Icarus, the sci-fi survival game from DayZ creator Dean Hall and his studio RocketWerkz, launches on Xbox Series consoles and PlayStation 5 as its Console Edition, brought to those platforms by GRIP Studios. The game has been available on PC through Steam for over four years, where it has received consistent weekly updates expanding its base content. Console players get the base game plus the New Frontiers expansion bundled from the start.
The setup is bleak in a way that gives the survival loop real teeth. Icarus was supposed to be humanity's second Earth, a terraformed planet that would carry the species to the stars. The terraforming collapsed. The atmosphere turned toxic, wildlife grew hostile, and the whole project became a punchline, a monument to overreach. Then someone discovered exotic matter, the very substance that caused the failure, and suddenly the planet nobody wanted became the most valuable rock in the sky. Players take on the role of prospectors, dropping from an orbital station to the planet's surface to extract exotics and complete contracts for the factions jockeying for control back on Earth. The catch is simple: get what you came for and get out, or get left behind forever.
The tension between greed and survival runs through every system. Prospectors begin each drop with nothing and must harvest, craft, and build their way up from hand-crafted tools to advanced composites and electronics across four tiers of technology. Three separate progression trees give the grind real shape. Planetary tech covers what you can build and craft on the surface. Player talents let you specialize across exploring, building, farming, hunting, taming, and combat, with over 100 options to choose from. The orbital workshop sits above it all, a persistent layer where exotic matter gets converted into advanced gear with unique properties that carry into future drops. The workshop is the thread connecting one mission to the next, turning each successful extraction into a permanent edge for whatever comes after.
The Console Edition includes 128 square kilometres of terrain across two maps, with the Prometheus region from the New Frontiers expansion adding mutated creatures, ridable mounts, and untapped resources to the original landmass. Every tree can be harvested, every rock voxel mined, every creature hunted. Hidden caves and distinct biomes fill out the hand-crafted landscape, and the planet itself pushes back hard: toxic atmosphere, destructive storms, forest fires, and apex predators all work to grind prospectors down. Preparation matters more than reflexes here. Finding oxygen, stalking a meal, stockpiling for a long trek into the wilderness, these are the decisions that keep you alive.
The planet's hostility isn't just flavour. It's the game's central argument about what happens when humanity treats a world as a resource to be stripped rather than a place to be understood. The terraforming didn't just fail, it created something that actively resists human presence. Flora, fauna, and atmosphere all push back. The prospectors aren't colonists building a future. They're scavengers picking through the wreckage of someone else's ambition, and the exotic matter gold rush that draws them there is just humanity repeating the same mistake with different stakes.
Hall's fingerprints are visible in the design philosophy. RocketWerkz, based in Auckland, New Zealand, has layered narrative content directly into the survival framework. Questlines play out as Operations in Open World mode or as episodic Missions, giving players the same story content through two different structures. Missions are timed drops where you land with nothing, build from scratch, and escape before the clock runs out. Open World is persistent, letting you forge a longer claim on the surface while completing operations at your own pace. A third mode, Outposts, strips away the danger entirely with regenerating resources and safe environments for creative building.
Up to eight players can cooperate on PC through Steam friends or dedicated servers, while the Console Edition supports up to four in its PvE sessions. There's no PvP here. The planet is the opponent, and it doesn't need help. Every drop is a negotiation between ambition and caution, between pushing deeper into hostile territory for better resources and knowing when to cut your losses and extract. Prospectors who survive return to orbit as veterans with better gear and harder contracts waiting. Those who don't make it back are simply gone, their progress on that drop lost to a planet that was never theirs to take.