Icarus Gameplay Stream Reveals The Best Of Rust & Valheim

The highly-anticipated survival game Icarus showed some gameplay in a recent livestream in order to build hype for the game. The game, which comes from studio RocketWerkz and Dean Hall, the creator of the hugely popular survival game DayZ, was first revealed last year with a gameplay trailer. Since then, however, there has been little information as to what the gameplay of Icarus will look like.

Icarus takes place on an alien planet and features the player having to survive a world where human terraforming went wrong. This world was the subject of a mockumentary-style trailer “No Rescue” which laid out some of the lore of Icarus. The game, which is billed as a “session-based” open-world PvE survival game, has missions that will become available for a certain amount of real-world time, ranging from a few hours to several weeks. Once the session expires, the mission will no longer be available to complete, so players will have to stay on their feet to collect the rewards. Those rewards can be used to craft everything from technology to shelter. The game can be played with up to eight players in a squad.

Building off what was revealed in the trailer, the livestream on SurviveIcarus’s Twitch delved deeper into the crafting and survival gameplay. The players land on a barren world and must use tools to harvest materials, using them to craft weapons, building blocks, chests, and other materials. Doing so allows the players to level up and increase their stats like health, stamina, and strength. Players must gather materials for everything from food to oxygen, which can be “crafted” by harvesting certain minerals. But the biggest enemy in Icarus is the environment, as events like wildfires, storms, and lightning strikes can alter the environment and harm the player.

In discussing the development, RocketWerkz discussed how important it was to try and push the envelope when it comes to the survival genre. On multiple occasions, the developers discussed comparisons to survival games like Rust and Valheim‘s material-gathering loop. But the developers stressed that the harvesting and crafting loop is not just limited to what players create on the planet, but what they can harvest for the time between drops. Managing inventory on the off-world station to have room for “exotics” that players can trade for better tools to be used during the next drop will be critical. Those drops will be a set amount of time players can spend on Icarus crafting and building before they need to return to orbit, but dying causes the player to miss the shuttle back and lose all they have collected.

The game’s setting has a very similar look to games like DayZ, which is to be expected, but the gameplay seems very similar to Valheim (and, in fact, the developers name-dropped the Viking game during the presentation). Not only can players participate cooperatively in building and gathering materials, but the setting is one of an unpopulated planet where players must build from the ground up. However, the environmental threats are much more akin to a game like Rust where there are no big bosses to contend with, but a lot of smaller threats to be aware of. In addition, the station base has a similar mechanic to the Compounds from Rust, where players can trade and use materials they scavenged from the planet’s surface. This constant rotation between the station and the planet provides Icarus with something that most survival games don’t have: a sense of urgency.

Source: SurviveIcarus/Twitch

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