Surviving ICARUS on Console is a Beautiful Nightmare

The Drop

After spending the last couple of years kicking the teeth in of PC players, Dean Hall’s notoriously brutal sci-fi survival sim has finally hit PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. But the real question isn’t whether you can survive the planet—it’s whether the game can survive the awkward jump to a controller.

Core Features:

• Nature is the Enemy: A dynamic weather system featuring torrential rain, toxic smog, and lightning storms that can burn your wooden base to the ground.
• A Massive Sandbox: 128km² of playable real estate right out of the box, featuring both familiar Earth-like regions and bizarre alien landscapes.
• Zero to Hero Tech: A massive crafting tree that lets you progress from crafting primitive bone knives to constructing orbital drop pads.
• Squad Up: 1-to-4 player PvE co-op. You’re going to want friends; playing this solo is an exercise in extreme masochism.

What Exactly Are We Doing Here?

The setup is actually pretty great. You play as an expendable corporate contractor. Humanity tried to terraform this rock, completely botched the job, and accidentally created a hybrid mutant nightmare of a world. But because the planet is packed with valuable “exotic matter,” corporate execs are happily sending desperate prospectors (that’s you) down to the surface to mine it.

If you followed this game on PC, you probably remember the launch gimmick that drove everyone insane: a real-world countdown timer. If you missed your extraction window and didn’t make it back to your dropship in time, your character was permanently deleted. Yeah. Thankfully, RocketWerkz listened to the massive community backlash and pivoted hard. The console version wisely focuses on the persistent Open World mode, turning what used to be a wildly stressful speedrun into a proper, deeply strategic survival sandbox.

Better yet, it bundles the massive New Frontiers expansion right out of the gate. That means you get a 128km² map to explore, ridable alien mounts, and access to the Prometheus region—a raw, non-terraformed zone full of mutant apex predators and weird new biomes. You start out frantically tying rocks to sticks to fight off wolves, and if you live long enough, you’ll eventually be building laser drills and solar arrays.

The Architects of Your Demise

It makes sense that ICARUS is unapologetically unforgiving when you realize it comes from Dean Hall—the guy who basically birthed the modern survival genre with the DayZ mod. His studio loves insanely complex, granular simulations. But PC architecture and consoles are totally different beasts. To get this thing running on PS5 and Xbox, they brought in GRIP Studios out of Prague. These are the heavy lifters who managed to wrestle massive PC games like Subnautica and Outward onto consoles, alongside doing technical work for Civilization and Midnight Suns.

Porting a game that tracks every single campfire, wall, and dropped item means making compromises. On PC, ICARUS eats RAM for breakfast. To keep consoles from literally melting, they capped co-op at 4 players (down from 8) and downgraded the mining animations. Instead of the cool voxel chipping you get on PC, rocks on console just kind of shrink as you hit them to save on processing power.

Oh, and a pro-tip: watch out for the trees. The timber physics here are notoriously deadly. When you chop a tree, it splinters into individual physics-based logs that will absolutely roll down a hill and crush you if you aren’t paying attention. Add in dynamic weather like torrential rain, toxic smog, and lightning storms that can burn your wooden base to the ground, and nature is very much your main enemy.

Fun Fact Sheet:

• Listen to the Crowd: The original version of the game relied on a strict real-world countdown timer that would permanently kill your character if you missed your extraction. Player backlash was so severe that the developers completely overhauled the game to focus on the current Open World mode.
• Killer Trees: The timber physics in this game are notoriously lethal. Chopped trees splinter into individual physics-based logs that routinely roll down hills and crush inattentive players.
• Hardware Compromises: To get the game running decently on consoles, the developers had to ditch the PC version’s impressive “voxel chipping” when mining ore. On PS5 and Xbox, the rocks simply shrink as you hit them to save on processing power.

The Verdict: How Does It Play?

So, how does it actually feel on the couch? It’s a mix of relief and frustration. Visually, it looks surprisingly gorgeous, especially on an OLED TV. But man, the controller implementation is rough. The menus clearly still think you’re using a mouse. Trying to quickly craft a bandage while bleeding out from a bear attack feels like doing a Rubik’s Cube underwater.

Here’s the final breakdown:

• Narrative (5/10): The corporate greed sci-fi setup is cool flavor, but don’t go in expecting a cinematic story. It’s purely window dressing.
• Gameplay Mechanics (8/10): Going from a literal caveman to a sci-fi engineer is incredibly satisfying, and the building physics are fantastic. But that sluggish, grid-based console UI makes inventory management an absolute chore.
• Audio (8/10): The sound design carries a lot of weight here. The terrifying crack of a falling tree or the deafening roar of an incoming flash storm will legit make you panic. It only loses a few points for repetitive menu chimes and lingering audio bugs.
• Graphics (7/10): The lighting and environmental density are beautiful, especially in the alien biomes. But to achieve that scale on current-gen consoles, performance takes a hit. Expect noticeable frame stuttering when moving fast or when heavy weather rolls in.

Overall Score: 7.0 / 10

If you have a dedicated crew of friends (do not play this solo unless you’re a masochist) and the patience to muscle through a clunky interface, there is a brilliant, hundreds-of-hours-deep survival game waiting for you here. If you lack patience, the planet of Icarus will probably break you within the first hour.

Have you taken the drop yet? Let us know if you survived.

ID Card

• Developer: RocketWerkz (Original PC), GRIP Studios (Console Port)
• Publisher: GRIP Studios
• Engine: Unreal Engine 4
• Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
• Release Date: December 3, 2021 (PC), March 26, 2026 (Console)
• Genre: Co-op Survival Crafting Sandbox