ICARUS

Story: Purchased EA 08/2021. Had access to Olympus forest and some arctic area. It had wolves, deer, rabbits, and bears (maybe chamois?). A hunt came out for the Wooly. Played for a couple dozen hours total, testing things, providing feedback, reporting bugs. Unfixed aliasing bands on shadows were so nauseating I had to quit slightly prematurely, but the primary complaint in my feedback was simple and critical: animals are r-tarded. What is a game? A game is a system of rules that defines a challenge where success or progress is determined by navigating constraints towards a goal. If there is no meaningful challenge- no opposition or constraint- then it is not a game, but merely a toy. What makes Icarus a game? The rules an challenges should be familiar; basic survival systems management of Health, O2, and Hunger. Mild pre-planning for resource management for your path/destination. And aggressive enemies. Aggressive enemies. This might be the only real "challenge" in the game as the others mentioned are satisfied with very, very little effort. There are two types of fauna in this game; ones that do damage and ones that run or walk in random directions for ~80ft. The ones that do damage, aside from (some) bosses, have one program: look at player, approach to attack distance, initiate attack program. The only deviation from this script I've seen is if the entity seems to be taking too long closing the distance and also seems to be not moving very far itself, so it'll try to move laterally briefly (trying to un-stuck itself from maybe a rock), but its core programming is still always going to be 'walk in an incredibly straight line from here to there'. This just means they didn't have someone (or someone competent) to do pathfinding (classically called "AI" back in my day, before the advent of LLMs, but that's just me showing my age). OK so they have virtually no intelligence (pun intended). Does that mean they're not a challenge? Yes and no, and neither answer is good. No, they're not a challenge, because you can either just "cheese" them or overpower them. Let's look at Polar Bears since everything before this has trivial health and damage. Got a rifle? Cool, crouch and one-shot them. Don't? Cool, just get them to walk into a fun rock formation that keeps them stuck in the still fantastically linear path towards you and slash their nostril with your knife a few times until they turn into pre-epoxy. So here's the crux of the conversation: What happens if you aren't prepared enough for this former option of cheesing, and you are stuck confronting? The world is kind of set up to allow these scenarios to occur; a weather event can hit, just when you pop out of a cave that gave you cave lung, and you didn't clear your peripheral enough to see that polar bear nearby, and how he's "hunting" you straightforwardly. Can you "skill" your way out of it? Brown bears I figured out pretty much instantly; just sidestep towards/past them a bit. They get locked into an attack animation of where you were, and you just clear past their attack sweep. Kiss their teeth with your knife as they approach, and press W&D on the keyboard to Spike Spiegel them. Never take a hit. But then Polar Bears? Again, assuming you can't cheese, what is your recourse? Well considering that so many of the fauna in Icarus share the same skeletons, animations, attitude programming, I thought these would be the same as the brown Bears. But no. They are magicians. They attack backwards. And this is the screenshot in the post. That is reliably reproducible. In fact, it's pretty hard to avoid if you let these little buggers close to you. i'm standing 5 whole leaps behind it watching it attack a ghost, and it's as if its big ol' butt ripped a bloody nuclear one and blasted me 5 feet further away, opposite the direction we can see it is attacking (that blood cloud is mine btw, not his). This is a cheap solution to a r-tarded problem. If you want to venture here, it's not "be prepared". It's "be prepared to cheese." Lame. So anyway to wrap up this rant and get closure to the opening title, these are the same complaints I had in 2021. These and a few more. And not a single one had any meaningful progress. (NOTE: I am under no delusion that I am required to be heard and accommodated for, and admittedly there were a LOT of people flooding the scene at that time). So it makes me sad. I see this game as a core concept skeleton that showed incredible potential, and ultimately was left as a core concept skeleton with some added makeup and clothing (clothing DLC costs extra btw) instead of actually fleshing it out and making it alive

Base game is ok you get your money's worth. The problem is the DLC and how many and expensive they are. The game is good but not good enough to charge ~200 or around 100 dollars if you just want the core DLC. With so much of the content locked behind a paywall I do not feel comfortable recommending this game. Though to be fair the price of the DLC l have driven me away. It maybe worth it but I'm not really seeing much that would convince me to spend that much money on what is basically the same game 4 or 5 times.

Bro is working hard pushing out updates (Content, fixes and tweaks). But it just feels lacking, like this dude is obviously putting in massive work. But where is it in game, the OpenWorld is the main selling point, I see a lot of people with hard-ons for the drop in and quest part of the game and that its where the real content of the game is in, sure I can see how that's appealing. Its not for me. I've played so many Open World Survival games with thousands of hours across them, and something is just off about Icarus, like its lacking something and the atmosphere is dead. DLC plagues the later tiers you cant do anything with the Tier 5 stuff, maps are locked behind DLC as well, the later quest are awful grind fests, I had to do a quest where to defend a nesting area and 400 wolves, Bears, Kiwi's. TDLR: Bro is pumping content into the game, but its all surface level nothing is in-depth and once you get based the initial struggle its a massive grind fest. DLC plays a huge part of the game if you plan on spending more than 100hrs on a save.

Не рекомендую. Проходил много выживалок, но эта самая непродуманная. Особенно в плане стройки. Накидали в кучу и оружие и стены и фундамент. Всё на клавиши от 1 до 9. Также выбесила ситуация, послали на задание, типа просто забери и установи одну бабуйню. Поехал на прирученной лошади. В итоге налетели животные, покрамсали меня и мою животину. В итоге на месте моего трупа куча животных, в том числе медведь, и я не могу забрать свои вещи.

Not a bad game but the amount of DLC in this game is pure LUDACRIS! Most of the DLC should be in the BASE GAME! What a rip off.

280 часов в игре и не освоено и трети от Олимпуса. И только облизываюсь от запланированных целей в игре. Стоит каждой потраченной копейки.

So far, this game is just extremely grindy easy survival with very low challenge. Everything takes absolutely unrealistic amount of material with very convoluted progression system.

Е***** за****, к сожалению купил давно, деньги вернуть неполучится, если есть желание игры подобного формата, не делайте себе мозг, КАЧАЙТЕ АРК!!!

Cash grab. Do not buy. I have spent countless hours on grindy games like this and am all for it. Not this one.

Sou um jogador de 40 anos, e a muito tempo venho buscando um jogo para me animar, como antigamente, pois fico jogando apenas os jogos antigos, porém o Icarus conseguiu mudar esse cenário, a história muito boa, a mecânica do jogo de construção, o desafio de sobrevivência, o conjunto todo da obra é muito bem feito, e saber que a equipe ainda está trabalhando ativamente para melhorar o jogo me empolga mais ainda a continuar jogando. O jogo é excelente.