Ixion has a stellar premise. You are the administrator of a spaceship for humans to live in and find a new home since Earth is far gone from saving.
But this maiden voyage to test out a corporation’s new spaceship have went, really, really wrong and now it seems that your ship, the Tiqqun (pronounced like tycoon), is the only thing standing in this desolate space.
This sets off a voyage into the unknown more dire and important. You’ll have to manage the few humans that are still alive, possibly the last of humankind, and find a new place to settle.
The direness of the situation and its city-building gameplay makes Ixion comparable to the likes of Frostpunk. There are stakes at play, but also a linear progression to follow through. Getting through that progression is what makes the game challenging and compelling. How do you manage the needs of the people while still getting things done?
There are many aspects that Ixion gets right, we’ll discuss that in an upcoming review. But there are some points where I feel the game has tipped the balance from “engagingly challenging” to “unfairly brutal”. And it’s due to two points: Space, and the Unknown.
Spaced Out
And by space, I don’t mean the outer space where you can navigate the Tiqqun and its many supporting ships across, no. Rather, it’s the inner space within the Tiqqun.
You see, the Tiqqun’s inside is just one long connected line, split into six parts, that forms the ring shape. It’s not a wide space, but a long one. But you only get those six sectors.
The sectors are not empty. Rather, they are various materials left around that you can gather, which should help in getting the sector to be up and running quickly.
So here’s the first problem. Before you can get your empty canvas, you have to get these materials gathered. And to do that, you have to connect them to roads. And since the materials are scattered in various parts of the sector, you will have to draw inefficient lines of roads, wait for the materials to be collected, and then delete those horrible squiggly lines you made. Then you can start building.
And then, the challenge comes from actually finding enough space to fit all the parts together. Ixion handily lets you know the room size of each building in the UI, but that still doesn’t help the fact that these buildings are like lopsided tetrominoes in that it’s hard to really build a tight layout with no wasted space. No matter how you line them up together more often than not the space just don’t fit the buildings together in any neat way. Each square is a premium, and trying to figure out how to squeeze enough buildings while still having road access that can deliver materials and resources to other buildings efficiently is a big ask.
Ixion expects you to redesign the layouts of the sector from time to time as you unlock new tech, more efficient buildings get unlocked. Though usually they also consume more space. So that layout where you can fit a couple of 3×3 Tier 1 batteries will need to be thrown out as a Tier 2 battery requires 5×5 of space. And then rework that space again when you want to plop a Tier 3 battery which takes up a whopping 7×7.
Later in the game, fires will start to break out as a random event alongside the usual accidents. But for fires, you’ll need to plop down a fire station on each sector to stop it from spreading. And that’s another big 6×6 space needed for that.
Now redesigning layouts would have been fine, but the way deconstructing buildings works right now makes it a pain. In order for the workers to disassemble them, they’ll need to take away the materials from the building into a storage. And you have to wait for that to happen. If you’re planning to demolish a storage space to make room for a higher-tier storage space, make sure you have an extra storage space to accommodate the transition. Otherwise, the deconstruction goes to a halt because the workers have no place to transfer the materials. And the UI fail to communicate this bit, leaving me thinking there’s some sort of bug that’s causing this deconstruction process to idle for too long.
Space, inner space in this case, is really a bother to mess around with. The constant need to make space and readjust your layout as some new building gets unlocked only for it to turn out to take a heap more space than expected is a common occurrence in Ixion. And with it being a survival city builder, it’s dangerous to just make swooping changes in one go. So having to manage the space in your sectors becomes a series of small changes that you have to monitor, in a game where you already spinning many other plates like managing the science ship, ensuring each sector has enough resources, balancing workers, and more.
Teching Into The Unknown
The other problem I find with Ixion is how the unknown can really get you into an unfair game over. Here’s a specific example I ran into. In Chapter 2, I started collecting cryopods- the only way to get more population in this game. What I failed to check and monitor is the rate of cryopods being opened. More opened cryopods mean more pops which means more mouths to feed. My insect farm isn’t able to produce enough food, so I looked at the tech tree to see what’s the next food-producing building.
There are two: the mushroom wall and the crop farm.
In my first attempt, I went to unlock the mushroom wall. I have space in one of my new sectors, and this will convert waste into food. I observed some of the buildings produces waste, and they’ll be spending time not doing work just to get rid of waste. I find that wasteful, so converting them into food sounds like the way to go for the folks on Tiqqun.
Then I hit my first wall. In order to store waste, I need to enact the right policy. And for that, I need to research the DLS building. As this is going on, food supplies aren’t enough, the people are starving and my trust starts falling down. Eventually, I can’t get to unlock DLS before a mutiny happened and that’s game over.
Reloading that save, I decided to go and research crop farms instead. Once I unlocked it, it was a surprise how small the building is compared to the insect farm, only to realise you need to plop additional crop tiles. It required more space than I imagined it would have needed.
Once I have space cleared for the crop tiles, that should be when the food supply issue is resolved. But no. As I find out, I need water to get the crops growing, and for that I need to research another building, the Fusion Station, to turn ice into water. More space clearing, and tech researching needed. And as you can guess by now, there was not enough time before the workers go on strike, more accidents happen, trust depletes to zero and triggers a mutiny.
At this part of the game, the tutorial is essentially over and the player is left to their laurels to figure the game out. That’s cool and not the issue here.
However, I would have wished that buildings that it was communicated better that these particular two buildings require other tech, buildings and social policies for it to function.
Granted, the crop farm does tell you it uses water to generate food, but at first glance it’s unclear if this is flavour text or a gameplay thing. It turns out to be the latter.
After restarting that whole chapter with this newfound knowledge, Ixion starts to become a breeze. There’s still tons of other things to juggle and whatnot but still, it’s mostly about watching the numbers from going too low or too high and adjusting production accordingly.
And that’s a shame, because knowing how everything works now robs me of that difficulty barrier I wanted from a survival city-builder. Yes, I do want a certain challenge to the game. But having that challenge be the lack of player knowledge is unfair to the player at first, and becomes a non-issue after they play the game enough times to understand how it ticks.
Ixion’s issues here really stopped me from really enjoying most of the game, and I hope the developers take these learning lessons to either continue tweaking the game or carry the learnings to their next title.
That said, there’s still other aspects of Ixion I do think the developers have nail it, so stay tuned for our full review.
Ixion is out now on PC via Steam.