What No One Is Talking About In Icarus

In this video, we take a look at Icarus and some things you should know before you purchase the game.

CARUS is a session-based PvE survival game for up to eight co-op players or solo. Explore a savage alien wilderness in the aftermath of terraforming gone wrong. Survive long enough to mine exotic matter, then return to orbit to craft more advanced tech. Meet your deadline or be left behind forever. ~Steam Store

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𝐈ғ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ʟᴏᴏᴋɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ ᴀɴ ᴇ𝐱ᴄᴇʟʟᴇɴᴛ ᴄᴜꜱᴛᴏᴍ ꜱᴇʀᴠᴇʀ ʜᴏꜱᴛ ᴄʜᴇᴄᴋ ᴏᴜᴛ 𝐆-𝐏𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐥
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♫ 𝙊𝙪𝙩𝙧𝙤 𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘: Spark of Excellence
By The Talented @xXasdfMAN12Xx AKA: Sean Wolf

[Monkeypuzzle]

There's some important things I think you missed in this vid:

-- Stone tier building and beyond does not get damaged by storms. So once you are at level 15, you don't have to babysit your bases with the repair hammer and the fire whacker. Prior to that though I feel it really enhances the feeling of precariousness that is so essential to the survival aspect of this game. The storms are wicked and the fire and damage modeling is really well done. So safety through building and leveling is a goal and building is much more relevant because of it. Prebuilt structures like you suggested would suck and I'd have no interest in this game because it would remove the majority of the cleverness and agency you can have.

-- If you buy the game now you can refund it all the way up to the point when you've played 2 hours of the full release on November 20 (if it releases then). So playing the beta every other weekend is a no risk way to decide if you think the game is worth your money. I think the pre-purchase beta is a much better model than early access because of this. I'm currently about 32 hours into the betas and could still return it for a full refund on steam at any time. I'm not going to because I really want to support what they are attempting with the genre.

I have a 3090 Nvidia gpu and I played with a friend who has a stock 1070. She got about 40 fps on medium settings with significant framedrops in action sequences, but the game was compelling enough for her to put up with it. My 3090 stayed well above 60fps on high and epic settings. I think the DLSS option makes a huge difference so, yeah, the 20 and 30 series card are a real threshold to enjoying the performance of this game.

[WhskyTangoFxtrot]

71c is normal operating temperature for a pascal series GPU. That's like turning off your car because the temp gauge hit the halfway point.

[plapbandit]

71*C Extreme temps? Brother, my old dual-gpu Radeon HD5970 wouldn't be happy until it was at 127*C on the VRMs

[AR]

71C is a perfectly normal operating temp.

[sirderpsalot]

71 is perfectly safe... Not even opinion, it's straight up fact.

[mirandadurbin]

I've been running on medium with my 1060. 🤷🏼 My poor processor is being taxed pretty hard, but it's been running well enough and will do fine until I get a newer PC. I very much enjoyed the building system. By the end of beta weekend 2, I had a 3-story house with a wraparound porch and a small loft area. If you build smart, you can greatly limit where you take weather damage. I basically had crumple zones that prevented the weather from ever reaching the important parts of my house and interfering with my storage and work benches and such. I could usually just go up into the 3rd floor and patch the roof a bit during storms. Now and again I had to get into the loft to put our fires if I was struck by lightning. But my floors were functional too. Living on ground floor, workshop on 2nd floor, and open rails on 3rd floor that I could hunt from in stealth. It is what you make it.

[sanctred]

if it wasn't an act of GOD to get a new graphics cards these days.. more people would be up to date on their GPU. It is so frustrating with the GPU situation we are in.

[dodforer]

To all the people saying they're not going to buy just because of this review, why not just spend the $30, get into the next beta and try it yourself instead of using someone else's view? If you don't like it, you can get a full refund for it all the way up until Live Release in November, which depending on what bugs are fixed or not could be pushed back to December or January, which also means more Beta time to test the fixes. I'm not sure how many hours FireSpark81 has in the game. I have 107.5 hours, over roughly 8 days of Beta so far. Yeah, your math is right, a little over 13 hours a day for those 8 days. This game had the smoothest Beta launch I've seen in at least 10 years. They've got a pretty decent bug reporting and tracking system and they've already made multiple changes that players have suggested, and fixed quite a few bugs the players have reported. Are there still issues, of course, that's why they opened it up for Beta instead of "Early Access" because they literally said they wanted more people in the game testing it and finding what wasn't working and they wanted players to have a chance for a full refund if they weren't happy before Live Release. They have at least 3 more scheduled Beta weekends before the Live Release and that's if they don't push back to December or January to make sure they've hammered out the game stopping bugs. Honestly people, $30 which you can get fully refunded and you can see for yourself. For me, buying the Deluxe Edition for $89 when it was first made available, my current cost is $.87/hour of entertainment, and it's only going to get cheaper over the next 3 Betas.

