REVIEW – Icarus: Console Edition starts like it actively resents you: it barely teaches, it buries essentials behind systems, and it lets the planet do the talking – usually with teeth. Give it time, though, and the messy first impression cracks open into a genuinely deep survival loop with serious long-term payoff. We put roughly 25 hours into the PS5 version.

Icarus drops you from orbit onto a botched terraforming project that turned into a hostile wilderness of storms, predators, and constant resource pressure. You gather, level, unlock tech, build shelter, and juggle oxygen, food, water, exposure, injuries, and crafting chains that keep expanding the longer you survive. The sheer stack of mechanics gives the game a distinct rhythm compared to most console survival titles – and that rhythm is exactly where it both shines and stumbles.

The biggest problem early on is onboarding. You get tossed in with a text-heavy manual and a vague sense of direction, then the game essentially shrugs and says figure it out. Discovery can be great, but here it too often turns into avoidable confusion. There is a clear line between trusting players and refusing to teach them.

The First Drop: No Tutorial, Plenty Of Teeth

My first prospect was the desert because it looked manageable: open sightlines, a river nearby, plants and rocks everywhere. In most survival games that means a quick tool, a quick shelter, and a steady start. In Icarus, basic survival tools can be gated behind tech choices, and if you do not understand that up front, you can waste precious early minutes doing busywork with no real way to stabilize.

Wildlife pressure ramps fast. Coyotes, boars, scorpions – they start testing you before you feel properly equipped. Then storms show up and you learn another lesson the hard way: the drop pod is not a safe bunker. Injuries matter, healing requires specific crafts, and even the obvious choices can backfire. Water is a perfect example: a river looks like relief, until it is not, and the game does a poor job of communicating those rules in the moment you actually need them.

I almost quit. Instead, I restarted in the forest biome and that was the turning point, mostly because my earlier progression finally started paying off. Even then, confusion kept cropping up. Oxygen management is the clearest case: I saw my O2 dropping, checked the tech tree, found related items, and still had no idea what the practical early solution was. The crucial tip – equipping oxite in your suit – is the kind of thing the game should teach cleanly, yet it often forces you to learn it through failure or external guides.

When It Clicks, It Really Clicks

Push past that early chaos and Icarus starts rewarding you in the way good survival games do. Better unlock decisions turn panic into planning. A cabin by the water becomes a real base. Drying racks solve food. Purification solves water. A refinery stabilizes oxygen. The game finally turns from constant scrambling into infrastructure-building, and that shift is the reason it can be so satisfying.

There is a particular joy in watching your homemade setup solve problems that used to kill you. Food stops being a crisis and becomes storage. Oxygen stops being mystery and becomes logistics. Then the game humbles you again – like the moment you learn what happens when you put a campfire inside a wooden house. Everything burns down. It is infuriating, but it is also exactly the kind of survival story you remember later, once the anger fades.

Progression is enormous and early choices matter, which is great. The issue is that the game rarely teaches new players how to build a sensible path through that complexity. Depth is not the same as clarity, and Icarus often mistakes one for the other.

On PS5, The UI Is The Real Predator

As a console port, it works, but the UI and controls feel awkward more often than they should. Menus behave like a PC interface that was only partially translated to controller logic. Some screens lean on cursor-style movement, others force dense grid navigation, and the rules shift from menu to menu in ways that never feel natural.

Inventory management is the worst offender because it is the screen you live in. Multiple panels, crafting queues, item details, and stat blocks all compete for attention, and moving through them with directional taps is slow and irritating. Quick tool switching in the field also feels dated, and a proper time-slow radial wheel would immediately make combat and survival moments feel less clumsy.

Readability could use work, too. Text and UI scale can make learning resources and modifiers harder than it needs to be. Combat on controller has another problem: aim assist feels minimal, which makes precision with spears and bows in close-range chaos feel more awkward than skillful. Visually and atmospherically, the biomes do their job – forests feel alive, deserts feel exposed, storms sell urgency – but performance is not perfectly smooth. Framerate is mostly fine, yet frequent stutters while roaming are noticeable enough to become annoying.

Multiplayer availability during the review window was not fully evaluable, so co-op stability in long sessions remains an open question here. What is clear is the overall shape of the experience: huge depth and real payoff, but it demands patience many players will not have – and it does not always meet players halfway.

Verdict

Icarus: Console Edition is content-rich and genuinely rewarding once you understand its systems, but the early experience is stubbornly unfriendly. The onboarding is weak, the PS5 UI is clumsy, and several core mechanics are explained too late or too vaguely. If you enjoy learning complex survival systems and can tolerate a rough first stretch, there is a lot to love – but if you want a smoother ramp and controller-first UX, this version will test your patience early and often.

-Herpai Gergely „BadSector”-

Developer: RocketWerkz, GRIP Studios
Publisher: RocketWerkz, GRIP Studios
Release Date: March 26, 2026
Genre: Survival, Crafting, PvE