i've enjoyed playing subterrain in the first couple hours of gameplay, the infection system and crafting system is pretty good and the combat system is alright for a top down indie game. the game is pretty challenging at times, but you can be able to overcome it once you get to the what each enemy type does. regular zombies punch you but are liek level 1 enemies, the spitter zombies just spit acid at you, the martian spitters are a leveled up version of the spitters but more dangerous and the hulking zombies deal massive damage.

i would've given this like a 8/10 but i would have to give it a 3/10 and heres why:

1. one of the biggest issues is the item inventory. whenever you want to access your inventory, of course just press the I button on the keyboard to access right? well wrong, there isnt one. how do you access it? to access it theres a small backpack icon on the top left side of the screen, you have to hover your mouse over the icon and then click on it to access your inventory and this is a massive problem that needs to be fixed because you use your mouse when looking around and aiming your gun at enemies, imagine a horde of enemies going after you and you need to quickly heal yourself or quickly replace an empty battery pack to charge up your weapons, its going to take a few seconds to do this while at the same time your character well look at the direction your mouse cursor went, you wont be able to keep an eye on the enemies. often times the mouse cursor will not hover over the inventory icon and you will accidentally fire your gun or swing your melee weapon due to how small the icon is. Another problem regarding inventory is quick slots, theres too few of them. sure you can upgrade your suits to gain more quick slots, but the high tier armor suit you get which is the last upgrade contains only 6, no 8 or 9 slots, just 6 which is pretty bad since you would really need to prioritize which health or stimulant items you're really going to need when battling enemies, knowing if you need 1 or 2 5 stacks of medkits or 1 stack of bandages for bleeding or a stack of casts if you get broken bones too often. it feels like they got stingy with the quick slots.

2. the game has a major issue with micromanagement. in the game, there's basic survival needs you deal with like treating the infection you'll get when hit, eating and drinking food since there's a hunger and thirst mechanic, sleep, weapon maintenance, going to the bathroom, resource gathering and charging up power packs. the character you play as, Albert West, has a real problem with his body, he becomes hungry and thirsty really fast, in 2 or 3 hours he needs to eat a buffet if you dont want him to suffer health and stamina debuffs, this also gets worse when he has to poop and pee after eating and drinking 2 to 4 items in a single sitting while at the same time you have to rest, so this means you'll be running to the bathroom and then going back to sleep wasting time.
another issue is weapon maintenance. there's a nanomachine where you simply put your weapons and armor inside of it and give the machine time to slowly repair the gear you use, this takes a long time if you didnt upgrade the machine with a software update. if you didnt upgrade the machine, the machine will repair only 2 items and then eventually to 3 once you upgrade the software, with a slightly faster speed to repairs. this gets annoying really fast since your weapons degrade pretty quickly and the nanomachine is incapable of fully repairing your gear to their original HP points, at the nanomachines last software update, it only goes up to 80% durability instead of a 100%, why? why at 80%? why not 100%? this is supposed to the future and the nanomachine is only capable at repairing 80%?
another problem is the power packs, in the beginning, the power packs will obviously carry a smaller charge, so researching them is mandatory so you can craft higher capacity power packs for your guns and flashlight. when you finally get to the last tiers of the power banks, surprisingly, they lose their charge pretty fast since at this point you'll be carrying and using fully upgraded weapons which use more energy per shot and the XL power packs charge is not really enough so you'll need to craft multiple of them to compensate. whenever your power pack runs out of power, you'll have to mouse over to your inventory and go to the section which holds your power packs and then double click it to use it and that is pretty bad design right there since again you'll be fighting swarms of enemies and you may not get the time to equip it since you will have to scroll through the amount of stuff you have in order to use the power bank, but whenever you get hit, it will exit you out of the inventory screen which means you're more than likely screwed.
the micromanaging gets really really annoying so fast it actually sucks the fun out of the game and turns it into a chore, like if you're actually cleaning your room or going to a job you hate. the micromanaging is a recurring problem that will not go away until you finish the game.

