Guns of Icarus Online

I have a soft spot for games that punish lone wolves on a systems level, and Guns of Icarus Online punishes them harder than almost anything else in its genre. The whole design is built around a single inescapable fact: your ship is your collective health bar, and it goes down when the team falls apart. That is not a slogan, it is the mechanical reality of every match. The three roles, Pilot, Gunner, and Engineer, are completely interdependent. The Pilot needs to angle the ship so the Gunner's turrets have a firing line. The Gunner needs to pick the right ammunition type, whether greased rounds for rate of fire or heavy clips for accuracy, to target specific components like the enemy's balloon, hull, or engines. The Engineer has to sprint between repair points fast enough to keep everything alive under fire. Take one player who decides to ignore their role and the whole vessel starts coming apart. That tight interdependence is both the game's greatest strength and its most honest warning label. The ship-building layer adds genuine strategic depth. Starting from a selection of hull types, ranging from smaller, nimble craft suited to flanking to heavier, gun-heavy platforms built to absorb punishment, players mix and match components before heading into matches. The mode list covers Deathmatch, King of the Hill, Crazy King, Skyball, and VIP, and the maps vary in environmental conditions, from open sky to dense cloud cover, sandstorms, and mountain corridors, each of which genuinely changes positioning priorities. Matches scale up to 32 players across multiple ships, and when a coordinated crew gets the spacing and ammo loadouts right, the tactical back-and-forth can feel like a proper real-time strategy duel at close range. Crucially, cosmetics are the only purchasables and have zero gameplay impact, so experience earns you titles and cosmetic unlocks, not statistical advantages. Here is the part that will decide whether you should install this today: the playerbase is very small. SteamDB data puts concurrent live players in the low single digits for most hours, and that number has been in decline for years despite an all-time peak back in 2018. The developer, Muse Games, has been active with updates and community events, and a successor project called Stars of Icarus entered a playtest phase in late 2025, which suggests the franchise is not dead. But Guns of Icarus Online itself is a game you now play with a pre-formed group or not at all. The AI bots can backfill empty crew slots, which keeps the tutorial and casual lobbies functional, but the PvP modes need real people and real coordination. Organise a group of four friends, and the experience is surprisingly rewarding even by 2025 standards. Queue solo on a quiet Tuesday and you may find nothing. The tutorial locks matchmaking to novice settings until level eight, which is a sensible guardrail. The community, while small, has historically been patient with new players and willing to explain loadout choices and repair routes mid-session. Steam Workshop support means cosmetic content has kept coming in from the community even as the active population shrank. The Metacritic score of 64 reflects launch-era criticism about bugs, lag, and repetitive engineer gameplay that early reviewers found wearing thin quickly, and those criticisms are fair at a surface level. But the counterpoint is that the Steam user score sits far higher, driven by players who came in with friends and gave the depth a chance to show itself. Both numbers are telling you something true about two different ways to approach this game. If you have a dedicated group ready to crew up and commit to voice chat, this is one of the most distinctive team-combat games on PC, still without a direct equivalent. If you are expecting to queue solo into full lobbies on demand, this is not the game for you right now, and you should look at Guns of Icarus Alliance instead for the PvE fallback option.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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