Recent reviews by Drethic

I originally purchased the game during Beta Weekend 1. I played Weekends 1 - 3 but due to other commitments was unable to play the betas until the game launched. During those weekends I was amazed at how well the developers had done with the night time mechanics allowing players to see just well enough to feel brave and explore because of the moon light without making it easy. I launched the game on release day and ran into several issues:

1) I have a nVidia 1080 and even loading up with DX11 had all the DLSS and FSR were both enabled. Because my card does not support either the textures were extremely blurry. Thankfully, the other users in the Icarus Discord were able to help sort that out and once I disabled them it looked amazing... during the day. Which leads into my next major issue and the reason for the negative review.

2) As soon as I stepped into a grove of trees or the sun went down the screen turned black. The only bit of light I had was a static moon reflecting off the nearby starter lake. I spent the next 3 hours trying to adjust settings (which require a restart to take effect) and no change. Tried to get help in their Discord and was told to rush through the game to get a sleeping bag. While that is an effective way to patch the situation if I were to play multiplayer that means everyone needs to have a sleeping bag and everyone has to agree (or be at their computer) to all sleep. I find this unacceptable especially since the lighting was perfect in the first 3 beta weekends. To compound this even using a torch I can only see about 1 - 2 meters in front of me. If I want to harvest anything that requires a pick or axe (assuming I could find an item that needs those tools in pitch black) I have to throw the torch down, harvest, find my torch, and continue. And if I was attacked it meant death. Given the horrific death penalties that persist between drops (better than anything else the devs provide) makes the game frustrating and less than enjoyable especially with friends which is the whole point a number of my friends picked up the game.

3) Death penalty. I could list out the issues I have with this, however, there are enough other negative and positive reviews that point out just how harsh this is compared to any other survival game that allows you to respawn.

In an effort to give the devs time to address some of the above issues (mainly the night being too dark to play) I've held off on reviewing the game. But, I don't foresee any change to these issues anytime soon as the devs and a number of hard core players see them as "challenges" and "working as intended". If the darkness issue and death penalty get reworked I'll be happy to reinstall, test it out, and update my review at that time.

I purchased this game on Oct 24, 2018. There has been no change to the main or "alpha" branch as the dev's call it. Over the years there have been a couple of tech demo betas the dev team is using to test features they are apparently working on. Another observation is there is news every 1 - 3 months of stuff they are working on with pictures/videos.

I'm not recommending this game because while they are pretty pictures and decent videos there has been no primary branch updates to the game in years. This is an Early Access game, even if you rewrite it from the ground up you should be releasing incremental builds at least quarterly for players to provide feedback. The dev's are developing in a bubble and when the do release 2+ years of code the amount of bugs will be overwhelming. And with that influx of bugs that'll delay new features and based on past performance probably another 2 years before the next feature set while they debug/fix everything.