izigame.me

Ixion's a good game, well done, tightly balanced... almost too tightly balanced. I would generally recommend it, but with a few caveats. First, a description of what it's good at, then where it has some issues.
The basic concept is "oops, we blew up the planet, lawl, guess we better save humanity" and it does a pretty good job of the introduction letting you get a grasp on how things work sorta for the most part. You have a space station, it has some very limited travel capabilities, but mostly relies on smaller ships to mine and ferry resources to it, and to do scientific work on distant planets.
The gameplay is pretty tightly controlled - there's a X1, X2 and X4 speed boost, but honestly, you should really never be using the X4 other than very, very narrow circumstances for brief moments. If you're using it for extended periods of time, you have a problem because there's absolutely something you should be micromanaging somewhere that you're not.
The game is a city builder, more than anything else. The heavy emphasis is upon controlling what gets built, what materials go where, and keeping things organized and running smoothly. This is a much more picky game than most other city builders though, and will be pretty challenging because it keeps everything on a fairly tight set of limits. If you make a big mistake, like not moving your ship in close to supply settlers and materials to a planet, and your ships have to do so via long trips, you will get stuck in a death spiral very quickly as a bunch of other stuff starts piling up or getting out of control.
That said, there's a fair bit of wiggle room too, if you're playing well, there's plenty of time to do all the objectives required of you and to do everything you need to. There's plenty of resources and you only really start to run low if you didn't actually strip mine things hard enough in your previous areas, or if you stay way too long in an area. If you play relatively well, like ~80% of where you should be, you'll be fine. If you screw up in a big way, it will start heaping on piles of permanent disabilities onto you and you're pretty much screwed.
I'm playing on normal mode and I'm usually pretty good at these types of games, and every mission other than the prologue, I've had to start over once. Once to figure out what I'm doing with all the new mechanics introduced and all the quirks of the mission, and once to actually play the mission properly. I have never felt like I was doomed or that things were completely unfair, but there's definitely been some issues where I knew I could do much better than I did, and some of the curveballs were blatantly fake difficulty.
So let's get into the problems...
Fake difficulty. It does this a bit, but not too often. For example, in the third real mission area, not counting the prologue starting zone, there's a big storm in space! ...It moves. It doesn't LOOK like it moves though. At some point you notice it does appear to be getting closer though, but you watch it for a while and it doesn't actually seem to be moving very fast, so you research resistance to space weather for your ships and... then it suddenly jumps and completely covers the area you're in and the resistance meant absolutely nothing because all your ships die before they can even dock with your ship for safety. This is not well done. There are hints that you should start preparing to move shortly, but the implied correct solutions are all wrong, such as the research options being absolutely useless. You can't possibly know that this is how it's going to react in the way that it does and though it has three overlapping autosaves to give you time to go back... each time you load one, it autosaves it again and wipes it out. If you try testing a few things only to find out you don't have time to fix the problem, then you have no autosaves to correct it and you have to start the entire mission over again.
There's also a very, very bad habit of the game giving you permanent, heavy-handed penalties that stack up and rapidly make the game nearly impossible if you do drag behind. If you get a -1 stability for staying in a region too long, you may as well start over. Make sure to save at the end of each mission as a separate save so you can do so.
In contrast, the rewards you get are almost never useful. +10% to something which is already at 100% is pointless when the reverse is basically -10% forever. This is really not an enjoyable comparison.
For a game about micromanagement, there's also a lot of gaps where you can't actually control things as much as is needed. For example, if you have 4 work crews to repair the hull, and you only need 3... there's no actual way to tell just one of them to not do that, if you turn it off for one, you turn it off for all of them. If you decide to build something onto the ship like more solar panels, ALL the work crews will stop repairing things to build it. You can't just have one crew building and the others still on basic maintenance. This isn't a huge problem, as more work crews make the work go faster, but it's kind of irritating that this absolute basic level of control is missing in a game that's so obsessively focused on micromanaging everything but won't let you micromanage the things that are actually important.
Controlling where resources go is also a nuisance and poorly managed. You can control where stuff goes fairly easily when you have lots to spare, but when you only have limited resources available, such as after a big purchase (like installing new solar panels for example), then the controls for transferring resources becomes extremely poor for the task.
Most of the time, the game feels really good. The voice actors are tolerable, the plot is kinda pretentious and the writing pretty clearly shows they really don't understand human nature very well at all or how people react in a crisis at all, but the plot is otherwise well executed despite its flaws, and the gameplay is extremely solid for what it is, with only a few flaws. It will occasionally throw fake difficulty curveballs at you that you have to be prepared well in advance to avoid, but the majority of the difficulty is natural, real difficulty of just having to actually make good choices, rather than "guess which of 3 options doesn't kill you and reload if you picked the wrong one" though that latter type does show up on rare occasion. Usually there's a warning, but it's not always particularly clear or useful until after the fact.
If you want a city builder with limited resources and which is pretty difficult, Ixion is a good choice all around and one of the best by a fairly large margin. Like it really is an extremely solid game for gameplay and the feel of running a crippled space station barely clinging onto life as you try to find a suitable world to colonise before it falls apart around you. Yes, it has its flaws, but they fairly rarely show up. They are rather frustrating when they do show up, however. If you don't like fake difficulty ever showing up, or if you want to play a game on game journalist difficulty, then Ixion is not for you, just set it down and walk away now, take it off your wishlist because it will only infuriate you.