Too Long; Didn't Play: Flight of the Icarus

Time In Flight: 51 minutes

Sponsored By: Wordsmythe

Icarus review

Have you ever Played FTL, after you lost all but one crew member, and found yourself in a pitched battle with pirates? Imagine being that lone crew member. That's Flight of the Icarus, only more so.

Daedalus review

I've been playing games for over thirty years at this point. Somehow, the industry still manages to surprise me.

Consider Flight of the Icarus. A title like that is ambitious, bringing to mind epic engineering projects and teenage hubris brought low. Can a game live up to that? Perhaps. Can this game live up to it?

No, but it does manage to do some interesting stuff anyway.

You play a nameless protagonist, whom I have named James Roberts. You are captain and lone crew member of the eponymous Icarus, a steampunk zeppelin that is transporting cargo across vast wastelands. Nothing is ever easy, of course, and your leaden airship is under constant assault by flocks of P-38 Lightnings. You must defend your cargo and keep the Icarus aloft long enough to make it to the next outpost. To accomplish this, you have to do a few things.

For example, it would probably be a good idea to thin out the attacking swarms, and your airship has six mounting points for weapons. You start with four gatling guns, which are useful, and a cannon, which is not. To defend your zeppelin, you must run to a gun emplacement that oversees the most enemy ships, and start blasting. I’m unclear as to whether leading the target helps. The gatling guns are short-range weapons, and the target reticule lights up red when you’ve scored a hit. Hit an attacking plane enough times and it explodes in a blinding flash.

However, like Han Solo was eager to remind us, don’t get cocky. Just because you’ve taken out some of the fighters doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. In the lower right corner of the screen there is a row of indicators that tell you how damaged various parts of your air ship are. If your engines get into the red, you stop moving. If your cargo hold gets into the red, you start losing cargo. If your rigging or zeppelin get into the red, you fall out of the sky and die. Therefore, it is advisable to take time out of your busy schedule of running between gun emplacements and shooting things to run between the damaged parts of your ship and beat them with a wrench until they’re not on fire anymore.

As you might imagine, the action gets frantic in a hurry. Things don’t stop being frantic until the counter in the lower left part of the screen reaches zero, indicating that you’ve reached your destination.

The game is broken up by route. After you clear the tutorial mission, you are presented with a map that shows you the various cities you can fly to. It’s not especially clear to me where the final destination is, but I’ve been assuming it’s in the section of the map marked with the giant skull and crossbones. Presumably, some routes are more difficult than others, but there is no way to tell from the map. You just have to pick your next destination, and then the game will tell you if the weather is impeding visibility (rain and dust storms make it harder to see enemy ships) or what kinds of enemies you’ll be facing.

Weather is one thing, but I wish they’d have given the player a heads-up about the enemy types. Between missions you’re allowed to change your loadout and move your gun emplacements, and it would be nice to know if there’s going to be an enemy zeppelin that can only be damaged by that heavy cannon that is, as I said, useless for anything else.

After each mission, if enough of your cargo survived, you’re entitled to pick one upgrade. Sometimes you can pick new weapons; sometimes you can upgrade your armor. The way the map is laid out, with its branching paths, I expect there’s a little FTL-style strategy at work, where you have to decide if you want to just bee-line for the exit or lollygag a bit to earn more upgrades. Every city you visit has a postcard with some storytelling scrawled on it, which is neat because it gives what you’re doing context without actually providing a major narrative. You’re just a guy making a delivery run through some hard territory, and the little vignettes in between give you some flavor. It’s subtle, and I appreciate the way it evokes the way videogame storytelling was back when I paid for my lives with quarters.

Fly on and up?

This is an enjoyable game if you’re in the right state of mind. It’s a rail-shooter that requires some brains. There are a lot of priorities to juggle in this game. When do I fight? When do I repair? What do I repair? How much do I repair it? What weapons do I bring, and what should I bring next time? Should I have bought an armor upgrade three missions ago?

I’ll give you a hint with that last one: The answer to whether you should buy armor is always yes.

So yes, I'll stick with it when I'm in the mood for some mindless shooting that isn't particularly mindless.

Is it the Bloodborne of lead zeppelins?

There is no way around it. Flight of the Icarus is a hard game. It is, however, vigorously just. If you bring the right weapons, and stay on your toes, you will make it to your next destination. If you bring the wrong weapons, or fail to keep up with the maintenance of your fragile cargo vessel, you will fall out of the sky in a ball of flaming hydrogen.

I’ll give this one 10 out of 10 blood phials. I don’t see how this game could be any more difficult, without being frustrating or any less difficult without being dull. It’s got that perfect blend of planning and execution that more games should aspire to.

Comments

Glad you liked it! My strategy is that, for codes that I wind up with (mostly through bundle purchases), I'll look through my Steam friends to see if it's on anyone's wishlist, and otherwise default to you.

The biggest problem, of course, is that you wind up making me wish I'd kept the games for myself.

Nice write-up!

I've never heard of this game.

Love the banner-pic choice.

Derp.

I'll learn that Quote isn't Edit one day.