Reviews

• Lucas567

  Dec 8, 2022

  Live out your dream of managing the Nauvoo.
• Emmet6500

  Dec 8, 2022

  released in a non broken state in 2022 that's a achievement
• Black7en

  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
• von_schtirlitz

  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

  Dec 8, 2022

  Slow waste of your time. Accidents need fixed pronto. 1. Even on optimal conditions, severe accidents can occur, and should... OCCASIONALLY. Not once every 2 cycles, and even then, shouldn't kill 3 people and injure 6. 2. The aforementioned accident, that is 100% RNG. Can trigger a downward spiral where your population is SLIGHTLY overworked, and therefore 100% more prone to have an accident. Bringing the ratio to close to one a cycle. Which will make them MORE overworked causing MORE accidents, causing more population overwork, causing more accidents, etc etc. 3. Your ability to get new population to remedy this, is far outpaced by the rate at which accidents take your population out of commission. Seriously, your population are effing morons. 4. When you realize, that accidents are a constant and frequent thing, no matter how carefully you play the game, and understand that you are set up for failure, it makes you not want to play it. (Remember, its RNG based and even in optimal conditions, accidents seem to happen VERY frequently) When did I discover this? About half an hour after my ability to refund. Save yourself the money, and wait for the developer to fix, if that's even something they desire to do. If its "Working as intended", I can think of far better ways to simulate the end of humanity than forcing the player to invest hours into a game before they realize they are unable to fix the problem.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  Full release upon launch? What year is this? 2016?
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  IXION feels similar to a Frostpunk in space with better story telling and production value. After playing the game for a while I can safely say that if you like Frostpunk and sci-fi then you're most likely going to like IXION. Despite the slightly better production value I would say IXION is far less polished than Frostpunk. Things always feel rough around the edges or like they're falling short of reaching their full potential. This goes for graphics, sound, game systems, balance, cinematics, etc. PROS: - Great storytelling and production value thus far. The game looks great and I appreciate all the voice acting - The prologue was engaging. It was a great introduction to the story, characters, and game mechanics. - It's not easy. You can definitely get yourself into a bad situation and have to start the chapter over. - I keep getting put into situations where I have to decide between 2 or 3 things that I really need because my resources are low. CONS: - Encountered a minor bug with roads and storage - Systems aren't quite as complex or in-depth as I would like them - Event rewards are static which I'm going to assume will reduce replay value - Pacing of story, science, resources, and some specific in-game events/things feels a bit off. Things just don't feel like they match up sometimes. - I strongly dislike being rushed out of chapters FIXED: - "My workers keep having way too many accidents": They made it much more reasonable in the most recent update.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  *Update 10/12/2022* Adding an update to this review after playing more of the game and progressing a bit further in the story side of things. My original opinions still stands for me personally, this review is more just me expressing my opinions and if you enjoy the game then that is great. Plenty of games people hate that I enjoy. The recent patch did improve the accident rate and they are now not constantly happening, so that is good. I will say one additional thing which is that this game isn't really hard, at least not to me. It's more frustrating than anything else. Frostpunk is definitely a harder game than Ixion, so my thoughts are more coming from my opinion on how the game functions and how things progress as opposed to getting stuck on something. This review for me is in a mixed state, I am 50/50 now with the game and that is down to a number of things that I personally am not a fan of: - First the idea that workers can't move freely between sectors. For me and for what I have seen in other Sci-Fi stories and their Stations, you usually want to separate living quarters and industry but that isn't possible here. - The "automation" of resources between sectors is still an annoyance and my original opinion still stands. Yes you can automate this but it shouldn't be necessary. - The Tech Tree is hard locked until you progress the story, on one hand I can see why this is done but also on another this really does limit your ability to expand and fulfil your ideas for the station. I have on final ring of the Tech Tree locked and Trains are still not available. - Finally it seems that the population gets to a point where they continuously decrease their trust in you but not at any fault of your own. Yeah I lost 2 Science Ships and their crew but I recovered that decrease in trust. The now massive decrease in trust is because of things the UN did in the past and other matters relating to DOLOS to which neither agency exist anymore. This can be recovered for sure but it just isn't fun. - Also permanent Hull damage is something that really should either be toned down or allow earlier on to fully repair it. What's the point of repairing something that never actually gets repaired? Seems pointless to me. I do honestly like what this game is trying to be and the story is really good, that I thoroughly enjoy but at this stage I think the game is starting to become something isn't my cup of tea now so I'll possibly revisit it again in the future. *Original Review* Writing this review as the game currently stands, it needs a lot of balancing. The core game and a lot of the mechanics are great. Overall the game is a lot of fun and the setting for the game is fantastic. The opening couple hours are a lot of fun. The game has you micro managing a lot which is enjoyable, with you managing your population and resources. But the amount of things just breaking, the punishing act of opening sectors and other balancing issues make the game feel like the game itself is doing absolutely everything to fight you instead of you fighting to keep the station running. Also why on earth can sectors not share resource autonomously? You can move resources from sector to another sector via a lot of button clicks but clearly the crew can move resources around and I feel this should just be something shared. It feels like instead of a single station we can have potentially 6 individually stations (sectors). Also why can't workers live in one sector and work in another? I know this is supposed to be challenging but also what Space Station doesn't work like this? I'd imagine this is possible much later via the tech tree but this is a problem you face early on quite quickly. There are clearly doors between the sectors but people can't move between them apparently. Like I said it feels like 6 individual small space stations instead of a single large space station that you are managing.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 9, 2022

  5/10 So-so, your mileage is going to vary depending on how you like your games basically. So, Ixion has their variant of a billionaire (Elon Musk style guy basically) and his company sending out a super station to begin the next stage of the space program for humanity - a requirement as the world is getting close to resource exhaustion. The tutorial is fairly simple, and within the tutorial, you'll get the big plot twist, things go wrong and now you're a station on survival mode. Your hull is shot to pieces, you can't repair it 100%, you need to basically industrialise on your station and set up food, water, factories and so on to stay alive. Here's the thing, some of these mechanics are okay. With each map you lose (permanently) some hitpoints, making travel tougher because apparently you need to put in a set amount of alloys DAILY or the hull falls apart as if you welded it together with knock off glue. Travelling stops repairs, fun times abound! Here's the other issues though; The game does not want you to take your time for some reason - and this is my biggest criticism of it tbh. As you go from sector to sector, you need time to figure out the resources, the chains, the research tree and so on. Sometimes, you'll be prompted to do something (open a new section of the station, colonise a planet, whatever) and it'll sucker-punch you with a malus/penalty that you now need to fix, either by re-tooling your industry or re-organising something on your station. But hey, this takes time, and time apparently makes your crew go 'write on the walls' insane, literally. You could be 100% hull, 100% food, and just need a bit of time to move your industry around, Bzzt! NO, -1 happiness penalty because you're taking too long sitting around in this new sector "where we don't belong!" Who designed this mechanic? It's stupid. It detracts massively from the game. It's rough enough juggling resources, trying to deal with the station's fairly weak distribution centre methods (as is tradition in these games), without having to be penalised because you're 'taking too long' - and you may very well not even be taking that long realistically, you've just moved from goal to goal and the game's going 'no, you're too slooow!' It's a frustrating, annoying mechanic that needs to go away as it's artificial difficulty really. The thing is, I kinda like the game, I think the visuals are great, the narrative is superb, the sci-fi elements and the way things are set up has huge potential, all they need to do is leave the game alone and let the player figure things out, tool things around, adjust as they go and they'd have a star on their hands. But instead, they just throw layers of suck and tedium at you - hence why I say this game is 50/50 depending on if you like "survival games" that just throw you artificial problems on top of any core issues. If you like that sort of thing, come on in, you're onto a winner here. If you don't, then this is a hard sell, because each map takes time to get through, and honestly, restarting is just going to drag it out far too long. This is basically one of those 'explore, find out, quit, reload, optimise' sort of games, and that's on the developer's for how they've designed it imo.
• WrenBonka

  Dec 9, 2022

  Steam really needs a maybe option, more like a 5/10 rn Although right now it's definitely a "wait for balance patches" kinda review As much as I love the concept of IXION, the current balancing makes the game impossibly slow and difficult. You'll often find yourself in a death spiral of events and debuffs that leads you to either a mutiny or your ship falling apart from deterioration. Not to mention, the current version of the crew's "moral" is just a bunch of +1's and -1's. In which the game will randomly give you -1's to make you fail. Being in a system too long will give you a -1, but leaving the previous system ALSO gives you a -1 penalty. Many times I had to go back an autosave because a random -1 causes my crew to mutiny and I had no time to prepare, having to jump back a save and build a monument to give me a +1 in advance. It's not exactly a fun system in it's current form. TLDR; Needs balancing but it really cool. Way too punishing in it's current form.