ICARUS
ICARUS is a PvE survival game for up to eight players. Explore a savage wilderness in the aftermath of terraforming gone wrong. Survive the Open World, complete timed Missions or build your Outpost. Explore, build, craft and hunt while seeking your fortune and prospecting for exotic matter.
ICARUS is a survival, open world survival craft and multiplayer game
developed and published by RocketWerkz.
Released on December 03rd 2021 is available only on Windows
in 10 languages: English, French, German, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Spanish - Latin America, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 43,779 reviews of which 31,354 were positive and 12,425 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.1 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 8.49€ on Steam and has a 75% discount.
The Steam community has classified ICARUS into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at ICARUS through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (64-bit versions)
- Processor: Intel i5 8400
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 70 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Recommended, with some significant "but..." clauses added to it. If you're a fan of survival-craft games this one checks all the boxes. You get dropped into a dangerous environment which becomes progressively less dangerous as you grind your way up the technology tree and become more familiar with how things work in the game. The technology tree is deep and wide and offers a whole lot of upgrades and ever-more-efficient ways to accomplish your goals. There's the usual - pick up stick, use stick to hit rock, tie rock to stick to make axe, chop down tree, use log with bigger rock to mine iron, etc. etc. Eventually you work your way up to running around in full high-tech combat armor and laughing in the face of polar bears as rare and priceless resources spill out of your pockets. It's a very pretty game to look at, and it can offer enough diversity to keep you (and a few friends if you wish) busy with just building bases and goofing around. There is a lot of technology to unlock and a lot of weapons, machines and items to play with and experiment with. This is where the game really shines and a player can lose hours (or hundreds of them) just growing crops, churning cream and cleaning the gunk out of their waterwheel power generator. As a "homesteader simulation" it can be a lot of fun, but as a mission-driven game it starts to get a little wobbly. Icarus initially launched with a unique and controversial model of time-limited, discrete missions which would wipe everything you'd built off the map when the mission was done. A lot of people (myself included) didn't like this - after all, who enjoys spending 8 hours smacking rocks just to have the house and machines you've built be thrown away without any kind of payoff? So they added the Open World mode which allows you to play through most of the missions while keeping your carefully constructed base and hard-won resource stockpiles. This is better, and by RocketWerkz' own admission it has become the most popular game mode by a large margin. The missions still remain in the game though, and here's where the "but..." starts to creep into my review. While the missions provide a little bit of structure and encouragement to travel to new parts of the map ,the rewards are paltry and hardly worth the time and effort required to complete them. At the conclusion of each mission you're handed a little bit of scrip ("Ren") which can be used to purchase additional tools and items from the orbital space station. The biggest failing in this system is that it requires multiple missions (many of which can take 4-8 hours or more to complete) to buy even the worst of the available equipment, and even the best of the available equipment is inferior by a large degree to what you can make yourself. Icarus apologists and purists make the argument that the orbital Workshop items are just there to give you a running start when you first land for each mission, but the addition of Open World makes this head start largely superfluous. You can either spend 40 hours doing missions to be able to afford a pickaxe that's heavy, flimsy and capable of only mining Iron and Copper or you can spend 4 hours working your way up to making your own Titanium pickaxe that can do everything 10x better. Outside of the improved "Envirosuits" that you can purchase (which can't be crafted or changed on-planet) and a couple of the specialized suit modules and backpacks available for sale, there's very little incentive to actually run the missions or harvest the Exotic minerals. This is strange, because the entire gameplay loop appears to be that you're supposed to run missions and harvest Exotics in order to buy better gear, which in turn is supposed to allow you to access harsher areas of the planet and complete more rewarding missions and harvest greater quantities of Exotics in order to buy still better gear in order to... Well, you get the idea. In actuality, there is no "better gear" available in the Workshop and there are really no "harsher areas" of the planet either. There is a pair of Arctic areas and a pair of Desert areas which offer a small bit of additional challenge, but this is easily overcome by even a modestly prepared Prospector and, more troubling, these areas don't actually hide any resources or assets that you can't already find in the relatively safe Forest at considerably less risk and travel time. At its core, Icarus fails to offer the player any kind of incentive to explore or undertake missions beyond doing them for their own sake. There's nothing on the table to really work towards outside of leveling up to unlock blueprints for things you make for yourself - and you can do all of this within 1km of your comfortable lakeside cabin in the woods if you so desire. Once the technology tree is unlocked and you've had a chance to build everything and play with everything a little, the answer to the question of "what next?" mainly has to come from the player's own imagination. There's no story, no sense of progression or accomplishment, and what should have been the prime end-game goals - expensive and powerful Workshop equipment and deadly, high-paying missions that require them - are poorly implemented or just outright missing. 15 years ago Minecraft set the standard for these kinds of games and even back then they realized they needed to offer some kind of story and goals and ever-more-desirable resources to push the players away from the temperate forest and into the harsh deserts, snowy tundras and terrifying alternate dimensions. Icarus seems intent on reinventing the wheel and making those same mistakes all over again, but it can still be a fun and contemplative game for people who are able to set their own goals and enjoy doing them for their own sake. Ultimately my recommendation for this game depends on what the individual player is looking for. A player seeking a new game with a lot of what they enjoyed in, say, Stardew Valley might really like Icarus' take on the genre and the way it adds just a little more danger to the mix. For someone looking for a more linear sense of progression and storyline, or for someone who enjoys the hard grind into a challenging and satisfying endgame tier of content, this game may not fill the need.
