IXION is a Strategy City Builder set in Space where you are an Administrator for a space station called Tiqqun. In search for a new home for humanity that’s expedited tenfold after a botched take off decimated Earth, making your mission even more crucial than it was before.
Getting to work to find humanity’s next home won’t be so quick and easy as first you’re tasked to take care of the crew onboard the Tiqqun. The game does a decent job at teaching you the game mechanics with objectives. Albeit to fully know what exactly a thing or mechanic is about, you’re given a wall of text to read through, so there’s little in terms or active teaching. Missing out on reading some of those will be costly as some aspects are hidden away in there.
Jigsaw Puzzle
At the start, the place you have to build and gather resources is limited to a single sector within the Tiqqun and increases depending on the speed of your progress. So things can get cramped initially and it is crucial to decide and figure out how to build and what is needed to build.
Step By Step By Step By Step
Unlike most City Builders, in IXION to increase your population, you have to scour the solar system or other planets in search of folks to rescue from events or to probe areas and retrieve cryopods. To retrieve those pods, you have to send your cargo ship for retrieval. Once you get the cryo pods back to Tiqqun, you have to shift them to a storage room and then build a designated building to extract the person in it.
It’s Like Bureaucracy
As the sequence of even to get a single person through either way has multiple bits of action to take, it takes quite a bit of time. Delaying important actions such as this makes or breaks your game. Unlike other city builders where increasing population is as simple as having enough resources and building a house and waiting for a little bit, IXION has more steps for the same outcome, and this is for every bit of task in the game.
Finding the Right Piece Quickly
Due to this, IXION feels more like a puzzle game. As you have to carry out a step by step process and feel directed and not open for you to decide how you’d like to complete those objectives. Taking a little time at completing a task or making a small mistake has the ability to bite you back in the future, so expect to reload past saves or restart the game/chapter. As shortage of workers, resources and power are some of the aspects that you will find yourself balancing most of the time.
Looks Good, Sounds Good
Visually IXION looks really good from a certain distance, with everything looking polished. The cutscenes are a step higher in terms of workmanship, together with the top audio design, it simply exudes with quality that you’d want from a space opera type of game. Just remember to block out the preachy story bit in the cutscene after the prologue then and you’ll have a blast.
I Dislike You But I Appreciate You
The game introduces you to some interesting characters through the introduction that feel should be recurring every once in a while, as they are positioned to have some interesting tie-in into the lore.
Gap in-between
IXION is a tricky one to talk about. As a casual, at the start it feels welcoming and interesting in the manner the story and mechanics are spoon fed to you bit by bit. But after you cross a certain threshold, things will fall apart very quickly and you’ll feel like you’ve hit a wall that prevents progress.
Final Thoughts
But at the same time, IXION feels the kind that expects the players to be veterans of the genre and know what to prioritize or that if you aren’t, it expects you to restart after a failed run and do better by min-maxing what you’ve learned. If you’re either or that then what you’ll get is a game of certain quality that is challenging or punishing depending on how you look at it.
Purchase IXION on Steam to work onboard the Tiqqun today!
Hailing from a small Island. Huge football fan. Drinks too much tea.
Survival, Roguelikes, Turn-based or Indie games in general are my go to genres but I like to dabble in all kinds of genres. I tend to have a soft spot for Shmups and Hidden Object Games once in a while.
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