as of now i am at the last final boss and just gave up on it, because the final boss moves very quickly and the enemies, which move slow most of the time, are now moving faster and the boss is flying around shooting energy balls at me while at the same time i have to fight over the inventory system to replace my spent power pack for another one. i did not realize i had to carry two of the same weapons to fight the boss because there's two bossess and both of them take a ton of firepower to take down, but it also means the durability of the high tier guns you made will also go down very fast.

i would love to give it a thumbs up, but the micromanagement and inventory system frustrated me way too much and sucked any interest i had in this game, i'll probably not play sequel of this game since i went from action shooter to turn based and has some similar issues regarding micromanagement. well, time to look for a new game.

The game is in pretty rough shape and nowhere near playable, the dev shouldn't have abandoned it in such a state to make another game. The entire game is a slog and needed a great deal of adjustments

+Interesting premise, I like the idea and setting. Your home base is fairly cool and levels aren't poorly designed.

+Intro/tutorial video is actually interesting imo, and thematically a lot of areas fit. No complaints about the main character and I liked reading the notes and lore entries.

-I get the whole theme is the infection spreading etc. But quite frankly it shouldn't be such a chore to even attempt to get power to all sectors and the oxygen and temperature regulators take such a long amount of time to even get and research. Incredibly tedious

-Everything breaks far too fast; guns practically fall apart in your hands after shooting them a few times in the early game and late game with the sheer amount of enemies they still degrade fairly fast when you're constantly fighting. The cores for the generator break very fast until late game causing even more tedium, and the repair bay even max upgraded can't restore items to 100% condition. Incredibly stupid design choices here

-Turrets can only use SMG's basically forcing you to rush them instead of allowing player choice, you can research others but you're very much so time-gated here before you get overwhelmed. Bad design again, and having to manually turn them on every single time there's a mutant invasion is very stupid too.

-Melee is absolutely worthless, why include them as weapon choices if you're pretty much going to make it a bad idea at almost every point of the game? Again, poor decision making balance-wise and using melee weapons against any sort of groups of enemies mid-late game is just going to get you killed

-almost everything in the game is very RNG heavy and that can get frustrating. Also, the chips are an absolute chore to get and it's terribly tedious to have to get all the way to level 4.

-enemy spawns and density also scale with local infection levels which can lead to situations like opening a door to a room packed to the brim with zombies and nothing you can do if you don't have aoe on you. The infection levels scale faster than your ability to deal with them until very late in

-Your character gets fatigued VERY fast, way too fast and adds to the tedium of the game constantly having to sleep. On another note, the hunger and thirst were more bearable for some reason which in that case why make you get punished so much for running when the entire game is time gated so heavily? very stupid

-The need to go to the bathroom is even more tedium and adds literally nothing to the game.

-Inventory capacity needs to be doubled both in weight and number of items you can hold, again constantly needing to go back and forth even with the biggest backpack adds to the tedium even more.

-Got a bug where I couldn't even get achievements, that definitely shouldn't be in the game. Kinda important

All in all can't recommend the game, it's a slog and the tedium outweighs the benefits of playing this game. It's fun modded, but it shouldn't have to be that way for the game to even be remotely playable. The dev needs to come back and edit this game in-line with the modder who fixed his creation aka Palandus. Base-game is just not fun, and it needs many adjustments all around which are clearly possible to do. Because like said a modder already changed a lot of aspects of it to be more bearable and player-friendly.

I've been having fun. I like collecting junk and recycling it to produce new stuff.
I've gotta play in little chunks with the light on though, 'cause I scare pretty easily.
It's cool that I get some idea of what's hiding behind the doors by what sounds are made. I don't like the giant spiders though. I'm arachnophobic.
Kinda wish that I could find some survivors or something, being alone all the time is getting to me.