ICARUS is a sci-fi survival game, dropping you onto a planet to see how long you can last, but with some RPG mechanics alongside for you to earn experience, level up and unlock more stuff to build. This along with missions and a distinctly cowboy-sounding voice makes for a good survival game, but the levelling up really just gets in the way.
There are a few things you need to consider before you even start playing Icarus. There are three game modes to choose from, with the main mode presenting you with missions and objectives to complete over a specific period of time, while a more freeform survival experience and a more easy-going outpost mode give you plenty of options. I initially started with the missions mode, but found that the repeated restarts when moving onto the next to be a bit obnoxious, so eventually settled on the normal survival mode.
Thankfully, survival is where this game shines. It’s more polished than other games in the genre (outside of some pesky bugs), and it brings some particular challenges to match the setting. You can run out of oxygen, for example, so you initially need to find oxite to top up your suit until you can find another solution. The first of these is a simple oxite processor to fill a balloon with oxygen that you can quickly grab when needed. Other than that, the usual hunger and thirst meters are here, ensuring that all my bases were near water and that any animals nearby should be very afraid!
As you complete tasks – basically anything from mining some rock to skinning an animal – you’ll earn experience, eventually levelling up and giving you a few things to spend. You can increase stats across multiple skill trees that are a little overwhelming and often just give small bonuses. If you’re playing alone, you also earn points to put into a solo skill tree that can give you a little boost to compensate for your loneliness. This all works fine, but levelling up is also the way that you gain new technologies, opening up a new tier of technologies that you then need to research. This includes researching things like cooking, basic oxygen tech, bows, spears and the like. Precisely how you managed to descend from a spaceship in a rocket pod without knowledge of spears and cooking is absolutely beyond me.
Even this works out great until you get to level 5 or 6. Now you’ve unlocked the stuff you really need, and will be dreaming of using a crafting bench to get to more advanced stuff, and yet you still can’t craft one. You can only access this at level 10, so you have to spend multiple levels just aimlessly mining, cutting down trees and so on, wasting a few hours on menial tasks. Survival games are time consuming enough as it is without gating technology behind player levels. There are multiple tiers of this, so inevitably it will happen again. When it does, the drive to keep playing is sapped. You’re no longer making progress, you’re treading water until the game decides that you can advance again.
It’s a shame, really, but worse than this are the bugs. On a few occasions, I’ve been unable to use or change the objects in my active inventory, forcing a restart of the game. The way animals are replaced with a static model after you kill them also looks very awkward, not just because you can see it happen, but because the new model often sticks up at a strange angle. Then there’s the UI on console, which is quite messy. Your cursor is constantly going where you don’t expect it to, making what should be a simple and quick process that you barely notice into a mildly frustrating one instead.
While not a factor for our score, another factor you do need to consider is the price. The base game is £33, which would be fine, except that there is a lot of DLC already available. The Ultimate Edition of the game is an eye-watering £124, but while that includes twelve DLC packs, most of these are maps for Outpost mode and cosmetics bundles. The key parts are the £16 Styx Expansion – the first of a three previously released on PC – and the £11.49 Creature Comforts pack which adds animal husbandry gameplay. It’s common for console ports of long-running PC games to arrive with a DLC premium, but there’s a real sticker shock to the Ultimate Edition, especially when there’s DLC that has yet to be ported.
