Icarus Game Review: We struggle to hold the wooden construction together as the storm rages outside while we are huddled inside its confines with hammers clanging. As a bolt of lightning smashes through the ceiling, it illuminates the night sky. We gather as much as we can fit in our pockets while futilely hurling fire brooms at the now-raging inferno. Icarus is not for the faint of heart, as we are harshly reminded when we watch all of our hard work burn to the ground while attempting to save our own skin. We start rebuilding with a shrug. A harsh mistress, but we’re to blame. It could be a hint if the game hands you a lightning rod.
Icarus Game Review
Icarus is firmly rooted in the survival crafting subgenre, emphasizing both. You will only have a few days to complete different missions before leaving the settlement and rocketing back to the space station to prepare for another trip to the surface. You will be descending from a space station to the planet with nothing more than a cheap enviro suit to slow down (but not stop) you from suffocating. What takes place on the surface is both painful and magnificent.
No Clues In Icarus Game
You know nothing when Icarus first begins. You have no skills, and your only equipment for creating blueprints is the most primitive caveman tools. To make simple items like a sharpened stick, a rock knife, a pickaxe, and a rudimentary wood cutting axe, you’ll need to gather sticks, rocks, and fiber from the ground like in any good survival crafting game.
You earn three points as you level up to spend on extra blueprints and one point to spend on talents, which we’ll discuss later. Early plans include designs for items like a bedroll, a campfire, and a stone skinning knife. Then, to protect yourself from the elements, you’ll probably pick some thatched building materials. You’ll need a bedroll, a campfire, and a roof over your head to be able to spend the night. You’ll probably realize at this point that you skipped the rag-on-a-stick blueprint due to the lovely weather. You’re in for a long, gloomy night.
Icarus Will Teach You ‘Lessons’
Icarus will teach you numerous “lessons,” one of which is the one about the rag on a pole. My first thatch-free home was made of wood, and it was magnificent. It had scaffolding for archery, wooden skirts to keep animals out, and pillars below to make sure it was stable. I laughed as it burned to the ground after I decided against using the fire extinguisher in favor of what I perceived to be more important items, such as that rag on a stick. When things are on fire, it turns out that the fire beater is really crucial.
There is an oddity, and I haven’t heard a canon explanation for it: every creature you’ll run into in Icarus is a typical animal seen on Earth. You can find polar bears, wolves, bunnies, deer, and chamois on the surface of the globe, to name a few. There is no extraterrestrial life in this strange world. The plants themselves are identical. Icarus was a squandered opportunity to come into contact with perilous new life on a perilous new planet.
We struggle to hold the wooden construction together as the storm rages outside while we are huddled inside its confines with hammers clanging. As a bolt of lightning smashes through the ceiling, it illuminates the night sky. We gather as much as we can fit in our pockets while futilely hurling fire brooms at the now-raging inferno. Icarus is not for the faint of heart, as we are harshly reminded when we watch all of our hard work burn to the ground while attempting to save our own skin. We start rebuilding with a shrug. A harsh mistress, but we’re to blame. It could be a hint if the game hands you a lightning rod.
Icarus is firmly rooted in the survival crafting subgenre, emphasizing both. You will only have a few days to complete different missions before leaving the settlement and rocketing back to the space station to prepare for another trip to the surface. You will be descending from a space station to the planet with nothing more than a cheap enviro suit to slow down (but not stop) you from suffocating. What takes place on the surface is both painful and magnificent.
Icarus’ mission structure is one of the gradual advancements. Your first mission will urge you to perform a straightforward task like hitting three survey spots and then returning to the station covertly. Simple from the inside out. The following one requires you to explore a few terrain areas in search of fresh possible drop zones. The rest is up to you when you complete that one, though.
The tasks are organized in a grid with a brief explanation, a level requirement, a skull rating, and a grading of easy, normal, hard, and beyond for difficulty. These are not recommendations, but rather warnings: if you take on challenges that are above your capacity, you will perish. In a moment, we’ll talk more about death.
One task off the main branch asks you to kill a potentially harmful predator. Don’t necessarily believe the difficulty or level statements because that predator was quite lethal when I was level 13 and playing with a partner. Likewise, a different assignment was to be my first foray into the Arctic with a “typical” level of difficulty. My preparations were derailed by the polar bears I came across and the bitter cold. Once more, Icarus is imparting to us unforgiving lessons about trust.
There are four different sets of blueprints, which are divided by tiers every ten levels. There are numerous recipes inside each layer, ranging from a simple spear to a potbelly burner for heat in only the first one. While you begin the game effectively at the level of a caveman, by level 40 you have advanced technology like solar panels and other things I won’t give away. You’ll receive three new blueprint options for each level you complete, but it never feels like enough because you’ll always want “just one more thing.” It’s a lot of fun that phase of the hunt.
Final Verdict
Icarus is, to be honest, a bit of a mystery. It’s exciting and satisfying to develop while defending against wild animals and the wrath of nature. You feel like a survival badass heading out over the tundra or a scorching desert after making excruciatingly meticulous preparations. Then technological snags like balancing problems, bugs, disconnections, falling through the world, and others appear and destroy it.
It takes hours of pure fun to build a magnificent home that can withstand the harsh elements and allow you to not only live but also thrive. On the other side, my wife and I experienced a home emergency and had to go offline for six days. When we returned, a message informed us that our character had to be erased since it was permanently dead, but mine had miraculously survived.
It turns out that the character she played was killed by a patch that the developers released when we were dealing with house rebuilding. Another problem to add to the list because it doesn’t explain why I didn’t lose my character. Icarus can be exciting, difficult, and brutal… I simply wish that technological issues weren’t the cause of the cruelty.
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