評論

• Alexander

  Aug 9, 2023

  The intro voiceover gave me chills. And the game ate. Awesome narrative.
• McSniffles

  Aug 7, 2023

  Really great game from the Mechanicus devs. There honestly aren't that many story-driven colony managers that have a beginning, middle, and end. The mechanics are solid; if you like colony management it'll be right up your ally, the only thing they dont really emphasize is that you REALLY don't wanna waste space to keep things easy. I played about 10 hours then just restarted because i knew I could do much better. The 2nd run though to be honest was pretty easy. I might in the future try the harder difficulty and see how it goes, but the base game on "normal" is pretty easy to get through. There's SO MANY resources in every sector to keep everything going; No chance of running out of ice, iron, or or carbon. Once you have your recycling set up to produce stuff as well it gets even easier to meet demands. The only thing they don't really inform you is that by the time you get to the final chapter, there's a time limit in it, but its not really displayed. You kind of just have to infer it and you can lose quite a bit of hours if you're not ready for it. It seems like an upcoming update is reworking how chapter 5 works though so I'm excited to see where it leads because that was the only downside here. TL:DR: Great colony manager with interesting story and fun flavor text (via science vessel exploration).
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  released in a non broken state in 2022 that's a achievement
• gamedeal user

  Dec 11, 2022

  Game plays like frostpunk and cliff empire had a baby, attached a FTL drive and shot it into space. Is it tedious? At times for sure, the word I'd use is daunting. Is it hard? Sure. Will you have to learn through mistakes and death spirals and start again? Absolutely. Will you beat in your first attempt? Uhh, probably not. (its good to set expectations early) The balance may feel iffy at first until you realise that it's just not a city simulator - it's a strategy/logistics game that has you managing several spinning plates simultaneously. Ixion is closer to a puzzle game in a city building disguise than it is to City Skylines or Tropico. There is no putting the speed on max and walking away to make a coffee; neglect in any area will start a doom spiral that may take you an hour of play time to realize has already locked in your fate. The most limited resource isn't food, people, alloys or electronics, it's building space. Pressure ramps up due to a limited population that needs to be supported in the final bastion of human life - that doesn't sound like a walk in the park, and well, it's not. You both have to expand and continually reoptimize the space you consumed already. Buildings have a limited life span, few if any will stay with you to the end. Don't get attached to patterns or symmetry, you've been warned. Game takes place over the span of a decade, so you can't just breed a population to replace all the people that died from mismanagement and neglect. The population you get access to is just as much as resource to be as carefully managed as the rocks and ice that you mine. Time is not on your side, if you're not pausing to make use of each in game day that goes past, you're gonna fail. If you're not keen to ship people off to another area so you can tear it down and rebuild, you're in for a bad time. Too little building materials and food = doom Too much building materials and food = doom Too many houses = doom via wasting precious space Too few houses = doom via violent uprising The game has no difficulty setting - I like this. You're playing a finely tuned experience that needs as much real time pausing, planning as you spend on max speed waiting for your plans to unfold. When you've bought this amazing game and are struggling, before you come to complain and leave a negative review I have a few tips for you. -Build fewer roads, roads are wasted building space. As I mentioned previously, functionality > prettiness. -Plan your research ahead, research points are a precious resource and you won't be unlocking many upgrades till later on. -Waste is an important resource, make it work for you - stop ejecting it into space (as soon as you can). -Too many cargo ships will doom you, don't plan to mine out a sector. Cargo ships don't have to be active all the time, in fact it is often detrimental if they are. -Be wary of storage, until very late game, having 300+ of whatever resource sitting around is using a lot of building area to sit there and be unproductive. -Specialize your districts, the game only nudges you in that direction rather than grabbing you by the short and curlys and screaming it into your face. You will fail. Buckle up, learn from your mistakes, and throw yourself at it again. This is an excellent game that will test your intelligence and problem solving skills - after the prologue/tutorial, the game will not hold your hand. This game does not deserve the mixed reviews from people upset that they didn't get a trophy for just participating. This is not a pushover game one can blaze through at max speed without pausing to experience the story. Good Luck future Administrators.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 20, 2023

  Yes, this game is hard. There are a lot of city builder type games where you can just turn your brain off, but this is not one of them. You may even have to save scum or restart from an earlier chapter. But once you figure out how the game works and how to win... man, it's rewarding. I give it a thumbs up. Give it a shot if you're a fan of city builder type games and you're okay with a challenge.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 12, 2022

  Engagingly difficult, then boring, then just frustrating.