[justin.s]

the whole buying "outposts" so you can just build in a small patch seems pathetic to me. why not just make a survivor mode, you stay on the surface and survive . i dont get the oxygen thing . you are on a planet with trees /plants and animals just like earth, , , , why do you need to manage oxygen ? or is that just for the space part? i also don't get you can travel between planet surface and space but have to use stone tools... what is your character a space cave man? lol. the game maybe good one day but for now its not worth it to me. too many iffy things that don't make sense and whats the end goal. Ark had the bosses, 7DTD has the horde nights, Atlas has the exploration/boats. empyrion has all the ships, quests, planets. i know its beta, and i hope they can make a good game. time will tell

[matthehazard]

FYI, this game is being developed by Dean 'Rocket' Hall's game studio. Dean is best known for making the original Day Z mod for Arma II and he did work on the stand alone Day Z game for a bit before he left to form the development studio RocketWerkz. He has expressed how he does know the importance of quick iteration which I am assuming he learned from making the Day Z mod. You can see proof of this quick iteration this beta weekend where they released 4 or 5 quick fixes to address issues the community was having.

[DasOhneEnde]

One question: How long do you have to play games to be aware of when you as a player are clearly being cheated out of your money and time? i'm now 36 i have been playing on the pc since i was 9 but the games have not gotten better, in the last 10 years they only got worse with pay to win or beta games that were mostly not finished after 2 years or are. That means if you buy games nowadays you have to make sure that this game is good, what I don't say about this one I am from yesterday but I am not stupid.
The problem is, if you support these projects, you end up feeling pissed off.

[JasonfreakinGreen]

The arrows when placing structure pieces looks like the S+ Mod on Ark while the mining looks like the mining in Osiris. Great vid. keep it up Firespark!

[DasOhneEnde]

there is still one question: Why are astronauts landing in a spaceship building stone axes and gathering basic materials? Where is the connection between this medieval sczenario and the astronauts?
Why the f... are ppl die to oxygen in a world with deers and animals in a wood biome? Is the helmet locked with glue?

Game looks pretty awesome but this space scenario vs medieval confuses me. It would not getting better when the techtree ends in laserweapons.

[markthefallen]

you know that 70c is not hot on a video card. video cards are designed to run at an average temp of 95-100 degrees Celsius and they are rated for that if you are concerned about your temps a huge bit of advice is to water cool your graphics card and apply thermal transfer for all your v-ram. sorry I wouldn't say anything but it something he bugged me with.

[FeniksGaming]

Real thing noone is talking about is that game has already 3 dlc scheduled and looks to cost up to £80 for full game that is split at lunch across multiple dlcs

[shosstah]

your base/gear being destroyed every time you leave the planet is the worst survival mechanic i've ever seen in a survival game.

[Majesticwalker]

I think it's worth reminding people that DLSS changes settings on the fly, in the background.
So while you may set options at epic, high, etc.. those will be auto changed to keep your fps doing decent. Setting for quality is great, but this game does seem to do a lot of dipping on frames. I play it on an i7 laptop with a 3070 8 GB. Even on medium, I see a lot of 40 or so fps.
I expect that to change as it gets more developed.
I agree with FireSpark here as well on the fact that the game will be VERY different on release because you'll actually be flying up into space and such.
I wasn't able to play as much on this weekend, but after seeing it was the same setting, I didn't really care to go through the motions again, especially since I just didn't have that much time.
The first weekend, I got a solid day or so on it, but this time, barely a few hours. Got to over 15 the first time and just shy of 10 this time.
One aspect I feel that's very important is actually having a solid group of players since you can't spec into everything at once. So someone dedicated to hunt, build, treasure hunt, etc seems to be the way to go imo

[JonasGrumby]

It is basically Rust without PVP. It doesn't feel Sci-Fi at all as it looks like you are on Earth. You just wander around and grab stuff. Animals spawn in front a back of you. Storms and Predators spawn at certain times near you. This game is stuff we all have done 100 times.

[clevelandfan]

Idk what you are talking about. 71° is fine. 10 series cards factory overclock to around 83°C before they even go to normal clocking for heat.

[gregoryquint]

I can still remember the first time I died in Valheim. I fell off a ladder in the dark, rebuilding my first home. That's weird, but it shook me with something deep. Not getting to a spaceship and I'll die. Sounds like .... I'm looking forward to this game, but