Survival game Icarus recently released Styx, a new DLC pack free to players. It contains a hefty new chunk of map measuring 8x8km, effectively doubling the size of the survival game's playable area, and adding new creatures to battle and new missions to complete.
The Styx map contains biomes you'll be familiar with if you've played Icarus already: dense forests, parched, arid deserts, and icy arctic zones. But even if the conditions are familiar that doesn't mean you won't meet some new inhabitants. Several creatures have been added to Icarus along with Styx, like fierce Komodo dragons, deadly crocodiles, and the beautiful kea parrot.
The colorful bird might seem harmless, especially when compared to those vicious reptiles, but they're hungry and won't hesitate to steal food from your supply cache. Yes, even the birds on Icarus want to make trouble for you. And those hideous cave worms you may have encountered—turns out, those were just babies. They grow bigger now and can even leave the caves altogether, so keep a watchful eye out.
If you haven't played Icarus before, or if it's been a while since you jumped in for a mission, you might be interested to know of some other recent changes. The real-world timer has been removed from the game completely—now, your mission timer only runs while you (or your friends) are actually in-game, so you'll never login again to see that you've failed a mission while you were offline. There are new difficulty settings, both for players who wanted the game to be harder and for those who found it a little too tough. A separate talent tree was also added for solo players who found it difficult to survive without fellow astronauts watching their backs.
The Styx DLC has been added free as a "thank you" to fans of the game who stuck around through what RocketWerkz found Dean Hall describes as a "rocky launch." The team is now working on New Frontiers, a paid expansion for Icarus, which is planned for next year and will feature new biomes and alien lifeforms.
