ICARUS

I don't write this negative review without warrant. First we must discuss what this game is trying to accomplish. The only thing Icarus excels at is dropping the ball and punishing players. From the get go the first building material "Thatch" is useless in the extreme not even as a temporary shelter. The storms will shred this material in minutes without continued repair. Wood is more survivable but just barely needing constant upkeep. Stone is great but excessively cost prohibitive to build with requiring thousands of stone, nails, leather, and wood to even make a small base. Let's talk about fire, you'll want to use torches, campfires and other methods to light your base. DON'T Icarus devs decided that any open fire source will catch ANY wood or thatch related material on fire RANDOMLY. I spent nearly 3 hour on a wood base and put down a wood torch only to have the entire building burn tot he ground because I was away on a mission. You'll even accidentally have a pet or player trip over a firepit and then traipse through your base leaving burning foot prints like some bad rendition of mephisto looking at you stupidly as they burn to death in your house. Pets: The game really really wants you to use pets and train them up and breed them. However the game also maliciously designs ways to remove them from play at every step. Do not let them wander, do not have a stable without secure foundations and even then be prepared to have your favorite steeds disappear, stuck in the ground or glitch out and die to surrounding mobs. DO NOT attempt to take your pack out on follow the rubber banding is egregiously bad and will not work. Many Time I've had animals stuck 3-5 tiles away and refuse to respawn. Only to get stuck in the ground or worse get mauled by wildlife. The game desperately needs a "sick em" command as there is no way to control pet aggression other than "passive, defensive, offensive" meaning you literally ahve to tag a creature or boss and hope to god you can deaggro them onto your pets. Most times this just ends up with you getting killed. and a naked run back to the area in hopes that all your animals are still alive...they wont be -.- The missions are all varied fetch quests or build quests or kill quests. Some of the open world quests require mining thousands of resources that could have been used for your base or upgrading tech tree items setting you back hours of gameplay because resources do not respawn. The kill quests are also aggravating because sometimes its "kill 64 rabits" and other times its traversal to a zone you can't survive in because you just shoved 8000 ore into orbit preventing valuable research. Item Durability is gods awful mechanic and always has been. Farming is already tedious and the hit box on wheat is so atrocious you have to swing at it 5x just to get it. Sure you could use the harvester but it reduces crop yield by 50% and doesnt use your bonuses for farming. Forget fertilizer it's to resource intensive to use and only last 1200 seconds??? the only legitimate use for fertilizer is an easier way to make gunpowder. Boss DLC: the core-ite boss DLC almost ruined this game single handedly as it spawns massive units that require special ammo to kill or they just roll into you and kill you. and that special ammo needs lots of gunpowder and volatile liquid which is best found from creatures called vespers, however the core-ites take up thier spawn locations vastly reducing youra bility to produce said ammo. These core-ites spawn EVERYWHERE and you will sometimes end up fighting off 4-5 of them at a time wasting hundreds of rounds. These things were not programmed correctly and they will glitch teleport to any location as they roll around like a derpy hedgehog. Speaking of bosses the last quest boss on olympus where you have to fight several boss encounters is probably the most terribly coded encounter I've ever seen. The desert scorpion is prime WTF? the encounter takes place on a glitchy platform that causes you to not be able to move near it until you LITERALLY glitch teleport onto it, the boss hit box causes your pack animals to attack but deal no damage, and the boss has a 1 hit KO stampede maneuver unless you are over 800 HP. If you do your body gets stuck beneath the arena and you cant get rezzed, and then you ahve to get back to the arena glitch onto the platform where the boss will instantly aggro you after he killed your pets and you'll get stuck in a death loop never able to get your old body back. The resource grind is atrocious, the game is designed to punish solo players with EXTENSIVE tech trees, you HAVE to use pets but they will get glitched away randomly regardless if you tie them down or not, base building is prohibitive and larger bases will tank the entire world, The game has no real "Story" the damn storms are excessive, tearing apart anything but stone in seconds and requiring you to literally sit for 10 minutes doing nothing other than hitting things with a hammer, electricity will randomly power off, the tier 5 power has a production deficit requiring batteries and wind/solar to operate, most things are locked behind DLC paywalls, Everything is an anticlimactic mess with almost no accomplishment. "RV there yet" had better terrain challenges than this polished turd of buggy and lazy coding. Trust me I TRIED to like this game with 280 hours into Icarus I've gone down every rabbit hole trying to seek the juice to squeeze ratio only to have my juice glitch into a box and drain away. There is SO mcuh potential here and for every good quality I found I got hijacked by 3 terribly coded mechanics or lazy development with no imagination. PET PEEVES: WHY THE HELL AM I GETTING CAVE SICKNESS IN A DAMN ENVIROSUIT WHEN THE OXYGEN I"M BREATHING IS FROM MY PURIFIED O2 TANKS!!! WTF DEVS!!! WHY THE HELL DID YOU INCLUDE XP DEBUFFS??? You got valhiem trees and broken legs and decided lets screw the player even more by handing out a 30 min long -25% xp debuff on top of reducing movement??? speaking of which PERSISTEN DEBUFFS AFTER DEATH IS TOXIC CODING STAHP!! NO ONE likes this and it's incredibly frustrating to deal with especially after you just died to your already glitchy buggy mess of a game. In every other crafting game I can pin resources or blueprints for items I want, here you better get used to writing ♥♥♥♥ down because screw the player that's why. There's no fast travel or waypoint system you can use to expedite moving around, your hoofing it everywhere which makes most quests a violation of my time because they DO NOT TELL YOU WHAT YOU NEED UNTIL YOU ARRIVE. This means you now have to break immersion for every quest to see what you need otherwise your taking multiple trips back and forth as most quests have several stages of random BS you'll need to complete them. JUST TELL US WHAT WE NEED BEFORE WE GET THERE FFS!! Let us make orbital pads so we can move the hell around!! If you want a fun survival crafter Icarus is not it, go play ARK, or Raft, or any of the hundred other titles that do this better in every way.