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Icarus review: frustrating, familiar survival fare that’s nonetheless enticingGrin and bear it
Grin and bear it
That’s Icarus, that is. It’s obviously flawed, wildly frustrating and frequently janky, but it’s also somehow simultaneously good enough to have kept me playing into the early morning on multiple nights without even realizing the time. It’s like Schrodinger’s cat, except if the cat was a bear made of draining thirst meters. I went on to spend another 20 hours (mostly) happily within its grasp.
Icarus: First Cohort - Action Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
Icarus: First Cohort - Action Gameplay Trailer
It helps that my Icarus playstyle is ‘hubris’. During those 20 hours I courted, then full on snogged disaster in countless ways, from not bothering to lay down respawn-granting bedrolls, to slamming raw watermelons Iknewwould give me food poisoning. I’ve died of thirst, asphyxiation, exposure and falling (well, hitting). I’ve scampered through woods, desert and snowstorms without proper preparation, before shortly and consequently succumbing to claws, teeth and tusk. But mainly I have died of bears.
Rather than the grand survivathon most tree chop ‘em ups subject you to, Icarus is divided into individual missions. You drop into a hostile environment on the alien (yet for some reason Earth-resembling) planet of Icarus, craft whatever you reckon you need to achieve an objective assigned via some bland corpo-spiel, then get out of dodge. Every mission has to be completed within a certain number of hours or your character gets stranded forever, losing access to all your unlocked blueprints and talents. That means you’ll be back to moving and gathering resources at the slowest possible rate, while hungering and thirsting at the fastest - along with being unable to craft anything except basic starter gear. I believe the timers keep going even when you’re not playing, which is a tad rude to anyone who can’t reliably commit to playing a certain amount within a certain period. In practice, every mission I’ve been on has had multi-day time limits but could be completed within an evening, so I never felt close to that mode of failure. Even with all the dying.
Icarus’s (esseses) main trick is to dangle those small, eminently achievable objectives in front of you, then pave the road to them with wolves and weather. “Pfft! I don’t need iron tools just to trek out to that geo survey spot,” you’ll think, wrongly. “I can cross the arctic with just a handful of thatch and gumption for shelter,” you’ll say, idiotically. “I already have enough arrows to fend off the wildlife enroute to building this hunting cabin,” you’ll whimper, about-to-be-dead-ingly.
The other defining part of Icarus is the storms. They are mighty. They are absolute. Buckets of rain lash the forest, while the wind brings trees crashing to the ground, or your head, inflicting death or at least temporary brain damage. The desert sandstorms almost entirely blot your vision, leaving you to wander hopelessly into cougars while dehydrating/melting from the concurrent heatwave. The arctic snowstorms are fearsome enough to warrant a story.
I whacked up the smallest of shelters, plopping a campfire in the middle of it - then noticed I was still freezing to death, because it turns out thatch is no match for a bloody blizzard. Fortunately, that didn’t turn out to be a problem, because I then immediately caught fire and burned to death inside my own suddenly delightfully toasty deathtrap. Undeterred, I ran straight back, a gap in the storms allowing me to fix up the walls and expand enough to let me both place the storm-buster and a campfire I didn’t need to step in. I sat through 10% of the required beeping before the next storm rolled in. The snow physically built up and my roof caved in. I started pelting it back towards the forest - then ran into another polar bear, which panicked me into a crevasse, which I plunged down before breaking my leg and dying of asphyxiation.
But. Buuuuuuut. The jank.
The combat is a bit one-note, too. The technique I eventually discovered to deal with bears felt less like a desperate, frantic struggle, and more an endurance test about reliably running forward diagonally at the right moment so the bears slipped past me and I could plug them with another arrow before rinsing and repeating. I also feel the auto-aim might be a tad too generous, because after an hour or two of practice I found I could reliably headshot animals from a ridiculous distance. It’s hard to feel threatened whenyou’re basically Hawkeye.
The unlock trees can be unsatisfying, with substantial perks submerged under individually unnoticeable +5% foraging buffs, and certain blueprints that feel next to useless (I beg you, do not bother unlocking poison arrows). I also disagree conceptually with -10% XP debuffs, which certain storms and ailments subject you to. There’s an entire currency attached to completing missions that lets you bring certain items between drops, which I haven’t bothered talking about because it’s stingy to the point of near irrelevance. Perhaps I could have spent more wisely, but still - it took me 25 hours to work my way up towards a mildly improved envirosuit.
Icarus’s biggest failing, though, is that it doesn’t embrace the alien. I’d hoped it was lulling me into a false sense of security, waiting to ambush with properly unsettling extra-terrestrial encounters, but the only non-earth threat I’ve seen so far are some poison-spitting cave worms. Fear of the unknown is a rich resource, which survival games fail to mine at their peril. If Icarus is (iziziz) still holding back, and wilder fauna lie within missions I’m yet to unlock, then it’s been holding back for far too long.
Most importantly, when it slapped me down I found myself wanting to slap it back rather than just walk away - for the most part. Once I’ve recovered from the knockout punch that was my aborted riverlands expedition, I might even return. I just hope there are fewer bugs.
