Icarus: First Cohort can be something of a bitter pill to swallow. The first time I accepted a contract and landed planetside to complete the tutorial, I ended up not realizing that the six-day timer was in fact continuously running, even when I wasn’t logged in.
In my initial playtime, I got my bearings and began to understand the systems and what the game was asking of me, I managed to level my character up to a respectable level 6. I also unlocked a couple of blueprints, mostly in a hodgepodge fashion, while trying to determine what I wanted out of my time with the game.
Then I took a couple of days off, only to return to find my character was lost forever since I failed to extract him before the timer reached zero.
Disheartened but not defeated, I started anew. After some grueling déjà vu, I ended up surpassing my previous achievements in a relatively small amount of time. And now, determined to be more mindful of the baked-in time limit of each mission, I made an effort to get in, get the job done, and get out alive. This approach slowed my character’s progression, but what was the point in leveling up my base-building blueprints if I needed to constantly watch the clock?
That’s when I hit brick wall numero dos while on a contract mission to exterminate a particularly rambunctious wolf that was mucking things up for the rest of the local wildlife. You see, in my haste to bang out these objectives, I found myself woefully under-leveled to beat this friggin’ boss wolf. Now, part of my trouble was that whenever I engaged with this wolf, it spawned other wolves, which made the whole ordeal far more tedious and aggravating for me as a solo player.
Add to this the occasional bear spawn, and the fact that this boss wolf seemed to have enough hit points to last far beyond my mission time limit if I continued to use basic stone arrows and wooden spears in my approach to kill it… needless to say, I had to make a change to my strategy. So I decided to farm for levels and really dive into the skills and blueprint upgrades to see if I could get the upper hand. And this is when Icarus really started to open up to me and more acutely speak my language.
For one thing, storms in Icarus can be a nuisance at best and life-threatening at worst. In order to survive these random, somewhat frequent events, you need shelter. And although you can rely on the thatch or base level of housing material, that stuff will crumble in even the slightest of breeze. And that’s to say nothing of the burning heap that’s left over should any part get struck by lightning. So upkeep can be a real pain in the butt cheeks. Naturally, I decided that I must upgrade to wood, at the very least.
While I was at it, I should probably also upgrade my weaponry and armor, both of which required acquiring most of the blueprints in tier 1, as well as some of the blueprints in tier 2. And in order to reach tier 2, I needed to level my character up to level 10, which was actually rather easy since I was already hovering around level 8 and learned how to farm animals rather successfully (kill one, take everything other than its meat, wait for the wolves, repeat).
And the more I unlocked, the more options I had for decorating my growing estate. Although at first my base was mostly a creature of function over form, I began to really enjoy watching it take shape into something a bit more ostentatious. Part of this comes down to how appealing I find most of the items in the game. The machine that allows you to better yield oxygen instead of consuming the raw oxite mineral directly resembles a sort of hot air balloon contraption, and the machine that allows you to then fill your oxygen canteen for use on the go looks like some sort of an alien vending machine.
I was pretty much hooked at this point, and I found that I was now spending most of my time gathering resources to level up my character to unlock more blueprints, and to also stockpile the ingredients needed to then craft said blueprint items. I had pretty much forgotten about that old boss wolf — so much so that I had pretty much eaten all of my time and bitterly had to bid a fond adieu to my burgeoning base, along with any hopes at vanquishing the beast that brought me planetside in the first place. So with a big L, I boarded my escape pod and left my palatial estate to succumb to the forces of nature and time.
The only problem is that I find myself caring very little about the already rather meaningless busywork of each mission’s fundamental objective; I’m far more interested in the base-building mechanic. I tried to play the offline survival mode, but the size of the map was paltry compared to those of the three missions I had embarked on previously — it felt like a weak olive branch for base-building enthusiasts. So back to the story missions I went, with little intention to actually accomplish their objectives.
Luckily, I discovered a mission that grants 30 days and has no objective other than to simply eff around, which felt like the game meeting me halfway. And so I have been effing around, exploring caves for ore to help build more elaborate and complex items, while also unlocking superfluous, decorative items that really bring the place together (if I do say so myself).
Although I do commend Rocketwerkz for trying to implement a meaningful mission structure in an open world-ish sandbox crafting survival sim, the real fun, for my money, is in the robust base building, which also happens to work incredibly well.
