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The most liked upcoming games are being announced as the Gameoneer community’s most anticipated games. Sort games by likes on the games page.
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9 Reviews
Icarus is one of those survival games that completely humbled me during the first few hours. I went in thinking it would be another casual crafting game, then suddenly I was desperately trying to survive storms, wild animals, and a lack of oxygen while sprinting back to my base. The survival mechanics feel harsh in a good way, and that constant pressure is what kept me hooked.
What I liked most was the mission based structure mixed with open world survival. Dropping onto the planet, gathering resources, building a shelter before a storm hits, and slowly unlocking better technology feels really satisfying. Playing with friends makes the chaos even better.
It does get grindy at times, and the progression can feel slow during longer sessions, but overall Icarus ended up being one of the more memorable survival games I’ve played.
When I first heard about Icarus, I was skeptical. The idea of dropping to a planet, grinding basic tools and a small shelter, then leaving it all behind just to start over again sounded like the opposite of fun. Hundreds of hours later, I can say my opinion hasn’t completely changed it’s a good game, but it’s trapped in a loop that wears you down the longer you play.
There’s a ton of content here: a full range of crafting benches, weapons, building parts, and survival tools. The base-building system is honestly one of the better ones I’ve seen in the genre, and setting up your camp from nothing always gives that small spark of satisfaction. But after doing it for the fiftieth time, that spark fades. You begin to realize that the structure of Icarus dropping, grinding, leaving, resetting feels like a treadmill that never lets you breathe.
The grind for the premium currency doesn’t help either. It’s slow, repetitive, and after a while, it just stops feeling rewarding. So what happens? You start cutting corners. You bring high-end weapons and armor from orbit, land, rush through the mission objectives, and bail as soon as possible. It works, but it kills any sense of long-term progression.
Persistent worlds were supposed to fix that, but the lack of respawning resources and limited XP scaling makes them feel half-baked. And losing your entire character if you don’t make it back to orbit in time? Brutal. I actually lost mine after taking a break from the game for few months, and later i lost my character once again when patches wiped old saves completely. That was a punch to the gut. Of course right after reddit was full of guides on how to modify game files to get everything back but also you could add infinite everything if you only wanted to. This removes all the fun because you would play a game or two and feel like you have achieved everything when in fact you cheated your way to getting everything in 2 mins of modifying files.
Still, for all its flaws, Icarus has something going for it. The survival loop is satisfying in short bursts, and building bases in those beautiful landscapes can be genuinely relaxing. It’s just a shame that all of it gets buried under a mountain of repetition and grind. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad game it’s just one that demands way more patience than most players will ever have.
I do Love this game and I keep coming back to it after a few months. I love the world view and the building mechanic. I love the open world feel. There are are tons of missions you can do and the skill tree and talent trees are LARGE and can be overwhelming for new people, but the main issue is that you never get enough points to be able to put them into everything, so you have to chose your items carefully. I believe if you have that large of a tree and you are playing solo you should be able to build your character with everything so that you can be your own power house. Leveling up can take time, I found it faster to just keep collecting stones and cutting down trees and saving them to build your house and use a boulder starting out to live in and make a storage crate in and just get the points to go straight to a Stone house that way you are not fighting the storms constantly and having to fix it all the time. When I just want to jump into a game and run around and play house this is the game LOL, I go out catch me some dinner bring it back home and cook it up and make special meals out of it you have furniture and tons of crafting benches this game will keep you going for a while, but than it gets lonely so I take a break and come back at it again.
I am making my review after a long playing experience. First of all, you are a surviving astronaut and you go on missions. The game has a large map, but it is much larger than you might imagine. There are a total of 4-5 different biomes on our map. Like forest, desert, snow etc. We land on the map by choosing our missions. The biggest thing to note here is that tasks have real-time duration. You need to finish the mission within that real time period.
The question “Am I going to start over again every time?” may arise in your mind, both yes and no. When you land on the map, everything you do gives you experience. When we level up, it gives blueprint points (for crafting) and talent points (to strengthen our character). Let me tell you in advance that there are a ton of talents in the game, the talent tree is made the same as the old WoW and old LoL talent trees, if you like those games you may like this. So why do we finish these tasks? We have a workshop tree in the lobby, it is just like the craft system, except we open different things. Missions give us 2 types of currency, which are used to open astronaut suits, food, items, modules, etc. from this workshop. We can craft the items we unlock using the same currencies, and most importantly, we can take them with us when we go on missions, hence the advantage of this.
If you want to build your “dream house”, the game also offers us a sandbox system called Outpost, where you can play as you wish without any time. But you can also build your dream house in missions, some missions take 1 month and in some missions you will have to build a large base. There are bosses in the game, they have tasks, there are more difficult tasks. For these, you will need to build a base and get stronger. The talent tree already helps. You collect a lot of resources and as you develop your character, it does not take you very long to set up all those tables and houses. In these aspects, it reminds us of the roguelike genre. There are also weather conditions in the game, usually wind, storm, rain, etc. In this case, you need to enter a shelter (you can also be safe if you lie under a large stone, you can enter caves or enter the house you have built). Caves are free shelters, sometimes you can even settle in a cave instead of building a house, the only drawback is that if you stay in the cave for too long, you get a debuff. You have to wait, but it’s a completely understandable debuff because the house you built gets damaged and breaks in a storm, etc., and you have to repair it. You don’t have such a problem in the cave, so it’s balanced.
In general, the game is very enjoyable, you do not have to worry about starting from scratch, the game becomes more fun as the character develops. Despite some bugs and optimization problems, it should definitely be given a chance.
I’ve got a couple hundred hours into this game, and I definitely recommend this gate. It has an awesome crafting and building system, great missions, awesome environment and survival element, and most importantly it is coop survival game. But on the other there are some downsides to this game, for example every mission you have to start from scratch, enemies are not so versatile and once you get the hang of them you can easily defeat them. I haven’t played the new DLC but by the looks of it, it seems like huge improvements with the awesome new alien like planets and enemies.
Icarus has had a DLC just come out call “New Frontiers” and with that, many of the game’s issues have been fixed. They do large updates every 2weeks that add in new content.
They just added in NEW mounts and even made some of the older mounts (like the Moa) 38% faster! Getting around the map is so much more easy!
The new missions added in this DLC can be done in the Open World game mode. This makes it more easy to get some of the high tech missions done far faster having the benches already made.
This game was gifted to me by a close friend of mine. He told me to play this game to try it out, so we played together for 3-4 times and I gave up as it is not a friendly game in terms of new players like me. Skills and training and repetition of learning the game is essential to this game playthrough.
I like this game alot but haven’t played it much since release. I played all 7 betas and the way the did the beta weekends ever other weekend was very excited and gave you stuff to look forward to. I worked through bugs in multiplayer connections and performance issues, lock ups and other issues. They have improved a lot but the game could really use a nice full featured dlc to help bring the community back. Hopefully they do this sooner than later.
Overall Im giving this an 8 as I still like the game but there is room for improvement in some areas.
I bought Icarus instantly, it fits my play style. The only thing I found out was I needed a fast GPU to run it, but it’s a great game with plenty of things to do and lets you get creative. Lots of player builds on the internet. You can really let your creative style shine once you have levelled your skill tree.
Levelling feels good, I personally hate fast levelling, I’m a slow burn type of guy so if getting to the end game fast is your thing you may find the grind too much.
Making your first twig or wood build is satisfying but don’t forget you’re wacker to put out the fires in the storms. But it’s fun when it happens in a weird way. Also hunting your first deer and getting the shot of a critical hit is satisfying too.
If you have the game and want to team up let me know in the discord and we can arrange some game time.