  The most middle thumbs I have ever given a game. I generally enjoyed my time with it and think it's worth playing, but there are so many ridiculously frustrating parts about the core gameplay that get worse and worse the longer you keep playing. First, there's this narrative that the game is stupidly difficult. I disagree. I think most of the negative reviews touting this haven't gone past the second tier of research, but to be fair, there's very little indication of which techs are good and which techs aren't. It's unforgiving towards mistakes, but it's easy to avoid those mistakes. Accidents are only lethal to your workers if you overworked them - if it was optimal, they will only ever take injuries. And once you realize that the stability penalty from staying in a system too long only happens once and the only thing forcing you to progress is lack of iron, you can easily turtle up in the first chapter and get an incredibly stable economy and core techs. However, that leads to the first big issue. The tech tree is wildly unbalanced, and the game becomes so easy it's boring after you unlock a few of the important ones. For instance, let's look at the first tech lab upgrade. It makes it produce a 3 research points every 5 cycles. For reference, before the upgrade, it only produced 1 point every 30 cycles. It took so long that many players rightfully believed that you only got research from planets. This should have a tutorial yelling this information at you with how crucial it is. For god's sake, it's 18x more efficient than it was before. The stability complaints are similarly easily solved with a DLS center (which should also have a tutorial yelling at you about its importance), which once put down, can instantly give you +2 stability with more to come down the line. Upgrading your houses to the next tier will also give you a +1 stability. You can do this by the end of the first chapter, and I went into chapter 2 with +2 stability and never had stability problems from then on. And it only snowballs from there. The Waste Treatment Center, and waste in general, is the most unbalanced thing in the game. For the low low price of one stability per sector (by the midgame, you can easily have +5 stability on all sectors), you have now turned every resource into a renewable one save for Helium, which is irrelevant because you can turn off all your industry to save power and not bother with nuclear power plants. Even in the late, late game, three waste treatment centers can easily produce enough alloy to keep your hull from breaking down. There is no challenge in this game that can't be beaten by waiting. It's boring. At worst, you'll have to go back to a previous chapter to stock up on resources to tackle some time limited challenges in the endgame. Speaking of endgame, what makes it frustrating? Well, a lot of challenges in the endgame are entirely new ones that the game will throw at you out of nowhere that will necessitate you redesigning some of your sectors to meet these new challenges. It may suddenly demand a ton of a resource that hasn't been relevant for a full chapter or demand a couple thousand of a resource that you previously only ever needed 200 of. Which brings me to my absolute biggest complaint. Relocating your buildings is the most infuriating experience I've ever had in any city builder. There is no relocate button, so you have to deconstruct your buildings to move them. Problem is, every resource you spent on them needs to be taken to a stockpile before they're actually deconstructed. So if your alloy stockpiles are all full and you don't have space for a new stockpile, guess what? You'll need to somehow clear up alloy storage somewhere before the building will actually go away. And good luck if you're trying to relocate an alloy stockpile - all that alloy and maybe waste needs to go somewhere before you can actually move the damn thing. This can lead to one deconstruction project taking ten times longer than it has any right to be. You want to upgrade one of your buildings to a better version that takes more space? You're screwed. In the endgame, when time is actually critical and you need to shift things around fast, it is the single most infuriating experience I've ever had. This can all be solved with a simple option to discard all those resources in exchange for an instant deconstruct. Yes, it might lead to people softlocking themselves. But I say it's worth it. This change would bump this up a point on a ten point scale for me. It was that bad. Another complaint I have that's a bit more minor is resource management. Moving things between sectors is incredibly clunky. You need to set a minimum on the area you want to send it from and a large maximum on its destination. Doing this repeatedly is exhausting, and I'd far prefer something like Anno where you can just tell them to send resources to a certain sector so long as you're above a certain minimum. As it is now, it takes five clicks to do something that really feels like should only take one.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  IXION is an excellent simulation of trying to manage a """self sufficient""" space station filled with electrical sockets, populated by suicidal children armed with forks, from trying to electrocute themselves. You have been appointed the captain of an unfinished space washing machine with a prototype hyperdrive that is constantly falling apart. Literally, if you do not spend hundreds of tons of alloys weekly to upkeep your ship, you will explode and lose. Coincidentally, you must also use the same resources to build repair facilities and also grow and expand your ship. This basically involves managing a medium sized fleet of haulers and miners to even attempt to keep up with raw resource demand, which take up a lot of space and resources back at home. After blowing up the earth with rotor wash, your crew decides that now is the time to start unionizing and forcing you to adopt very lax labor standards. They become extremely upset when having to work more than the contract they signed, and have also found a large stockpile of explosives and molotovs in the middle of your ship. At the slightest inconvenience, they will start blowing up random buildings in their sector and then complain about it. However, blowing up random buildings also really damages the washing machine, which requires alloys to fix. Alloys, which are made in the furnace that they just blew up 2 days ago. Also, they are now even more sad because the washing machine is falling apart from the explosion they caused and you cant fix it :( This is probably the best time for a labor strike in all of your other critical infrastructure, and probably cause some more explosions along the way. Oh, and best part about these very numerous explosions, is that you get to be part of them! Every 3-5 seconds, you need to find which sector something blew up in, and click the green button! Every single time! Otherwise you will hemorrhage ship health and die within days. You can, however, invest a little time into tidying up the situation, and spend a little time scooping up extra resources to fix holes and make people happier. Wait, you get a permanent mood debuff from staying in the same system and trying to solve problems? Awesome, I guess I have to jump to the next system and get even more permanent debuffs to cripple my already dying ship. Amazing difficulty options I can tweak on the fly as I'm learning the game. Jumping into the next system, the fleet of suicidal support ships so essential to my survival decide that their only possible routes are through the spicy thunderstorms that instantly kill them. You can research technologies to give them a *slightly* better chance at survival, but the limited amount of research you can acquire lie through those spicy thunderstorms. I gave up at this point because seeing my ship hull health meter go triple digits into the red from having ISIS cells onboard my ship and losing essential ships who decide that they need to electrocute themselves in the thunderstorm to fix those problems is not fun. Beautiful game, very enthralling story, fun city builder gameplay, horrible balance
• gamedeal user

  Feb 21, 2023

  TLDR: Playing this game is like having a conversation with a petty and passive-aggressive person. Play Frostpunk instead. I really wanted to like this game. I did. It looks gorgeous and has great sound/music. But it's hampered by bad design decisions. I've played hours and hours on all sorts of base builders, from Rimworld to Frostpunk and even Dwarf Fortress. Terrible UI. Game likes to act like a roguelike, but everything takes so long that you'll lose 20+ hours on a single run if you mess up. Has a tetris-like city building but moving or rearranging is a nightmare. Space is extremely limited, but it's impossible to re-optimize. And it's not that it's costly, it's just annoying as hell. So much clicking and re-jiggering just to move two buildings. For a logistics game, the logistics suck. Transfer between sectors is clunky and overly-manual. Population management is micro-managey and the game does not do a good job of expressing important information to you. For instance: you can see how many homeless you have, but not how much extra housing you have. So if you want to demolish some houses after moving population (because space is so limited) there's no clear way to tell. You have to count up your housing blocks manually. Another example: overworking your population leads to accidents (it's not a risk as the game says, you'll immediately get them and they'll come quick. You basically can't overwork I'm not even sure why it's there.). So you'd think the proportion of active to free workers would be readily displayed? No, you have to hover over the "overwork" indicator to see it. So you'll be mousing over that constantly to double check before building something. if something is so important (you'll get accidents and deaths IMMEDIATELY if you overwork them) why not have it easily referenced? Why hide it in a tooltip inside a different display? The UI does nothing to warn you if a building you're building will take you over your power limit (causing a blackout). Again, why not have a small red indicator or something to warn you. It's like it wants to 'gotcha' you. Over and over the game designers seem to delight in building systems that work against you, not in a strategically challenging way, but in a petty and un-fun way. The events are punishing and the outcomes fixed, with no way to intuit what the right choice may be (and believe me, the outcomes can be wildly good or bad on the same event). So I ended up looking them up because it just wasn't fun. Overall seems like it would appeal to the kind of person who likes micromanaging every aspect of their supply chain, and wasting a lot of time restarting. It's like the opposite of Factorio. You have to manage everything and it's not fun. I'll contrast it to Frostpunk, a game in a similar vein. Frostpunk is punishing and brutal, but I never felt like it was sucker punching me. It gave me the info I needed to succeed, and then threw challenges at me that I had to solve tactically and strategically. IXION feels like the designers saw Frostpunk but, to be honest, just weren't as smart or talented. So they added a bunch of cheap shots to up the difficulty.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  AS LONG AS WE’RE LIVING AND BREATHING, THERE’S MORE WE CAN DO. WE JUST HAVE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH. ~ JAMES HOLDEN Remember the Cant
• gamedeal user

  Dec 10, 2022

  Ixion is a great game with severe balancing issues, and odd design choices. PROS: - First game of this type I've played with an actually interesting storyline - Cool mechanics, and excellent use of the limited space you have as something to consider when building. - Fun to play for the first 3 or 4 hours until you run into the balancing issues. - Great graphics, music and performance. - Excellent atmosphere; it gives a cool space opera vibe, combined with a Frostpunk style desperation for survival feel. - Relatively bug free, from a functionality standpoint. CONS - Excessively punishing. I understand I need to learn the game and adapt to its challenges, but this is straight up annoying. I restarted the game 4 times with the knowledge accumulated in previous tries, only to get slightly better results...until the next jump, which makes things even worse. - Continuous hull damage which gets worse after each jump is just a resource sink which forces you to build duplicate structures in all your sectors, in order not to loose the game. - Excessively punishing "accidents" system. I don't mean the frequency, I get that's a bug, I mean you STRUGGLE to get a positive balance to your ship's repair rate, some moron trips at work and BAM, -26 damage to the hull. Seriously? I worked for 15 cycles to repair that damage! - Sector opening is a huge resource sink, and it seems like it's meant to throw your entire fragile economy out of balance. You're forced to open new sectors, and when that happens, you need to compensate FAST so your citizens don't revolt and you run out of resources. If you were already having issues with both, you are screwed. - Poorly made resource management system. It's incredibly frustrating to transfer resources from one sector to another with no reliable way to automate it. The interface doesn't help either. Due to this I am forced to duplicate many structures in each sector so I don't have to deal with moving stuff around. Example: my mining ship brings Iron in sector 2, but my warehouses assigned to iron are in sector 1 because that's where the steel mill is. You'd think the game would send the iron where there's room. It doesn't, so I need to build additional structures which eat up resources, power and people to get around it. The same goes for industry, which only links to warehouses in the same sector, not others. - Cumulative systems meant to punish you for: waiting too long in a sector / moving your mothership too much / people get home sick / people are upset there's too many cryo pods in storage because I have no way to feed them or give them housing / there's SPACE WEATHER which messes up your ships / side quests which fail because people are, again, home sick / you have too many resources in the space dock, etc. Individually these are interesting systems. When working together, they're too much. - You cannot have people live in a sector and work in another. The option to have people who awaken out of cryo automatically move to a sector where you know there's a workforce deficit doesn't work. I have to do it by hand. - There's more, but the stuff above is the most annoying. I AM SURE there is a "proper" way to build, research and expand which allows you to mitigate problems before they happen, and leave a system in a good enough shape to help you hold on until you get your shit together in the next one. I'm sure it can be done. But, if there's just one correct way to play the game, and I can't make any mistakes, because they all add up...well, that's not fun. Last point. I really like this game. If this stuff gets tweaked, I will for sure alter my review.