ICARUS
Skip · Multiplayer · 2021
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $34.99.
- Length
- 36.1h
- Value
- $0.97/hr
- Reviews
- 75% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when ICARUS is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 16 GB of memory, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 70 GB of storage. Windows only.
ICARUS is a solo or multiplayer PvE survival game. Explore a savage wilderness in the aftermath of terraforming gone wrong. Complete narrative quests as either Open World operations or Individual Missions. Explore, build, craft and hunt while seeking your fortune and prospecting for exotic matter.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $3.49, set in December 2025. 29 discounts in the 5 years on record. They run about 33 percent off, roughly 11 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 11 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 24 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 67 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Green Hell ($24.99, scores 60) beats it on value, while it beats Nightingale ($29.99, scores 16).
25 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 490 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 204 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 31 percent of the 4,259 reviews written there were positive, against 75 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 36.1 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 200, 5.5 times as much.
Still 1.5K concurrent players, 5 years in.
The drop-off
79% start to 5% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 36.1-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
1,492 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Icarus feels like a survival experience constantly at war with its own mechanics. Instead of a meaningful journey, progression turns into a relentless, action-based grind where you frenetically engage in every minor activity just to level up. This task-heavy loop completely undermines the sense of real danger, stripping the environment of any actual threat. Even the severe storms fail to pose a genuine challenge...
A frustratingly designed game - there's a lot here that I really like, but it gates its content behind long grinds, drip-feed unlocks, and a buggy mission system. Add on the free-to-play style monetization of content drops, and I just can't recommend it over other games in the genre.
After a long weekend playing solo, this gets a qualified thumbs up from me. There's a lot to like, but it demands a serious time investment and a tolerance for its particular brand of tedium. The early game is brutally punishing, but there's a satisfying payoff as you build your character, unlock better equipment and learn the systems. I suspect it takes hundreds of hours to really master everything thrown at you...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
ICARUS scores 40/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1149460/icarusThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 6, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.