Co-op survival game Icarus is celebrating 153 consecutive weekly updates by giving you a flamethrower and a free weekend

An astronaut using a flamethrower to burn trees

(Image credit: RocketWerkz)

Over the three years since the release of co-op survival game Icarus, developer RocketWerkz has continually updated it. And by continually, I mean on a weekly basis: the newest update is the 153rd since December of 2021. That's a lotta patches!

As a celebration of everything that's been added to Icarus since launch, which includes new operations and missions, new weapons and items, new creatures and an entire fishing system, plus DLC that doubled the size of the map, Icarus is giving players yet another new toy: a flamethrower.

And to encourage more people to light up (the flamethrower, I mean) Rocketwerkz is also giving everyone a free weekend. Dive in and play the base game all weekend long on Steam, free of charge. If you want to stick around after, there's more good news: Icarus is 50% off for the next week, and there are discounts on the various editions and expansions, too.

If you've never played, the premise is that there was a big corporate gold rush to mine precious minerals on the planet Icarus, but in the midst of terraforming the world for habitation everything went wrong. Now the air is toxic, the weather is brutal, there's a mix of alien and animal life on the planet, and prospectors (like you and your friends) are making trips down from an orbiting space station to collect what resources you can.

I've been away from Icarus for a while myself, so I might dive back in this weekend, or possibly next—I see that cows are being added in the following update, and I'm more of a farming fan than a flamethrower enthusiast. Even if you're not into a punishing survival experience, I've found it can be a great chill out game: build a homestead, raise some weird alien creatures, farm, fish, and only take dangerous missions when you want to.

Just be careful if you invite some friends over: I've had plenty of fires accidentally burn my place down, and that was before they added flamethrowers. And since I asked Dean Hall for a picture of the flamethrower to use in this article and he sent me several, here are the rest:

A man in an astronaut outfit using a flamethrower — (Image credit: RocketWerkz)

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.