ICARUS

The verdict is 7.5. This is an underrated, time-rescued hardcore survival game — it does not court everyone, but the one thing it set out to do, it does with real conviction.

From a lukewarm launch to an unlikely second wind

At release, ICARUS managed only a lukewarm reputation: a 69 average from sixteen critics on the aggregator and a 33 percent recommendation rate, parked squarely in the "fair" tier, with bugs, crashes and punishing penalties named in nearly every review that went up. For most games that kind of opening is a quiet death — a slow slide off the charts and out of the conversation within a season. This one flatly refused it. Through near-daily patches that chipped away at the jank, two substantial expansions that nearly doubled the game, and years of unbroken polish — then boosted by an early-2026 launch on new console hardware that put it in front of a fresh audience — it stumbled into a genuine second wind almost five years on. In a market this allergic to old releases, where most titles get one launch window and never another, that comeback is rare enough to be worth dwelling on, and it says something real about the bones underneath the early mess. Studios rarely get a second first impression; ICARUS effectively manufactured one through sheer persistence, and the version players are discovering now is a markedly better game than the one critics reviewed at launch. That is the unglamorous truth behind a lot of survival-game success stories — the genre runs on patience, and the developers who keep showing up tend to outlast the ones who shipped flashier launches and walked away.

Who should buy, who should walk, and which version to grab

The numbers make the case best. Developer Dean Hall revealed that during the late-2025 Steam Winter Sale the base game sold 984,000 copies in that promotion alone, with another 243,000 players buying DLC, while concurrent players climbed from just over nine thousand in November to north of thirty-five thousand in December and kept rising into the new year. A five-year-old survival game pulling off that kind of comeback is not a marketing fluke; it is a core loop that holds up under repeated scrutiny — good things, even late, eventually get found.

So who is it for? If you want to be pushed step by careful step by the environment, to feel the primal payoff of turning raw wilderness into a working base — ideally with a few regular teammates — this off-world trip will sink its hooks in. Flip it around, and if you want snappy combat, a tight story, or have no patience for the steep on-ramp and the hard penalties of XP-wiping deaths and permanent character loss on a failed prospect — especially as a solo player — it will most likely turn you away. No patch fixes that; this is simply the design it is. On versions, the safe pick is the edition that includes New Frontiers for the fullest content, with platforms each making trade-offs: PC has the higher ceiling, smoother UI and up to eight players, while console is convenient and still stunning to look at and hear but ships a controller-hostile UI and a four-player cap. In the end, the thing hardest to copy is the one-two punch of the losable timed prospect bolted to wipe-on-exit, persist-forever progression — and its most direct rival, ARK: Survival Evolved Ultimate Edition, leans on near-endless taming and accumulation, the never-ending loop that ICARUS deliberately set itself against. It does not want you to play forever. It wants every single run to be winnable, and losable.