Name: Guns of Icarus
Item: Guns of Icarus
Author: Retro Replay

Guns of Icarus

Guns of Icarus starts with a strong, scrappy fantasy: you are alone on a cargo zeppelin, sprinting from deck guns to damaged engines while hostile aircraft turn a routine delivery into a panic. The switch between third-person movement around the ship and first-person gunnery gives its fights a pleasing hands-on feel. You are not simply aiming at enemies; you are deciding whether the next few seconds belong to shooting, repairing, or protecting the cargo that unlocks better equipment.

That tension is the game’s best idea, even if the moment-to-moment action can become repetitive as you hold out until each destination. Mission preparation, unlockable weapons, armor choices, survival, and multiplayer give the formula some range, but the modest 5.9 score fits a game whose ambition lands more cleanly than its sustained excitement. Give it a shot if the thought of solo airship triage in a steampunk shooter sounds more appealing than a polished campaign spectacle.

Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first few minutes put you in the right kind of trouble. You move around your zeppelin in third person, jump onto a fixed weapon, and fire in first person at incoming aircraft. Then something breaks. Suddenly, the fantasy is less about being an untouchable sky pirate and more about being an exhausted privateer trying to keep one battered vessel moving long enough to complete a delivery.

That split responsibility gives Guns of Icarus its personality. A damaged engine stops the zeppelin from moving forward, while wrecked cargo cuts into the upgrades you can earn after the mission. When enemies are pressing in, repairing damage means leaving a gun unattended; staying on the gun means accepting more danger elsewhere. It is a simple loop, but it creates sharp little decisions that make the ship feel like something you are actively holding together rather than merely standing on.

Before missions, you pick from unlocked jobs on a map and adjust weapons and armor. Cargo survival matters: finishing with at least 40% intact unlocks additional weapons, and 80% earns a bonus. That makes careful defense more satisfying than merely surviving by the skin of your teeth, and it gives failed deliveries a practical sting. The core objective remains holding out until you reach the destination, though, so repetition can set in once you have fully understood the rhythm.

Weather and different times of day can interfere with visibility, which suits a game built around watching the sky for threats. Multiplayer and survival mode are welcome alternatives to the story mode, especially if you want more excuses to revisit the ship-management firefights. Still, this is not a deep tactical simulator. Its best moments come from immediate priorities colliding: an enemy in your sights, a damaged engine behind you, and cargo that cannot take much more punishment.

Graphics

The view changes according to the job at hand: third person while you run across the zeppelin’s deck, then first person when you take control of a gun. Enemy airplanes, deck-mounted weapons, and damaged ship components are the important sights, while changing weather and time of day can make threats harder to spot through the air.

Story

You play a privateer hauling goods by zeppelin through a steampunk world, a premise that immediately gives every mission a useful reason to exist. The cargo is not background dressing; its condition affects what you earn, so the delivery work carries directly into your decisions during combat.

The story mode is structured around choosing missions and reaching destinations rather than around a detailed narrative described through specific characters or events. That makes the role-playing hook straightforward: you are a working airship captain trying to get valuable goods through dangerous skies, not a chosen hero saving the world.

For some, that light framing will be enough. The privateer setup keeps the shooting and repair work grounded in a clear goal, but the real drama comes from whether your zeppelin arrives with its engines running and enough cargo left to matter. If you need a heavily authored tale to carry an action game, this is unlikely to be the reason you stay.

Overall Experience

Guns of Icarus is at its most enjoyable when it forces you to abandon a comfortable firing position and race across the deck to stop the whole operation from falling apart. That constant switching between offense and maintenance is a genuinely good fit for the airship setting, and cargo-based rewards make a clean run feel meaningfully better than a bare success.

Its limits are just as easy to feel. Missions ask you to endure until a destination is reached, and the central routine does not have enough complexity to guarantee that every run stays tense. The choice of gear before departure and the extra modes help, but they do not fundamentally change the fact that you will spend much of the game cycling between guns, repairs, and incoming aircraft.

At 5.9, this is a middling but interesting shooter rather than a must-play. You should try it if the image of personally operating and repairing a cargo zeppelin under attack sounds irresistible, and you can tolerate a repetitive mission structure for the sake of that pressure. Anyone looking for a richly developed story or a shooter that constantly introduces new ideas will probably find the journey runs out of altitude too soon.