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Icarus is a very large and vast game. It has a massive blueprint and talent tree. The maps are very large and interesting to explore. The weather system is something I also like a lot. The game gets weekly updates. There are two main game modes in Icarus - The "original" Mission modes. - You drop on to the planet do the mission and leave never to look back at what you created and made. It is all lost. - This mode is also kind of like a Roguelike game in that after the mission you will get a currency that can be spent to buy items that can be taken down with you on your next mission to make it more easier. - The Open world mode. - It a open world survival craft game. - There are "operations"(Mission) you can do in Open world However they are directly converted from the Mission mode meaning. There maybe a long long walk to were your objective is depending on where you decided to settle. I have now played Open world on two of the maps Olympus & Styx. I have also completed many mission on both of those maps as well. I do find Both game modes hold Pros and Cons. If doing open world you have already build up your empire and toys to deal with the operations however there could be a long time investment in travel to get to the start of the operation. If doing a mission you are dropped in right on top of the mission start point and now the time investment is in building up the empire to finish the mission. I have also built up a home in a Outpost map. Outpost are areas were the resources respawn so you can build and create with more freedom. They are also smaller maps so they load up faster then the main game maps. When you look at the game store page you will notice a lot of DLCs and it can be overwhelming. The base game has most all the content in it you will need to enjoy the game. With this said Icarus: New Frontiers Expansion is where a lot of the "New content" is currently being added to the game. New Frontiers - holds the map Prometheus it is a more "alien" and rough map then the other two and has unique biomes in it. It would be the DLC to get if you are looking to get a DLC. The next map I plan to load up and play on is Prometheus I wanted to the other two first to get the feel for them. All and all there is a lot of content in Icarus and a lot going for the game. As stated the game gets weekly updates and new features. I highly recommend Icarus it a great time.
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This is not a typical survival game. I think a lot of the negative reviews saying it's too hard for solo players shows that. The game sends you on missions, and even the early ones can be brutal, but there's a reason they are 7 days long. If you go into the world and charge at the objective, you'll get your head kicked in. You should land, make a base, get outfitted, and THEN go do your mission. As you progress, you can unlock other items, so that you're not having to start out slowly again each time, but you have to buy those items with quest rewards. In short, I thought this was stupid too, but then I learned to play (how I think) the devs intended. I've only played this solo, and I definitely recommend.
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Cautious recommendation. It's fun most of the time, but the bugs can be nuts and the mission rewards are weak. Spend 2 hours of your free time in on a mission? Enjoy an entry level upgrade purchase at best. Bought all those? Make it four hours for the next tier. Like these guys wanted to make a gacha game but didn't implement the pay to speed up grinding. 47 hours in right now and I have 6 entry level items I can bring with me now to speed the mission start a bit. Also at 47 hours in I finally have enough Stanley nickles to buy the consumable items used to summon your ship to the mission end point that's normally 10-15 minutes real time from your spawn point. It's a slog back to your ship after finishing the job OR play for 40 hours and get the beacon thing. This is not fun gameplay. It's just running, waiting for your stamina bar to fill again, run more. Earlier I approached a fallen tree and as I got close enough to cut it up it decided to do cartwheels in the air and settle on my house. Got a 30 minute real time debuff telling me to be more careful. Sure I'll be aware of the pirouetting trees next time.
