The survival crafting genre is home to some heavy-hitters: Rust, ARK, Terraria, and Minecraft all still boast huge player counts, and there are a plethora of similar titles coming out what feels like every day. It can be tough for a new game to gain any ground in this crowded landscape unless it’s got a particularly unique mechanic or hook. Valheim managed to make a splash with its fresh Viking setting and old-school graphics, but most new survival titles quickly end up with only a handful of daily players once the initial hype wears off.
Icarus is a survival crafting game that makes us hungry for more
Enter Icarus, the upcoming PvE survival crafting game from DayZ creator Dean Hall and his New Zealand-based studio RocketWerkz. In Icarus, players attempt to make a living harvesting exotic materials from a planet that was part of a failed terraforming project. While the setting and basic mechanics will immediately be familiar if you’ve played any other games in the genre – your first mission usually involves a lot of hitting trees with a stone ax – it’s the session-based gameplay that sets it apart from its counterparts.
An interesting setting with potential
In Icarus, you create a character and then send them on “prospects” missions down to the planet that require you to complete one or more objectives: things like recovering tech from fallen satellites, mapping a new region, or hunting some specific creature. The catch is, prospects are timed, and if you don’t get back to your shuttle before the mission ends, your character is left on the planet and lost forever.
The ticking clock puts an interesting twist on typical survival crafting gameplay loops since you won’t always have time to create all the equipment you’d like before setting out to complete your mission objectives. The chance of being too slow and getting left on the planet adds excitement to what can otherwise be a fairly slow-paced genre and creates tension that most survival crafting games generally rely on PvP for.
Icarus is currently still in Beta, and so far, the community response to the game has been positive. The devs have done a decent job getting and implementing player feedback and have even been taking suggestions in the form of a Feature Upvote tool.
Also interesting: 5 Survival Mobile Games to Pass Time
Icarus is set to launch on December 4th on PC via Steam. If you think it looks awesome and can’t wait, there are two more Beta Weekends scheduled between now and release, which players who pre-order will be able to participate in. If you do pick up the game, the official Discord is a great place to ask questions or find a prospecting buddy. See you on Icarus!
YouTube: Upcoming Survival Game ‘Icarus’ [Trailer + Gameplay]
About the author
Daniel Downey is a writer at EIP.gg and an avid reader of sci-fi, fantasy, and history. Believes disagreement should mean discourse, not flame wars. Still searching for that next game that grabs him the way (those mimics in) Dark Souls did.
Photo credit: All media from the game has been provided by RocketWerkz as part of a press kit and is owned by them. The image of the author was used with permission.
