Submerged Review - Explore the Ruins of a Submerged City as You Look for Emergency Rations to Help Your Brother

Written by Brandon Hofer on August 16, 2015

Reviews: Submerged is a game where you explore a deserted city in the hopes of finding something that will help your brother get healthy.

Submerged is a third person exploration game set in a deserted city. The majority of the city is submerged under water and you arrive there in a fishing boat with your brother who is sick. Once you get to land you carry your brother over to somewhere safe and you spend the game exploring the city trying to find supplies to nurse him back to health. Unfortunately that is really all the narrative there is. Submerged is incredibly light on story which some people are going to find boring. There are ten items for you to find throughout the course of the campaign and each time you find one of these items you return your brother to give him the item you found whether it is something to clean his wounds, materials to make a fire, something for him to eat and more.

Submerged is is pretty game and one that I would often stop playing for a few moments to take a screenshot. Your main method of transportation is the fishing boat you arrived in as you drive to the different buildings that have the emergency rations you are looking for to help your brother. There is absolutely no combat in Submerged so you don’t have to worry about running into any enemies or getting killed. This is truly an exploration game where you are trying to figure out how to climb buildings to reach the supplies you need. Along with those supplies are hidden collectibles for you to find as well. They don’t really serve any function in the game except adding a drawing to the storyline that you probably won’t be able to figure out as well as getting an achievement for finding all of the collectibles. There are no other characters in the world except for the occasional zombie that you will see as you get close to the rations but there is nothing to worry about because, again, there is no combat or anything.

With that said Submerged is an empty, almost lifeless world. That might have been the exact intention of the development team but it can make for a boring game at times. Couple that with the fact that the game doesn’t run that well and you have a pretty average game. The framerate has problems and dips on occasion. There were at least a couple of times where I completely fell through the geometry of the world and just kept falling for a few seconds until the game reset itself and put me back where I was before the glitch happened. The controls aren’t responsive enough or tight enough to really get around the environment quickly. There were many times where I would get stuck and my character would go in the wrong direction. There are certainly much worse games that I have played but there are also titles that are much more deserving of your time and money.

Submerged is simply an average title. There is nothing to make it stand out among the pack and its shortcomings make it so I can’t really recommend it to anyone, especially at the current price. If you see it on sale at some point for a few dollars then you can have at least a little bit of fun here looking at the nice environment and doing a little bit of exploring. If you are someone who enjoys achievements and cares about your gamerscore then you will be happy to hear that Submerged offers up a fairly easy 1,000 gamerscore that will only take you a few hours to get. For those who want to go through the quick campaign and then explore the world to find the rest of the collectibles you are able to do that as well. Once you beat the game you will have an “explore” option become available to you in the main menu which will allow you to return to your game so you can get any achievements you might have missed. Submerged is a game that is more about style than substance. The game looks nice and offers some great vistas when you are the top of a building but overall it is a fairly empty experience.