I've been playing a lot of
Icarus lately.
Pure PvE. You and your buddies against nature basically. Wild animals (wolves, bears, and murder-emus), fires (often self-inflicted) and massive storms form the main antagonists.
Farming and Cozy Cottage construction are both possible.
The hunting/gathering aspect is really well done. You need to use your ears to listen carefully for sounds of prey (or predators attracted by your kills). You can process your harvest in the field or bring it back to the base (carrying it on your shoulders) to process for more materials.
The storms ranges from irritating rain showers to massive storms that can kill you via exposure and damage your constructions. Again, excellent sound design: When you're in your cabin you can hear the creaking of timbers and rain on the roof. Opening a door or window you can hear the fierce gale in full force.
As for farming you have the usual tradeoffs of managing light/water/fertilizer (if desired) but also ensuring crops can survive storms. There's an animal-ranching aspect as well where you can train mounts and companions (
Ark style).
There are 3 main modes:
- Missions: This was the only mode for the game at launch. These are short-ish scripted/ hand-crafted missions where you're dropped on the planet with mostly nothing and given a set of objectives to do. These reward XP (for bluprint and skill unlocks) at a high rate and provide some structure to your goals. They are timed but most of them have timers in range of like 15 real-world day of play time (so you would have to play for hundreds of hours on that mission to run out). When you finish the mission you bring no equipment back but keep your skills, blueprints and XP. This means that each new mission you get to move through the Early Tech stage again, albeit much quicker each time. I really like it but I guess some people would get annoyed. Lucky for them, there is also....
- Open World Mode: This is the usual unguided playstyle. XP gained is much slower but there's no end-state, so this is a good place to work on a "permanent" base. Folks who jump in here
first may get a bit frustrated if they haven't scooped up some unlocks from playing a few Missions first. Later you can craft a "mission board" station that will give you short-term objectives to complete which rewards the in-game currency needed to craft some high-tech items and have them dropped from orbit for you.
- Outpost: This is the Homestead and Chill mode. No enemies, no storms, infinitely respawning ore nodes. A much smaller area to roam but good for the Builders out there. XP is
extremely low so you really want to get a good base of unlocked blueprints first before spending a lot of time here. Note that there are a number of Outpost-Specific DLCs that provide new areas to build your outposts in. Those DLCs have no bearing on the rest of the game but if Outpost is your thing, there are some options there.
I must point out that it
is a Dean Hall/Rocketwerkz game but it has constant updates since
2017 edit: correction 2021. 2017 was Stationeers
, their other co-op survival game.
There's a boatload of DLC available but only the
Styx and
New Frontiers (aka
Prospector Edition) add much of import. Recommend to just get the base game and see how you get on with that first.
