izigame.me

Ixion tries to be many things yet fails to do any of them properly.

City builder. At first the game feels great: you are building, expanding, experimenting with layouts. And then you run out of place. Congrats, now you realize that this is not a city builder game but a puzzle with limited space. And now you have two options: either try to optimize whatever you have and fail miserably, as you did not know what buildings you will need and what techs you will have, or grab a layout that someone already optimized to 99.9% efficiency. But whatever you choose - prepare your tea and wait for 3-4 hours to implement the layout, as deconstruction and construction of every building take a lot of time, and that’s IF you have spare space in your stockpiles to put back the resources you used in the building you are now demolishing. And you clearly don’t as most of the buildings require so many resources that you will need a completely empty stockpile just to deconstruct ONE building at a time. So to get more space for stockpiles you open the second sector and discover that it isn’t really a part of your city, but an entirely new one. Not only you have to grab another template to build properly from the start, you also have to set transportation between sectors. In most games you have 2 numbers: import if lower and export if higher. In this game you have one target value for a resource. What happens if this resource is both locally produced and consumed? You produced some - it is moved away, you consumed it - it is moved back, creating a 100% load for you transport drones so now the sector in question is basically not working as all of the transports are busy. I had to manually change transportation rules every time they broke, as there are no priorities here either, no way of sending resources directly - only this horrible menu that doesn’t work properly half of the time.
Survival. It has your food and mood, just like in Frospunk and similar games. Yet the funny thing is, none of the events like frospunk had work here - you either have a positive morale and you can ignore any and all demands from your population as even the harshest punishment does nothing, or you are in negative morale and event will maybe grant you are minute or two of life but will do nothing - those things simply don’t matter. And the events themselves aren’t even making sense: “Ok, we are in space with limited resources and we barely have food to feed us - but we demand you unfreeze 200 more people, half of whom will not even work”. The hell is that, are they suicidal?
Accidents. I am putting it as a separate point simply because of how annoying it was. In banished, a game that is really old now, when people got ill they left their work and had to be reassigned manually after their recovery. It was really annoying but the game is like 16 years old so this is understandable. What is not understandable - how does this game manage to make this system even worse? Because in this game people refuse to leave workplaces empty even if there are not enough people and overwork themselves. As a result - buildings explode, killing people in the process. So if you place a building and there are no extra workers in the sector to fully man it as soon as it is built - the building will explode the moment it comes online, giving you neither a warning nor time to react. One of your old buildings had an accident and people got ill - go disable it as now you don’t have enough manpower (and in the early game you do not have any spare workers at all) in the sector so something will explode soon. And while in frostpunk or banished people falling ill was a result of some problem you could solve (like cold, low food etc) here it is just a recurring event that can not be avoided - very, VERY irritating.
Exploration. There are two separate problems with it. First, the process of prospecting and mining resources is very, VERY simple (2 clicks to launch a drone), yet it requires A LOT of time: mining and transport speed are low, and you can’t even fit whatever you mined into your ship due to limited stockpiles. And the funny thing: at some point mining becomes completely useless, as somehow iron rich asteroids contain less iron in them than feces and industrial waste, as your recycling plants will simply produce more while using an infinite source. Second, the events are extremely dull narrative wise and have a huge difference between outcomes - something like “lose your science team or gain a lot of stuff”. If this game was some kind of roguelike with randomized events - it could be fine, but we are looking at a game where a single playthrough would take at least 20 hours and save/load function is easily available. So after the first location you will either savescum the best result from the events or just look at the outcomes in wiki.
Science progression. In this game your science income is mostly received from the events, and the amount of science points gained this way per chapter isn’t really that big. But for whatever reason there is research that lets you generate said science points out of thin air, even if at a snail's pace. So in a game where you don’t even know what research you may need, where resources are limited per chapter, will you hurry with the plot, abandon limited resources and potentially die because you didn’t have some tech or leave your game running on max speed for 3-4 hours to use up all of the resources while generating oh so precious science points? I can bet that most people who play that kind of game would wait. And let me tell you - waiting for said 3-4 hours kills the pacing completely and it is not fun in any way, shape or form. Oh, and the already not-so-impressive research tree has a few options that have no use whatsoever in game (like a fire station, because fires only appear if you are actively trying to create them), a few researches that are needed only if you are playing on max difficulty (nuclear power plant and its upgrades), and a few mandatory researches that are there just ro waste your time and delay your real science (the buildings that produce your resources).
Insane amount of busywork/absence of QOL features. You want to upgrade your housing? Demolish it and rebuild it, there is no upgrade button. You discovered resource asteroids in a dangerous area? Click each of them and disable mining manually or your miner ships will try going there and die. Did the danger pass? Click each of the asteroids and enable mining. Oh, and since your ships will only ever fly in a straight line - do the same manual enable/disable every time you move near the dangerous area or your ships will try to go through it. Have a full stockpile of one resource? Manually switch your ships to move somethings else, as there is no “fill the stockpile” option. You are placing a new building? Manually switch it off before it is finished to avoid accidents. Need to urgently transport resources - you guessed it, a dozen clicks in horrible menus.
Story. I almost want to skip this section as the devs clearly skipped the process of hiring someone competent at writing. It is not even SCIENCE fiction, it is some kind of fantasy BS that just added a bunch of pseudo scientific stuff and explained nothing - it just sucks.

As a summary: the game has no QOL, the progression is slow, pacing is horrible, the entire process is pretty dull. The visuals and sound are good, but that’s all the game has to offer.