Yeah I’m fulfilling obligations. Key provided for coverage. Reviewing on Xbox.
I’m learning a lesson on biting off more than you can chew as my press score dips down into the two star range and I haven’t followed up on half the games I promised I’d actually get around to covering. So let’s talk about some early impressions of Icarus, shall we?
I’ve had a few false starts on covering ICARUS because I always try to give everything a fair shake and there’s nothing particularly fair about ICARUS. Billed as a hardcore survival game from that Dean Hall guy who made DayZ, ICARUS is without a doubt quite hardcore. How hardcore?
How about landing on the starter mission and immediately and repeatedly getting killed by wildlife before I even have a chance to read the tutorial text. That kind of hardcore. The kind of hardcore where the game says hello by just killing you.
ICARUS is a trial by fire and the game throws you right in with very little explanation on how to actually do things. My advice? Have a browser open and a link to the interactive map so you know how to actually interact with the tools you’ll be building.
But I got my little shack up and running and now I’m working on getting some animal skins together to build a bedroll because bedrolls are oddly expensive in terms of animal skins. Kinda crazy how the game had no trouble throwing beasts at me before I had a way of defending myself, and now that I’m out for animal skins there’s no animals in sight.
How hardcore is ICARUS? I built a little shack to get out of the weather and then the thing freaking caved in because the storm ripped up the trees and threw them on my house. Granted, that’s also when I learned the game is a little wonky. A wolf got caught on the fallen tree limbs and actually physics’d them into the house doing more damage.
But I am having fun with ICARUS so far, even if I have died more than I’ve spent time doing things that are productive. My biggest issue with ICARUS is that it falls into the same trap as other hardcore survival games; your character has the metabolism of a hummingbird.
What does that mean? Your character needs to eat, drink, and have their oxygen refilled roughly every five minutes or they’ll starve to death. I absolutely hate the endless babysitting that comes with survival games, and I prefer the ones that balance those systems out so you’re not constantly maintaining them to the detriment of everything else in the game.
And in ICARUS your food actively degrades. Who knows. I’m sure there’s a setting I can toggle somewhere for that on the regular survival worlds. I’m working on it. It is a pretty game though.
MMO Fallout 