izigame.me

TL;DR: Beautiful world building and visuals. Amazing soundtrack. Bones of a good survival city builder. Atmosphere pulls you in, but the core game play loop is tedious, unforgiving, and for me, just feels like the illusion of choice. You will be constantly restarting. No automation for micro management systems. Everything feels completely manual. The constant degradation of the ships hull just feels like a big timer forcing me to play the game perfectly a single way before the time runs out(your hull degrades). What little rewarding feeling you get from progressing, is squashed when you realize you just have to do it all again.
I didn't read the reviews before I bought. Got the game on sale. I definitely should have, because a lot of them say exactly what I found out by playing this game.
The game isn't bad, but my god, "unrelenting" really is the most apt descriptor for this game.
The world of Ixion is beautiful. It sounds amazing. The atmosphere of a meticulously crafted sci-fi world is all here.
As a huge sci-fi nerd, I loved the idea of Ixion. I caught big Expanse vibes just seeing the Tiqqun and it reminded me of The Nauvoo/The Behemoth/Medina Station from that series.
Some of the game play here is on the right track. I like the building options, and the way the tech tree works, and the progression system. It is really cool sending your mining and transport ships out from Tiqqun to gather desperately needed resources, and any fans of Anno will recognize the limited, grid based building system, where you have to carefully manage which productions and service buildings need to go where.
The part where this game falls apart, is the outright tedium. You will be restarting, A LOT. Once things start to go down hill, there is almost no saving it, and for me this was all on the normal difficulty. You really have to be picture perfect with how you setup your buildings, how you spend your resources, what research projects and investments should be focused on, and all the while your hull is constantly deteriorating and needs upkeep. Having to be picture perfect with all of these aspects, it feels like I'm very limited in how I can actually play. It doesn't feel like city builder after a certain point. It feels like micro-management hell. Don't get me wrong, I love micro management games, but this is beyond that. Even just gathering too many resources can be detrimental because you need to have storage buildings to hold all of these resources, and if you don't build enough storage, your docks get backed up, but you can't just go building a ton of storage, because that costs valuable alloys(the key building material) and takes up space. So the answer is another tedious micro management of how many resources you need. Taking just what you need. This isn't a bad idea, but executed poorly, as there is no way to do it easily or in a fun way. You have to first manually count how many resources you think you need for that immediate moment, then find them by sending probes out, then going to your mining and transport ships and manually checking off which resources they should gather, and then remembering to un-check them once you get the amount you need. You will forget to do this often as you're juggling 100 other things like riots, and science/exploration choices, and building. Repeat this every time. There is no way to automate it and create an equilibrium.
Every sub-system in this game is like this. Completely manual.
When you open up new areas of the station to build in, your resources and population need to be manually sent into the next area. So if you build a big food production layout in area 2, you need to find out how much food area 2 needs, then subtract that from how much food you want to manually send over to area 1! But oh no! In Area 1 I have my cryopods, which is how you grow your population. So as I get more population in Area 1, the food demand goes up, so now I have to go back to area 2 and re-calculate the food debacle. Fast forward 10 minutes. I've opened up area 3. I build a refining/production hub in this sector. I must now transfer population from area 1 to area 3(again, manually). This throws the food calculations out of whack and I need to do literally everything over again to account for it. Doing something like this for almost every subsystem/mechanic of the game is how you will spend 90% of your time in Ixion
It's just simply not fun for me.
I never use guides, and on my 4th attempt I found myself googling one. I followed along with it a bit, but just got bored because it felt like I was playing the game on autopilot. It also wasn't fun.
All the while, perhaps my biggest gripe is the hull integrity. Tiqqun's hull ticks down slowly and sometimes rapidly based on where in the story you are and which choices you make. It's just a timer. That's how you have to think about it. There are ways you can slow it down and other modifiers that can help you avoid degradation, but in the end, its a timer. I hate games that give you a time limit. This is different from challenging. Challenging makes you feel good when you accomplish something. What little accomplishment you achieve in Ixion, is quickly squashed when you realize each chapter is just going to be more of what you just slogged through, and there is a constant clock ticking down reminding you that if you don't play it perfectly, you're going to lose. This combined with the aforementioned tedium of the actual game play makes me feel like I'm just wasting my time.