izigame.me

TL;DR This game does not respect your time and traps you into thinking that you are playing a game, instead of the game playing you.
IXION aspires to be a Frostpunk in space but it ends up being unfun instead. While the narrative interested me during the prologue, it quickly fell apart beyond that. In this game, you are offered many options to progress your tech tree and develop your sectors, but in truth, those are false choices. You have to follow exactly one upgrade path, or you will soft-lock yourself into a death spiral that you had no way of knowing to avoid. Because the game doesn't tell you until it's too late.
Let's take one of the most fundamental elements of gameplay: Alloys. In this game, you need alloys to build anything. You also need alloys to repair your ship. So far so good. Unfortunately, alloys are a constantly draining resource for reasons that defy explanation. For some reason, operating your ship's basic functions, like, say, existing, you receive a constant penalty of losing ship health. It's a timer, a doom clock. Alloys are finite and you will run out eventually. In Frostpunk, you use coal as the constant resource need/gameplay pressure element while you have other resources you use to grow your infrastructure. In IXION, you are losing a critical resource needed to grow your infrastructure for no reason at all. It's poorly thought out and punishes you for actually playing the game.
Additionally, each sector you open speeds up the ship's health decay. You are forced to open new sectors to place new buildings. What happens if you open a new sector before you are ready? You go into a death spiral because of the increased alloy drain. What happens if you open a sector too late? You go into a death spiral because you have run out of room to grow. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. In Frostpunk, you had a way of expanding without losing the entire game. In IXION, you are set up for failure and only notice many hours after that fact that you were. In this game you will be treading water, not playing the game. Get more alloys to produce more alloys while you are losing alloys at an increasingly alarming rate. It's stressful, not challenging. Tedious, not fun.
All of the events you encounter are static and have predetermined outcomes, making this game pointless to replay. You will lose workers/colonists for no reason other than the game having rolled the dice and having decided that now it's time to hurt you. Doesn't matter how well you look after your people, accidents will happen regardless. And not to forget that you have to keep many plates spinning all at once, just for the sake of spinning plates. Probe for more resource nodes, send out miners and haulers to get more resources. While handling accidents, while handling the constant drain on your alloys, while handling occasional requests. While getting permanent penalties to your sector stability because the game decided that you had enough time in one chapter and it's time to move on now. Those permanent penalties don't go away either. Congrats, you took too much time exploring in a game that requires you to explore to advance.
IXION wants to rush you and then slows you down. Like a bully grabbing you by the neck and shoving you into a wall.
The tech progression is also wildly unsatisfying. You are researching a recycling plant to save on alloys? Well done! But you can't use it yet, because you didn't unlock that other building that actually allows you to manage waste. That's a large amount of science point you don't get back, unless you wait for the tech building to produce more. But you can't wait, because the game will hit you with permanent stability penalties after an arbitrary amount of time. Other tech modifiers bump up food production by 10% or energy production by 10%. Why?
There are a lot of game systems that don't make sense in this game. Why was alloy chosen to be the doom clock and your critical building resource at the same time? Why wasn't atmosphere/air quality used instead? in a SPACE game at that? Or water? You know, the universally useful resource that you can use to produce fuel AND atmosphere. And growth.
Why does your ship drain hull constantly? Because hurry up, don't waste your time playing the game, we have a schedule to run. Why does this increase if you dare to use your ship for its intended purpose by opening up more sectors or just move?
Why are features that are essential to space exploration now completely absent in this weird future? Waste management was one of the first problems NASA solved in our time, and it has now become a tier 2 technology in IXION. Why was the ship itself designed to tear itself apart? And once you fixed it up, why is the drain constant, and why is it increasing? Steady maintenance would make sense, but losing critical resources just to slow you down does not. It is wild how little the game respects player agency. Insulting, even.
Add to that the harebrained idea of giving you a psychological reason for why people are unhappy, but refusing to give you any tools to mitigate or counteract these problems. Apparentely people mourn the death of the earth. Okay. Believable. And it's getting worse because you spent so much time in the Sol system, gathering resources, preparing for the long trek to a distant world that shows promise. Why? I'm actively working towards securing this voyage, to make it safer and asking everyone on board to work towards that goal. Nope. Can't handle being in the solar system. Do we get psychiatrists? No. Do we get medication to alleviate anxiety? No. You get -1 permanent for taking too long. And if you do move out of the system, you keep that penalty. And you get another -1 permanent penalty for actually moving out of the system.
The game punishes you for playing it. It's not difficult, or challenging. It's tedious. Save yourself the money and buy something fun and rewarding instead. Like Frostpunk.
Of course I'm past the refund period, but I hope to save someone else the trouble (and the money!) at the very least.