Icarus, the sci-fi survival game from DayZ creator Dean Hall, will no longer launch on 11th August as originally announced and is now expected to arrive some time this November.
Icarus (now a full-price release after developer RocketWerkz pivoted away from its initial free-to-play plans) casts players as deep-space prospectors attempting to salvage what they can from the surface of a hostile alien planet following a terraforming disaster.
“Icarus was once destined to be a second Earth,” explains the game’s Steam page, “but when terraforming collapsed, the air turned toxic and humanity’s hopes of colonising a new world died… Yet when xeno-biologists discovered the cause of the failure – exotic matter – new interest was ignited. Valuable beyond reckoning, these ‘exotics’ sparked a gold rush, fuelling political tensions on Earth, and bringing prospectors flocking to Icarus.”
That translates to what RocketWerkz is calling a “session-based PvE survival game”, where up to eight co-op players repeatedly leave their orbital space station to participate in time-limited jaunts on the planet’s survive, which can last from hours to days to weeks. While on Icarus, players can use the resources around them to build tools, structures, and machinery to protect themselves, and those that manage to survive until the return trip back into orbit can use the rare materials they acquire to craft advanced tech in preparation for tougher challenges ahead.