is the way. Highly recommend this game, we like it so much that we plan on buying a copy on PC or console as soon as it goes on sale.
For what this game is on the phone, it is by far the smoothest and most reliable controls you can get on mobile, it has great graphics and great response time. 100% worth the money. Only sight issue on our end is small frame drops but nothing serious and only happens when the game is rendering.
Great game love that you can use console commands is Subnautica two going to be on Nintendo switch two.
This game is amazing Ive played subnautica once but didnt finish and our ps4 broke so we had no way to play until this game came Ive been to the back of Aorua and got every vehicle in the game just surprised that our phone can run this game at 60 fps Ive been putting hours into this game we barely play anything beside this game also we saw you give people tips in responding we cant find the prawn suit grappling arm its the only one Im missing.
We haven't played the mobile port yet but ive played console and it has a good storyline and cool mechanics overall 10/10 game.
We absolutely love this app, but there is one problem. We are trying to escape in creative, but every time we teleport to gun, we crash out of the app. But we still love the game. Thank you for reading this. Bye.
His game has been won the most best games of our life. Keep up the good work. Jacob Strader.
Absolutely love this game! Thank you to the developers for making this port.
This is excellent. Ive played with a controller while casting to our TV and it feels like you are playing on a console. We have also played with the touch controls and found them to be easy to use as well. We have managed to sink countless hours into this and believe its well worth the cost. Update: we purchased Below Zero during a Switch sale and Im hooked. We really hope Below Zero is ported to iOS.
This was our first step into the Subnautica game series and what a cannonball of fun it it. We had no idea games could be so engrossing and fun. Especially on a phone. Normally with survival games it is so boring, with this game we genuinely want to to survive on the planet and find the right equipment so we can explore every inch of this place and hopefully tame this wild world. We still cant find the prawn suit. We have no idea where it is but we have the arm and we are looking for that darn thing.
We love the game but will it ever allow mods.
Runs smooth and the auto save feature is great. Very impressed with the mobile version of one of our favorite games.
Please make Subnautica: Below Zero on mobile. That would be really cool.
One of our favorite games of all time, and its UNREAL to us that we can now play it on our phone. What a time to be alive.
Subnautica hits different, its not just a game, its this weird beautiful haunting experience. You crash into an alien ocean and its scary we had a good experience playing this game subnautica will be our favorite game.
We just wanted to say that it works great on our iPhone 11. So anyone with an older phone shouldnt be worried. Settings on low. Still very playable and fun. Very rarely crashes but saving often mitigates that. Amazing game. So addictive.
The game itself is phenomenal, best mobile port besides carrion, we just wish higher resolutions than medium were available for iPhone 13 because the game runs perfectly fine on medium with 60 frames.
We got this game for our trip to Paris and it saved our flight, the graphics are as good as the PC version, the UI is amazing, we spent like 2 hrs on this game on our flight bec we had no internet this is a must buy game. But we dont know why ts is 10+ this game gave us thassalophobia and immense trauma. Peak game buy it nowwwww.
Bluetooth Steak Dual Shock 05: 10.
We just want to say, subnautica is a great game and we enjoy it, but when the game went to auto save, it seems to be stuck. The same issue sometimes pops up if you save manually. We will have to exit the game and get back in and will bring us to our last successful save. This might have to do with the fact that it said our device wasnt supported, Im enjoying the game but since it auto saving wont stop loading, it really is getting us stuck. We have around 30 gigabytes left of storage, so it shouldnt be a storage issue. All we ask is to fix this glitch, and we can continue our game without having to reset to our last save. More recently, Ive been experiencing a game crash when we get to close to the alien structure at the sunbeam drop point Im hoping we didnt pay 10 bucks just so that we couldnt finish the game. Thank you for reading.
The game is best in breed in terms of survival games and has been a hit on PC for years. Enjoy exploring? Dark creepy environments? Base building? It has all that. And it should be five stars – except the port includes issues carried over from PC: graphic bugs / clipping issues, intermittent loss of audio on launch, occasional base pieces that cant be connected without cause. If these get fixed, it will easily be the best game available for iPad, bar none.
Great game. Unfortunately, whenever you try to use the stasis rifle on reaper leviathans, they can still attack you when you get close. Please fix this issue.
