Is ICARUS on PS5 Worth the Drop? | Full Review
Imagine being dropped onto a savage alien planet where the very air wants to kill you and the weather is even moodier than a 90s teen. Icarus is a session-based survival trip where you hunt, craft, and try not to get left behind when your ride home leaves orbit. It is a massive, high-stakes game of sticks and stones against high-tech nightmares, all set across beautiful but lethal landscapes.
Developer: RocketWerkz
Publisher: Grip Games / RocketWerkz
Genre: Survival / Action-Adventure
Release Date: March 26, 2026
Website: surviveicarus.com
UK Store: PlayStation Store Link
Specs & HUD |
Gameplay |
Performance |
Settings
ICARUS PS5 Review: Specs & HUD
- The HUD looks scary, but it does have everything you could need, including a 3-day weather report!
- Your exp bar shows at all times, exp earned pops up and more.
- There is an option to play the game, hiding the HUD and ui.
- Tutorial pop-ups can happen, and hover text shows on everything in the world and also in the menus.
- Earn exp for everything and anything from harvesting to killing animals, etc., you get an on-screen rolling log of earned exp.
- When you level up, you get points to unlock new blueprints to craft, and you have another tree to unlock buffs, abilities, and upgrades to attributes like health, etc.
- The text is very small and is a problem when you want missions up on screen; it’s ridiculous.
Gameplay Review & Mechanics Breakdown
Sticks and stones survival gameplay is the heart of it all. Anything you can harvest will highlight, and I like that interacting with them causes the tree or shrub or whatever to break down; it looks cool and is immediate. As you break down trees, they split into neat little logs, and rocks get smaller; it’s the small touches like this that add a lot to the game. Simple crafting can be done from the menu on the touchpad; more elaborate builds require blueprints and crafting tables. Crafting is done in real time, and you can set how many items to craft at one time.
Three ways to play the game and setup – open world (full persistent world with all enemy and weather types), missions (time-limited missions and complete contracts), and outposts (risk-free persistent world with less enemies, calm weather, and you earn less exp). Open world lets you select your drop zone, and the mode is very open-ended. Missions mode has you pick a location, and then you get presented with a massive mission tree that you pick and choose your way through, and each one lets you pick the difficulty, which affects stats, modifiers, and exp. You have easy, normal, and hard difficulties. Missions mode will dole out missions as said in the tree, but you also have a deadline to get it done by, or you fail.
Weather can change at any time, you get a card pop-up to warn you, and when you are exposed to the elements, you get warnings, shelter, and even going under trees can help lower any effects the weather can dish out. A stamina-based system for running, jumping, mining and fighting. Luckily, it regenerates over time automatically, but you can use food and drink to increase the speed. The game uses the full food and drink bars along with temperatures. As you go on alien planets, you have to manage your oxygen in your suit, and you do this by getting and consuming Oxidite, which is a common resource most of the time.
It is a very deep game and one full of possibilities, as you always have full control over what to do and where to go. Your dropship can hold materials and even send the materials back to your home base if needed. I like how you can kill an animal and then hoist them up onto your shoulders and carry them around. Animals and enemies of the world have names and levels, which you can see just by looking at them. Weight plays a big part; every material and resource has weight attached to it, and you have a limit. Go over that, and you move slower and spend a lot more stamina. One thing I do like is that you can choose food or drink and consume the whole stack, which cuts down on pressing the button loads. Insurance policies are something you can take out every session, and this will have the prospector returning insured goods back to you after a few days. Locations on a map all have unique modifiers for the biomes, so hotter places will have less water to find, and animal density is larger in forests than in the snow, for example. You can fish in the game, and you also have a full fishing record that shows the fish and their size of them. The bestiary will fill in as you encounter and take out animals and enemies. Map-wise, it will uncover itself as you play, and you can fill in points of interest, drop markers, etc. There is always something to do. You cannot pause the game even in offline mode, so you need to build safety. Combat is initially hack and slash and kind of sloppy, but as you progress, you get better gear, and it makes combat a lot better and more engaging, and against big animals, it’s more akin to a monster hunter. I found the onboarding to not be that great. Yes, it uses a lot of mechanics from other games, but new players will feel isolated and uninformed.
ICARUS PS5 Review: Performance & Fidelity
- Awesome graphics and beautiful 3D game worlds, and they do look incredible.
- You can play in third and first-person views.
- 38.55GB download size.
- Two base game locations – Olympus and Prometheus, with a third location called Styx, a chargeable DLC.
- The performance, even on performance mode, is not always stable, a lot of juddering, graphics and textures pop in, and slowdown.
- Had the game hard lock a lot of times and at random times.
- It is really impressive how much data and gameplay are in here, and it still maintains a high-end looking interface and story.
- It is a technically impressive game, both in looks and in depth. I really like the text and menu structure, whilst not always easy to use, it looks the part.
Settings, Customisation & Control Details
- Platinum trophy available.
- Display settings – motion blur slider, gamma correction, and performance mode set to either quality or performance.
- Audio sliders for – character voice, dialogue, SFX, music, ambient, and master volume.
- Controller settings – Invert axis and sensitivity sliders for cursor, aiming, movement, etc., toggle sprint, toggle aim, sprint cancel reload, crouch ledge safety, and toggle crouch.
- User interface settings – Crosshair style and colour, disable map selection warning, display temperature, skip start-up movies, workshop tool tip open animations, and blueprint tool tip open animations.
- General settings – Kill am toggle, player marker, show aim Crosshair, damage numbers, blood effects, multiplayer ghost building, tutorial prospect, show item highlights, deployable shelter warnings, disable deployable camera rotation, screen hit effects strength, screen shake, fibre, and stone respawn toggle.
- Decent character creator, male and female choices, hair colour and style, outfits, and face types, but it is very basic.
- You can set game lobby openness to friends, invite, or offline.
- Photo mode support and handy unstuck button.
- No designated accessibility options like Colourblind, dyslexic font, or text size, etc.
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ICARUS
Summary
THRILLS & HIGHLIGHTS
Awesome graphics and beautiful 3D game worlds, and they do look incredible. I like how you can kill an animal and then hoist them up onto your shoulders and carry them around. Anything you can harvest will highlight, and I like that interacting with them causes the tree or shrub or whatever to just break down; it looks cool and is immediate. As you break down trees, they split into neat little logs, and rocks get smaller; it’s the small touches like this that add a lot to the game. One thing I do like is that you can choose food or drink and consume the whole stack, which cuts down on pressing the button loads. It is a very deep game and one full of possibilities, as you always have full control over what to do and where to go.
KEY NEGATIVES
Had the game hard lock a lot of times and at random times. The performance, even in performance mode, is not always stable, with a lot of juddering, pop in, and slowdown. The text is very small and is a problem when you want missions up on screen; it’s ridiculous. No designated accessibility options like Colourblind, dyslexic font, or text size, etc. I found the onboarding to not be that great. Yes, it uses a lot of mechanics from other games, but new players will feel isolated and uninformed. Not being able to pause can be a real problem for some gamers. So much to take in, and it feels constant.
OVERALL VERDICT
It is a technically impressive game, both in looks and in depth. I really like the text and menu structure, although it is not always easy to use, it looks the part. It is really impressive how much data and gameplay are in here, and it still maintains a high-end looking interface and story. While the performance has its issues and the lack of a pause button or proper text sizing will sting, the loop of dropping in, harvesting, and building through those massive mission trees is addictive. It feels like a proper big-budget survival experience, even with the rough edges. If you can handle the jank and the tiny text, there is a massive alien world here waiting to be conquered.