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Icarus is a bit of a dark horse in the survival genre, but it's pretty solid, if you have a tolerance for jank. Icarus has two main pillars. There's the standard open world, where you set up a persistent world to build and develop. You can take this as far as you want, with a huge fixed map to explore, develop, and exploit. There's also missions, which were the original core of the game. Missions (some of which can be launched and run from an open world you're in, but many cannot) drop you in a fresh temporary instance and task you with miscellaneous objectives. Some are basic building or gathering, some require you to go hunt particular wildlife, others might even see you testing out new experimental technologies. Missions are interesting in that by depositing you in a fresh instance, they force you to learn and become familiar with all levels of the standard survival game technical and gear hierarchy, versus something where you set up your map and you go through the low level starting process once ever and forget about it. As you get more familiar with Icarus, you learn the more efficient ways to set up those mission encampments, identify what tools and structures you need to make, what's probably overkill to build, and tap into different aspects of the map design. You'll appreciate when you can run a mission in your developed open world map and just take your preexisting setup out into the field, but having you interface with both sides of the equation is pretty savvy design. All this feeds into an overall development process for your character ("Prospector"). As you play the game, you get experience, which levels you up. Leveling gets you talent points (which are a limited resource, though you can respec if desired) and blueprint points (which are effectively infinite, as you never stop earning them) to learn new technologies. There's also a separate "solo" talent tree that gives you extra talent points to spend that only apply in solo play, which helps compensate for lack of efficiency from being by yourself. Missions also earn you currencies for Workshop tech, which are a set of items that you can take with you into missions. While the number of things you can take is limited, it reinforces the overall mission loop by letting you work towards a standard kit (armor, some tools or weapons, building facilities, etc) that rewards you for playing the game via improved efficiency and streamlined progress. Workshop tech is in most cases inferior to what you can ultimately build on-planet, but being able to drop in with a full set of armor, a solid weapon, and some mid-level tools really helps keep things flowing. All the while, you're going to benefit from the developer's extremely aggressive development and patching schedule. As best I can tell there's been weekly updates since the game launched, and they're still going strong. Sometimes those updates are minor additions of a few pieces of furniture or a new tool, other times it's new creatures (the bee invasion of Week 112 claimed many lives and buildings), others they're full out system overhauls and reworks. These don't always go smoothly, as you'd expect for such a fast-paced release schedule, but the devs are responsive to feedback for those releases and the game I'm reviewing now is definitely in a much different and better state then when I picked it back up in December. I'm not about to claim Icarus is a perfect game. There's definite and obvious gaps all over the place in terms of tools and technologies. The game can be laggy or crashy. Our open world still has a permanent grave marker from a corpse that fell through the terrain and was unrecoverable. Balance of tools, gear, and talents are all over the place. If you dislike games without a high level of polish, Icarus is just never really going to fit your needs because of their development and iteration processes. It's also not a game that I think would be great for a solo player; it can be extremely unforgiving, and the sheer scope of technologies and resources means that having only one set of hands is going to spread your blueprints and focus extremely wide and thinly, and some of the fights versus large swarms or boss type creatures are going to be very difficult alone. I can't speak towards the history of Icarus; my understanding is the game's current design ethos does not really match the mission-first presentation from the Kickstarter and really disappointed some of the backers, and given some of the gaps and systems jank I still see two years after launch, I imagine the early going was really, really rough. That said, it's a good time currently if you've got friends to play it with, and there's a ton of content in the base game alone; I don't think it's coincidental the overall reviews have trended upward over time. Give it a look if you and some friends are looking for a new survival game to poke at and want something that's not in the earliest stages of EA release.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 19 January 2025 00:34 |
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| SteamSpy data | 21 January 2025 22:25 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:48 |
| Steam reviews | 21 January 2025 04:04 |
Online players
10,834
Developer
RocketWerkz
Publisher
RocketWerkz
Release
03 Dec 2021
Platforms