The frosty new Icarus trailer dares you to pick a fight with a polar bear

We learned more about Icarus this week, as the survival game from DayZ creator Dean Hall and New Zealand developer RocketWerkz announced a release date for its first chapter and confirmed it is no longer free to play.

The trailer begins in the space station orbiting the planet Icarus, with astronauts rocketing down to the surface, crafting a base, and then seeing it become partially destroyed by a nasty storm and a fire. Then the action moves to the freezing alpine biome to build a sturdier base out of stone instead of wood.

I've played Icarus twice with Dean Hall. The first time we explored the forest biome (our base didn't burn down, though Hall himself caught on fire). In my more recent session, Hall escorted me to the alpine biome, which is far more inhospitable than the forested areas where I've spent most my time in the survival game.

The alpine zone is fairly barren of trees to use for building, and it's so cold fur armor needs to be worn and chunks of ice need to be collected and melted in a fire just to get ahold of some drinking water. It's also home to polar bears and wolves, which I got to observe first fighting each other, then charging directly at me, just as it's shown in the trailer. It's not surprising that Hall (who has actually had real-life survival training) says the alpine biome is his favorite area in the game, but after that polar bear loped steadily toward me while I pelted it with panicky arrows, I was definitely ready to head back to the safer forest area. I did actually survive the attack, but only just barely.

And if polar bears aren't big enough for you, RocketWerkz sent over a few screenshots of a creature not shown in the trailer. Hey, it's a damn mammoth:

Well, if bows and arrows can just barely slow down a rampaging polar bear, what will I need to take out a mammoth? Hopefully there's a Gatling gun somewhere in the tech tree. That and a very large barbeque. The first chapter of Icarus, called First Cohort, is due out August 11.

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.