When we were playing the game and we got everything to make a prawn suit, we went to open a locker and auto save decided it didnt want us to and we were stuck in the auto save screen unable to do anything, in fact, we still am now while writing this. And this only happens with autosave somehow and we dont want to disable it, but it keeps ruining our experience /:.
We are an original PC player and love Subnautica and Below Zero. Ive got about 10 hours in the mobile version on our iPhone 12. The iPhone 12 is on the bottom of the compatibility list, and medium quality is the highest option for us. Pop in is a big issue, literally islands and whole biomes are invisible until you get close. Im not happy about that, but the rest of the gameplay is excellent and smooth. Personally, we think our phone can handle more than what theyre offering. The phone runs fairly cool on the highest settings that we are allowed to use. The only reason Im not giving this five stars is because of the terrible pop in issues on the iPhone 12. Theyve done a wonderful job porting this game to mobile. Controls are excellent, and gameplay smooth. Resource availability is lower and we think the biomes are smaller, but this is still a really enjoyable game and comes very close to the original experience.
Great game but needs controller support.
This has been around for a while now. But now that its really showing on our mobile world? Its concerning. The lack of resource respawn. It could be like a setting to toggle or other mechanics like more creatures digging up stuff like limestone. Or the void could be expanded on with a late-game resource solution; Making the void a hotspot for both dangerous creatures like the already present Ghost Leviathans but add lots of resources that respawn. Another way would be deep-ground/sea mining drills. Already a mod for PC but could be nice as a complete feature for the base game Another idea? Maybe an item that makes certain creatures spawn and try to kill you depending on where you are but make it respawn resources! Overall this is an amazing game. We played it on PC awhile ago and recently got it for mobile. We think lots could be done for this. Especially after Subnautica 2 or if people want this updated.
We started playing the game one day after it released, And we gotta say, Even with medium graphic and 60 FPS, It rlly good!, The texture, controls, animations, and gameplay was rlly fun!, we enjoyed our progress-making within this game, Ive reached a month within this game and you did a good job!!, But aside from all that, There are minor problems slithering around :(, 1: our IPhone 13 Pro is only 5 yrs old and Ive been experiencing frequent game crashes, like whenever Im swimming in Safe Shallows, or at random times, our game kicks us out, when we autosaves, the game freezes sometimes, we also experienced a infinite loading screen so we lost all our progress, but we restarted and didnt quit, :3, Overall 9.3/10.
We think the gameplay and open world exploration is awesome, but theres one bug. We finally made it to the Sunbeam landing zone but whenever we try to get near the alien base our game crashes. We play on an IPad 12,2 so Im pretty sure its because our device isnt supported but we were hoping you could make more devices compatible to this game.
Its been a good hour and a half in the game, a little awkward on the iPad Pro screen compared to our pc setup but still fun to play for all the same reasons as the original. Not fun, however, is getting stuck on the save screen multiple times. It seems we cant progress the game at all past a certain point very early on, and it has been a known issue for a long time. If it isnt fixed we will have to refund as it isnt playable.
Im enjoying the game but there is a slight issue where everything is missing and when we try to save to leave it takes forever and if we close the game completely after that it doesnt save the game at all and we have to restart everything that we did for that time we played.
The graphics are okay we just hope they get better. Also, PLEASE FIX THE AUTOSAVE. It is madly annoying and lost all our progress. Super annoying.
Sometimes when we save the game freezes on the save and when we reload we lose progress.
We dont even know if this is the right game or not the graphics are horrible.
Would love to have backbone support.
When go near the place where ion cube is the game kick us out and we dont understand.
The game is overall great as Subnautica is. But you guys really need to fix the auto saving issue. Its not even a minor issue as it completely destroys all progress youve made. Also sometimes important locations such as crash sites, and Degasi bases sometimes dont load into the map this is also related to the auto saving issue somehow we dont really know but please fix this because its frustrating, and does not create a good experience.
No ridiculous, micro transactions terrific story and creative mode. One of the best games ever made. We have played this game for years and years and years and years. Im so happy that its out on the phone since our computer broke.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.2.4
- Size: 2,246.26 MB
- iOS: 15.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, PT, RU, ES, ZH, TR
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc.
Last updated: 4th September 2025 | Genre: Adventure, Action | Developer: Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc.