An alien world for the taking. Explore, survive and make your fortune — or die trying.

A resource-rich frontier world has opened up for human exploration and exploitation, where hopefuls claim prospects for a limited time to mine for exotic resources.

Icarus takes a session-based approach to survival games. Players take limited-time drops onto a broken planet in search of rare exotic matter, which fuels advanced tech and player progression in the game’s gritty sci-fi universe. While navigating each prospect's unique challenges, players must collect meta-resources to permanently progress, explore the damaged planet, gather resources, craft tools and machinery, build shelter, hunt wildlife, extract the exotic matter and return to their dropship in time.

Developer RocketWerkz is celebrating the game’s one year anniversary and 52 weeks of community-driven updates, as it has published a significant update to the game every single week for over a year.

The biggest community-driven changes have been the introduction of an Open World survival mode, a big change from Icarus’ original mission-based take on survival gaming, and dedicated servers.

When it launched last December Icarus reached number one on Steam’s Global Top Sellers Charts and has sold over one million copies, but gamerunner Dean Hall is the first to admit the game had a rocky reception. “Icarus now is a vastly different game from what we launched a year ago, and we can thank weekly updates and constant feedback from our community for that,” he says.  

Dean Hall is well-known for pioneering an open relationship with player communities with his previous game DayZ but believes Icarus is the first major PC game to introduce new updates every single week for over a year.

“After Icarus’ launch we committed to a weekly content cadence to build trust with the community, with a solid update each week, every week, with not a single week missed including holidays. This fast turnaround means we get community feedback faster, developers can respond faster and the game is better faster,” says Hall.

Icarus introduced an Open World survival mode in October. “Probably the most fundamental change we made to Icarus was adding a more traditional Open World survival mode. We originally launched Icarus with a unique approach of time-limited survival sessions, but it became clear that many players just didn’t like rebuilding their bases with each mission and wanted more permanence.”

“We tried something new with Icarus’ session-based mission structure, which is still available in the game, and we don’t regret that. At the same time we haven’t been afraid to challenge some of our big original design decisions in response to players.”

Other major updates to the game since launch include a free map pack that doubled the world’s size, changing the mission timer from realworld to in-game time, ridable mounts, adding both hardcore and insured difficulties, farming, optimizations and much more.

Harsh environments demand an envirosuit, regular oxygen, food and water, shelter and constant attention. The wildlife is easily provoked, and your plans may need to change on the fly. Take the resources you find back to orbit to craft advanced technology for your drop, either with a crew or solo.

Use your time wisely or be left empty-handed or even left behind. Calculate the risks, stretch your endurance and resources. How far are you willing to go?

Icarus is available for PC (Steam), possible coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S at a later time.