Icarus: New Frontiers Expansion Review Summary

The DLC adds worthwhile gear and crafting, improves story and missions, and offers great value, but poor performance, frustrating mission design, and recycled content and skins hold it back.

New gear and crafting options: The expansion introduces a variety of new tools, weapons, and armors, including specialized items like cold steel tools and miasmic gear. These additions are considered game-changers and add depth to crafting.

Story and missions improved: The DLC features a more engaging storyline with better narrative and voice acting compared to previous expansions. Missions are described as dynamic, challenging, and with a cohesive plot.

DLC offers excellent value: Many reviewers consider the DLC well worth its price due to the substantial content, including new maps, missions, and gear. It is frequently described as a must-have expansion that adds significant playtime.

Developers actively update and listen: The development team is praised for consistent weekly updates, responsiveness to community feedback, and continuous improvement of the game. This dedication has significantly enhanced the player experience over time.

New biomes expand exploration: Multiple reviews highlight the addition of new biomes such as swamp, volcanic, arctic, and plains, each with unique environments and challenges. These biomes are noted for their visual diversity and engaging exploration.

Poor Optimization and Performance: Many players report terrible optimization, constant stutters, FPS drops, and memory leaks, even on high-end systems. Performance issues are severe and widespread across the base game and DLC.

Mission Design Flawed: Missions are often poorly designed, involving excessive travel, grinding, and fetch tasks. Many are boring, repetitive, and lack meaningful objectives.

Recycled Content and Skins: The DLC is criticized for reusing existing assets with only cosmetic changes, such as re-skinned animals and items. Players feel it lacks originality and new content.

DLC Overpriced and Scam: The DLC is widely considered overpriced and a scam, with many feeling it is not worth the asking price. It is seen as a cash grab that adds little value.

Bugs and Game-Breaking Issues: Numerous bugs, broken missions, and game-breaking issues are reported, including progression loss, mission objectives not registering, and crashes. These severely impact playability.

New biomes in DLC: The DLC introduces multiple new biomes such as grass plains, swamps, and volcanic regions. These biomes expand the game's environments and offer new exploration opportunities.

Survival crafting gameplay: Players describe the game as a survival crafting experience, emphasizing core mechanics of survival and crafting. This is a fundamental aspect of the game's identity.

Animal taming feature: The game allows players to tame animals, adding a creature companion system. This feature is frequently mentioned as a key gameplay element.

Base building mechanics: Base building is a significant component, with various construction options and tiers. Players can develop and upgrade their bases extensively.

Open-world exploration: The game features open-world exploration across diverse biomes and locations. Players value the freedom to explore and discover new areas.

Poor Optimization Causes Frame Drops: Players report severe performance issues, including constant FPS drops and stuttering across various hardware configurations. Many describe the game as horribly optimized, with frame rates plummeting during gameplay.

Frequent Crashes Hamper Experience: Multiple reviews mention constant crashes occurring every 30-60 minutes, with some becoming more frequent over time and persisting on local machines. This makes the game unplayable for many.

High-End Hardware Still Struggles: Even on powerful setups like RTX 3080, 4080, and 3080Ti with i9 processors, players experience low FPS (30-40 at medium 1440p) and severe stuttering. DLSS 3 does not alleviate the issues.

DLC Performance Is Problematic: The DLC map exhibits worse performance than the base game, with heavy stuttering and frame drops despite fewer rendered objects. Some note it feels lighter but still runs poorly.

Optimization Lacking Versus AAA Standards: The game runs less well than some AAA titles, with optimization described as the worst in years. Many attribute the issues to poor optimization rather than PC specs.

DLC positively recommended by many: Six reviews explicitly praise the DLC as well worth playing, a must-have, or the best DLC so far. These positive recommendations are echoed across many other clusters.

Worth full price: Three reviews state the expansion is worth its full retail price and purchasing it supports the developers. This contrasts with clusters that consider it overpriced.

Great for base game fans: Two reviews strongly recommend the DLC for those who already love the base game. Numerous other clusters reinforce this sentiment of enjoying more of the same.

Recommended for survival fans: Two reviews suggest the DLC for players who enjoy survival games. Several other clusters also recommend it to survival and crafting enthusiasts.

Good for long-term grinders: One review recommends the DLC to anyone seeking a long-term experience that requires work and enjoyment from grinding. Another advises leveling to 50 before playing due to resource scarcity.

Community fair range: $20.00 - $30.00.

Endgame: 70.0h.

Reports are mixed: several players find Icarus fun immediately, especially as an open-world co-op survival game, while others bounce off early tedium such as a forced one-hour scan wait, travel-heavy missions, and empty/boring pacing. Patches have improved the core and early progression, but no specific unlocked state or timing for fun is consistently supported.

Friction: Forced one-hour scan wait with no activity in-between; Boring missions dominated by travel (95% moving to a location); Empty and boring early experience for some players; Early game uses identical resources until tier 3; Progression-deleting bugs and poor performance; Bad collision and repetitive copied map/missions.

Unlock drivers: Patches made the core more fun and early progression less tedious; Open world story progression made the game recommendable; Co-op performance improved since main game patches.

Co-op Survival Devotee: Co-op PvE survival with base-building, resource gathering, missions, and joining friends' worlds. Motivation: Shared open-world survival adventures with friends. Stance: buy.

Performance-Sensitive Optimizer: Open-world building and mission play while monitoring performance and using optimization patches. Motivation: Enjoying survival gameplay without technical frustration. Stance: no buy.

Time-and-Value-Conscious Survivalist: Mission and resource progression, but disengages from time-gated and repetitive loops. Motivation: Efficient, rewarding progression without excessive grind or monetization pressure. Stance: deep sale.

Monetization: The reviews focus on the paid New Frontiers/Prometheus DLC being overpriced, incomplete, or poor value, along with crashes and poor optimization. There is no direct evidence of in-game microtransactions, premium currency, loot boxes, gacha, battle passes, or pay-to-win mechanics. Because only traditional DLC price/value complaints and technical issues appear, the monetization score remains in the fair/non-MTX range.

Weekly updates and active developer support: Many reviewers highlight RocketWerkz's consistent weekly updates, continuous patching since launch, and strong responsiveness to community feedback. This ongoing support is frequently cited as a key positive factor.

DLC Prometheus adds new map and missions: The paid DLC introduces a new map called Prometheus with around 14 missions, new building pieces, armors, animals, and story content. It also adds an in-game red currency and miasmic pickaxes.

Prometheus compared unfavorably to Olympus: Several reviewers feel Prometheus is a downgrade compared to the Olympus map, which they found more fun and immersive. Olympus is often recommended as the better experience.

DLC pricing and value concerns: Reviewers express mixed feelings about the DLC's price, with some considering it steep or not worth the cost given the content amount. Comparisons to Styx's lower price and higher mission count are made.

Comparison to other survival games: Reviewers compare Icarus to games like RUST, ARK, and Styx, noting differences such as solo playability, lack of PvP and zombies, and overall enjoyment. Some prefer Icarus over Ark 2.