Dropped in mission. all the workshop gear with me got stuck in "on drop/settle" and lost.. Considering devs have audacity to ask people 25-30€ per dlc. While basic stuff is legit broken. And only way to fix this, is head to %appdata% and manually edit my json files to access the gear game stole from me. eat a bag of soft dih.

I don't know how the has has "Mostly Positive reviews", considering the amount of bugs it has. Like, it has been forever since the game released and the devs just don't care.
Craft que, dissapearing mounts after death with no option to get the loot, mounts/animals being stuck all the time everywhere, terrible pathfinding, domestic animals blocking your way all the time with no option to push them away, craft not starting with no apparent issues, neing stuck on any small object while riding the mount, etc., it is crazy how many bugs there are.

So, I'm mixed on this.

Let me start with: Overall Icarus is a fun game. However, fun is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in that sentence. There is a lot about this game that absolutely does NOT feel like a 1.0+ release. There is a lot of jank and frustration in many core mechanics that make this game still feel early access.

My review is going to be focused from the perspective of someone who loves building. I play these games to build. Valheim, Ark, Sons of the Forest, I got them all so I can build, and Icarus was no exception. And you can build some pretty neat things in this game. I've really enjoyed putting many hours into building a base with a bridge that extends over one of the lakes in the Forest on Olympus.

However, The structural stability feature of the game is good in theory, but ends up being a massive pain in the ass. The snapping and grid system works against you just as often as it works with you, and while it does help to keep everything nice, tidy and lined up, I often find myself wrestling to get a piece in the spot I want it and struggling to attach to the structural support I'm trying to snap it to. The structural pillars are especially egregious in this. I spend more time spamming the rotate key and trying to get the seemingly required pixel perfect mouse aiming to make the pillar face the way I want, only to have it move when I put pressure on the mouse to click to place and the piece just goes where ever it feels like.

The storms are a very neat idea, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Shelter is often required during the various storms that hit periodically, but the game doesnt seem to be consistent on what it considers shelter. Plus, unless you start off building at stone tier or better, your hard work will be all washed away when a wind storm completely decimates your wooden or thatch structures.

The perks and perk trees are, again, neat ideas but awful execution. With a perk cap, the player must specialize in their build - which I have no problem with. My problem lies in how the perks are structured and distributed within those trees. Respecing your points is available, but uses the in game REN currency to do so after your free X (40? I believe?) respec points. REN is pretty much infinitely obtainable, yes, but it makes an already very grindy game just artificially bigger.

Speaking of grinding, there is a LOT of it. My time in Olympus has been probably split 20-80% solo-multiplayer with just one other person, and hoooooo boy, the sheer amount of ♥♥♥♥ you need just to build a single wall (looking at you Concrete). And you will need a lot of space in your permanent base for all the workbenches, because this game took a cue from Conan Exiles, and you need a specialized bench for every aspect you could imagine. It would be SO lovely if the masonry and carpentry benches were merged, the forge and glassblowing bench were merged, the herbalism and grinding benches were merged, etc.

Resource requirements, in my opinion, could also be toned down, especially in tiers 3 and onward. The game requires that the player venture into caves to access the mining nodes, then makes the caves less enjoyable than a walmart trip on black friday with no shopping list to guide you. Worms, bees, spiders, and other mobs in the cave are annoying but fine. But the cave sickness system is honestly just downright cruel. Yes, one can mitigate or lessen it - but that takes yet more grinding to make potions/tonics/pills, or the dehumidifier (I'm gonna cry, its all so resource expensive), when maybe the system could just be removed entirely or maybe just lessened.

Mining nodes are limited, too. Finite. Pop those voxels, and its gone, baby. There are things you can do about it in game, yes, but also, that is so insanely stressful, especially when destroying structures doesn't fully refund materials. And it feeds into the resource scramble at higher tiers because unless you get insanely lucky with the randomly generated contents of the non-randomly generated deep-ore mining nodes, you may find yourself having to trek literal real world hours across the map to get to a tier 1 deposit (iron, sulfur, silica), because almost everything after tier 2 crafting requires at least one, if not multiple, of those materials, and at insane amounts. You will bottleneck. It is inevitable.

Inventory space is woefully limited, which forces the player to turn to the mounts and pets system, which is yet another bench, skill tree, BLUEPRINT UNLOCK SYSTEM point dump (luckily not finite, but the player is aggravatingly slowly drip-fed points per level up, and with the benches requiring points, then the individual items requiring points, its a whole thing.), and resource sink. And usually, your pet dies about 15 minutes after taming it, because the system for commanding and maintaining pets is.. well bare-bones would be generous. Animal husbandry and farming are my second favorite systems in games like this, typically, and here its just a pain.

Not every creature is tamable, which I have no problem with, but the taming methods are wildly inconsistent. Some you must trap and build bait for, then babysit meticulously, taking precious time from your resource gathering. Others- you kill their mom then claim a baby for your own. The whole system feels half-baked and slapped in to justify the pets/homesteading DLC, which I am NOT purchasing.

Farming punishes the player for growing crops by inflicting a crop fatigue system within the crop plots. Fertilizer doesn't seem to be strong enough to mitigate it, and I understand the idea is to mimic real life farming, where one must rotate their crops for the health of the soil. That's cool, I guess, but in Icarus, it just serves to be pointlessly frustrating and time consuming. Building a greenhouse helps, but the resources to build the glass are - you guessed it! intense and a pain to gather! - only for a wind storm to shatter it all because the durability on the panes are atrocious.

Too often, I find myself excited to log in to my prospect, only to look at my chore list for it, and realize this just feels like a second job to me. It loses its novelty very quickly. I had the same problem with Satisfactory, where I'm pouring hours of my life into something that just does not give the returns I'm looking for.

I got the game on sale for about $8.00 USD, so I'm not upset with what I have received overall, but I certainly would not buy this game for full price. And it is with a dissatisfied grumble that I give this game a recommendation. Because there is a gem here. they just make you dig through so much frustration to get there,... and your stamina bar has been halved by cave sickness.