I should have known better, a game made by Rocket, AKA Dean Hall, AKA the man who created Dayz (the mod was awesome). This is the longest review i've written and it's because Dean has bent me over twice.

1stly let me say this, Dean Hall left the dayz project right in the middle of it to pursue an adventure climbing mount everest, Imagine me leaving your kitchen half finished to F**K off on a holiday! He appears to have done it once again, releasing Icarus as a finished game when frankly it should still be in Alpha.

Just because Dean Hall likes to go on long walks up big mountains does not mean every f*****G game he creates should be a walking simulator! I remember when dayz added bicycles, well Dean, you might wanna add them to Icarus cause it's just taken me 3 hours to do a 3 point mission, collect beacon, place beacon, repeat, repeat.

The missions go like this and it's practically the same for every single mission,
Land on planet, collect some stuff in order to breath (i've just come from space but didn't bring anything to breath on the planet for more than 5 minutes), walk, Yes walk (i'll explain what I mean by Walk later) to the objective. Get attacked by 15 to 30 wolves, cougers, hyenas on your way that literally spawn out of the !!!GROUND!!!. Finally arrive at destination, place beacon, it starts to scan, then 50% in some animals attack said beacon that you must kill and then restart the beacon. Collect beacon and do the same again 3 times. No joke, this is the basis of practically every single mission.

Now when I say walk, why is it every game of this genre insist on giving you a character from Austin Powers, ie, Fat bastard! You've ran, or swung your hatchet for 4 seconds and boom your F****D, far too exhausted to continue your perils journey without stopping for a breather and a snack. Can you imagine if we'd sent a fat bastard -esque individual to place a flag at the north pole or even at the top of snowdonia! We'd be F*****D as a species, yet every game insists on it and this one is no different and possibly even worst than it's counter parts!

Let me put down some pro's
Pro's

It's pretty

The workshop idea is pretty neat where you can craft thigns to take with you, how ever you should be able to bring other resources back, ie the 100+ bones you collected from the 6 million surprise attacking wolves.

Honestly this is taking me a while to come up with some.

The co op system is very simple, easy to join and leave and if the session is not there when you come back you can carry on in your own session.

It does the weather system better than most
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Cons..

You'll spend all your points in the stamina tree before anything else, and you'll still not have enough.

While the graphics are pretty dam solid, you want run them on max, i'm running a very high end system including a 3080ti and the mere suggestion of ray tracing or max settings will cause your fps to perform like a dead hamster on a treadmill. The game runs single core so despite having a decent over clock on a high end cpu, you won't use your card to it's potential and struggle for fps. I found a nice balance with graphics and performance, but there a re still multipul sub 10 fps drops from 70+

It's boring! I know that's a subjective description, but it is, it's just boring, at 1st it's a good game, the 1st 10 hours or so with friends, wacking tree's, rocks, seeing what you can build, but after that you start to realise there is actually very little to this game. It's much more like a repetitive side quest you would get in a larger game, go here, fetch that repeat.

Hit boxes, my god the hit boxes, half the time you swing you miss, n no im not a s**t shot. For example, there are fairly regular baby deer's walking just behind mummy deer's. You crouch down, you steady your bow aim, your trailing the shot just a few inch's in front of mummy deer's face and release. The arrow sails smoothly through the air, then suddenly "god" freezes time, takes your arrow and re positions it before unfreezing time again! and Bam, you've just commited the scene out of Bambi and the baby deer that was a good 5 foot behind is now dead! I mean I know it's just a game but when I decided to go hunting I figured i'd kill the adult and let the baby go free to come back in a few years for revenge! but the hitboxes are soo far off that every time I shoot at the adult deer I end up murdering the little sod behind it!! & then the mummy deer just stands there, gorping, presumably in shock at the 14 inch black ribbed knobler poking out her babies head! Before once again 2 predator animals just spawn out of the ground and begin to F**K you up as you've just used all your stamina on your shot!

Turning your torch on at night time is the equivalent of pressing alt and f4
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To summarise

The games very good looking, think WItcher 3 graphics on max, except you can't run the game on max, so it ends up being fairly good looking, or let me explain in a different way, You're in a club, you were talking to some one but didn't find them attractive at all, it's been an hour and your 8 shots deep! suddenly all your sexual desires are ready to go at the individual you really weren't into before and surly won't be into in the morning when you wake up with genital breath and a hang over.

The game is basically a poor base building game, Pro tip, if you like designing and building things, buy a CAD program and learn a real life skill with it.

You'll spend more time walking to objectives than it takes to ferment wine in real life

The games huge, but empty.

I imagine much like dayz that in 6 years this will be a great game but by then it will look very average and have lost the majority of it's player base!

Overall in it's current ALPHA state it's a £5 game! I don't consider £20 a great deal of money, im certainly not going to add this to my life long regret list, but if I was younger and I had to pick a game 3 or 4 times a year due to funds, i'd be pretty pissed off if I'd bought this!