Icarus: Styx Expansion Review Summary

Styx's map and tougher difficulty plus new creatures impress, but terrible mission design, unoriginal maps, and excessive backtracking drag it down.

Styx Map Highly Praised: Players consistently describe the Styx map as beautiful, brilliant, and their favorite in the game. It is seen as a major highlight of the DLC.

Increased Difficulty Appreciated: The raised difficulty level is well-received by players who enjoy a challenge, with many noting it turns up the intensity. It adds a new layer of engagement.

New Animals and Creatures: Reviewers welcome the addition of new animals and critters, noting they add a fresh feeling and new engagement to the game. These creatures are exclusive to the new content.

New Missions Are Fun: The new missions are frequently described as exciting, varied, and fun. Many players appreciate the fresh content they bring to the game.

Challenging and Rewarding Missions: Missions are noted for being challenging yet rewarding, with a satisfying escalation in difficulty. This appeals to players seeking a tough but fair experience.

Terrible mission design: Missions are criticized for being tedious, uninspired, and requiring excessive backtracking across the map. Many feel like artificial time-wasters with poor rewards, making them frustrating to complete.

Map lacks novelty: Many reviewers note that the Styx map is too similar to Olympus, with identical biomes, animals, and few new features. This makes the expansion feel like a rehash rather than a fresh experience.

Excessive running and backtracking: The map's layout and mission structure force players to spend a large portion of time simply running across the map, often with little reward. This leads to burnout and a sense of wasted time.

Poor value for money: Many players feel the expansion is not worth the price, offering too little new content and feeling like a rip-off. The lack of significant additions makes the purchase feel unjustified.

Repetitive and boring gameplay: The expansion offers little new gameplay, with repetitive grinding and a lack of interesting activities. Many find it boring and a waste of time.

New map and missions: The expansion adds a new map with missions, including more diverse and challenging objectives. This is frequently mentioned as the core content addition.

Excessive running and backtracking: Missions often require long distances and repeat traversal across the map. Players find this repetitive and time-consuming.

Survival and crafting mechanics: The game includes survival, taming, building, and crafting mechanics. Players note these as core features.

New creatures added: The expansion introduces new creatures such as monitor lizards, crocodiles, and birds. Some creatures like crocodiles are dangerous in water.

Map similar to Olympus: The new map is compared to the existing Olympus map and found to be similar in design. It shares the same three main biomes.

Frequent crashes and freezes: Players report frequent crashes, particularly when calling shuttles or doing orbital exchanges, as well as general freezes. Crashes tend to become more frequent over time, significantly disrupting gameplay.

Performance varies across systems: Experiences range from initially laggy but becoming fluid later, to running nice and smooth from the start. Some users also report no weird bugs, indicating inconsistent performance across different hardware.

Poor performance at higher settings: Lag and freezes occur when graphics settings are raised above medium. The game requires multi-core and multithreading support, plus high CPU base frequency and large cache to run well.

Graphics rendering issues: Some players encounter graphics problems where objects do not render fully. Additionally, rocks sometimes remain as blobs while being mined, indicating visual glitches.

Underwhelming performance after development: After five years of development, the game runs worse than some AAA titles, which players find disappointing. This suggests optimization issues that need addressing.

Strongly recommended game: Many players highly recommend the game without hesitation. They suggest giving it hours of your time.

Not for inexperienced players: The DLC is not recommended for inexperienced players. It is advised to level up characters first and not start with new characters on this map.

Wait for discount: Reviewers recommend waiting for a sale or a significant discount before purchasing. It might be worth it at 25% off or more.

Buy Prometheus or New Frontiers instead: Multiple players suggest getting the Prometheus or New Frontiers expansion instead of Styx. They believe those deliver better new content.

Good for Olympus fans: Players who enjoyed the Olympus map and want more missions, exploration, and challenge will likely enjoy this DLC. It is recommended for those who have completed a good chunk of Olympus missions.

Community fair range: $10.00 - $20.00.

Game completion: 100.0h.

Session length: 2.0h.

Player reports suggest the game often has a rough start, but can become worthwhile after early friction and onboarding, especially through Olympus as a tutorial and mission-based progression. However, bugs, boring missions, and linear biomes keep it from clicking for some players.

Friction: rough start; performance issues after long development; bugs that delete all progress; linear Earth-like biomes; boring missions; low tutorial completion.

Unlock drivers: Olympus functions as a massive tutorial introducing biomes and mechanics; Olympus serves as a warm-up or tutorial; Mission progression unlocks new areas of the map; Continued post-launch additions keep improving the game; Higher difficulty with improved biomes on Olympus.

Hardcore Survival Veteran: Solo hardcore drop-and-grind survival with demanding difficulty. Motivation: Mastering a tougher, grind-heavy survival challenge. Stance: buy.

Co-op Social Player: Group co-op sessions, including groups larger than four players. Motivation: Sharing the experience with friends. Stance: buy.

Creative Sandbox Explorer: Relaxed building, crafting, and exploration of new areas and creatures. Motivation: Creative expression and immersive exploration in an open world. Stance: buy.

Monetization: The reviewed feedback concerns a paid DLC or expansion for Icarus, with some users receiving it free. There is no evidence of in-game microtransactions, real-money gacha, loot boxes, pay-to-win, currency obfuscation, or aggressive FOMO shops. Complaints are about DLC content value and difficulty, which are not predatory monetization by the audit criteria. Traditional DLC alone cannot raise the score above 20.

Developers release weekly updates consistently: The developers have maintained a consistent schedule of weekly updates and bug fixes for over two years. This continuous support is frequently praised by reviewers.

Styx is an Icarus expansion: The Styx DLC is an additional content pack for the base game Icarus, adding a new map and missions. It uses the same textures as the base game but features a new layout.

Styx DLC was initially free: The Styx expansion was available for free to owners of the base game for a long period, until 2022. Many players received it for free, especially early adopters.

Styx map compared to Olympus: Reviewers frequently compare the Styx map to the base game's Olympus map, noting differences in flow, difficulty, and biome width. Some find Styx's biomes wider and better.

Styx adds new animals and content: The expansion introduces new creatures such as the Kea and Tusker, along with a boss called the Scorpion. It also adds new missions and a map with unique areas.