izigame.me

Hey there kids, want to hear a story? Because Grandpa's got a great one, it's called: "How 4 Units of Carbon Ruined my Fu**ing Life."
But before we get to Story Time, let me begin by saying that this game, was made for me. As a big fan of the Expanse series and a certified "sPaCe NuT" - being the Administrator of a Scifi Space Station might be one of the greatest settings for a game ever. As such, it was one of the few games where I wouldn't even let the negative reviews influence me: I was going to buy it, I was going to enjoy it, and that was that.
Well, as you can tell, that wasn't that. IXION hates absolutely everything about you and doesn't want you to have fun. What's that? I'm a giant noob and I should git gud? Well friend I agree with you- but unfortunately that's not what we're talking about. You see my Crew, Hull and Trust were 100%, virtually 100% of the time. IXION's difficulty, is fine.
No instead, the game hates you, because it takes absolutely everything that makes a city management game fun, throws it in the bin, then pees in the bin, puts you inside the bin, and sets it all alight with cheap vodka.

STORY TIME


Building, is fu**ing awful
You wanna build a cool space station with cool crew quarters and cool tech labs and scifi factories and sh*t? Well too bad- you've got a 56x30 grid, and EVERY, SINGLE BUILDING takes a different amount of space, resulting in the worst game of Tetris you will ever play. Tarkov's Inventory is Heaven compared to this. Crew Quarters? 3x3. Infirmary? 4x3. Tech Lab? 9x9. Steel Refinery? 12x9. - Oh that's fine, all multiples of 3 so that should be--- hold the f*ck up bucko, because here comes Stockpile 4x4. Insect Farm 4x8. Mess Hall 4x6, and many more! Your base, will never ever look good- and it will always, by design, be fraught with empty rows of 1x1's and 2x2's that you can never ever fill with anything useful. Forget symmetry, forget visuals, forget building something good and efficient - you cannot build an efficient (let alone aesthetic) station in this game, period. There are more and less efficient, but never truly efficient. That is virtually impossible, just go look online for "the best layouts" - very few (if any) of them can fill the dead space.
Resource Management, is the worst I've ever had
So let's say, like me, you struggle with the aforementioned absolutely ass, limited grid that is your build space. Every now and then, you might have a situation where you want to demolish something, because you realize that you f***ed up your Tetris. Ok, no problem. In my case, I wanted to demolish a Polymer Refinery in my Industrial Sector, because I thought I could rotate it to make space for a Fire Station, 6x6, and an Electronics Factory, 6x15(???). I've got a lot of space if I demolish this ill-placed Polymer Refinery, it should be fine, so I demolish it. But wait, what's this? Oh, it's produced some polymer that I need to remove first- but my polymer stockpile 4x4 is full in this particular sector, so I need to set up an Export to a different sector with space for polymer. No problem. Oh, but the other sector doesn't have a polymer stockpile and no space to build one because it's pockmarked with unusable 2x1 and 1x1 grids. Ok that's fine, I've got an Electronics stockpile that I can swap out since Electronics are empty right now. Ok cool. I click like 30 buttons to make sure they export. Great! It's exporting. Oh shoot, it needs to store 80, E I G H T Y Alloy. But a Stockpile 4x4 can only take 110 at this stage of the game. That is basically filling an entire stockpile; so if you have any Alloys remaining (which you MUST have because otherwise your Hull Deteriorates and you lose), that makes it damn hard to fill an entire stockpile just to move 1 building. But ok, fine, it'll be worth it. At this point I want to warn you, because if you're reading this and think "Holy sh*t this is a boring story-* JUST WAIT, IT GETS INCALCULABLY WORSE :) - so I do the hoop jumping to eventually get the Alloys out. Oh, it needs a SINGLE electronic to get out also (this is all just to demolish a building) - I move some stuff around, build a temporary Stockpile that I'll have to delete in and of itself later just to house the single f*n electronic. Holy sh*t, finally.
"Wait, what's this?" It has 4 Carbon in it. But there's a lot of Carbon space. Why don't the Transporters just remove the Carbon? It's connected by road, it's got a ton of space in that sector, and there are currently no Export/Import rules on Carbon. Then I realized, that Polymer that it had inside it earlier, well it makes it with Carbon. And these 4 Units of Carbon, are sat there, because they were a part of the production cycle of this building. Transporters can't remove it, because it's not a "Building" material, it's just sat there, on some derelict conveyor belt, and everybody refuses to touch it. So I have to rebuild, the entire Refinery, so that it can finish making Polymer out of the 4 remaining Carbon Units- BUT NO NO NO, NOT 1 AT A TIME, 5 AT A TIME - SO I HAVE TO WAIT FOR TRANSPORT TO BRING 1 AT A TIME (THEY ARE FAST AS FUQ BOI) SO I LITERALLY PAUSE UNPAUSE PAUSE UNPAUSE THE GAME UNTIL I CAN GET A MULTIPLE OF 5, SO THAT WHEN IT'S DONE PRODUCING POLYMER IT'D BE EMPTY - HOLY FU**ING SH*T - NOW, I GET TO REPEAT THE ENTIRE STOCKPILE GAME THAT WE STARTED THIS WITH, SO THAT I CAN FINALLY UNINSTA--- I MEAN DEMOLISH THE POLYMER REFINERY. --- ok, I'm sorry, I just get really heated when I want to love a game that apparently hates me. But it's ok, because once you do all of this--- aaaaand the Electronics Factory can't fit.
Super Fun Extras!
a. This game is optimized worse than the Waste produced by Factories. On an i9-10900k + RTX3080, I scratched 60fps on 3440x1440, on LOW. EVERYTHING was low. Very often dips into 30, 40 FPS territory for a time.
b. Almost no keybinding customization (very few shortcuts exist at all)
c. If you unlock better Crew Quarters for instance, you have to demolish the old buildings (pissing off everybody who lived there) to build new ones in their place. What, did you think you could just upgrade to the new tech? Haha.
d. When you're done with a science investigation (bless your soul), you have to press escape 3 times to back out of the prompt. A lot of small UX fecal seasonings like that in this game.
e. You have no policies to enact until later in the game. Then, when you get it (and fork out another ridiculously huge landmass that could've been other useful stuff), they're practically all useless because every single one of them have such massive downsides over the "default" state of things you'd rather just keep it how it was. A lot of people have said how sh*t the crew are in this game and I agree. They are absolutely awful.
f. If you unlock something (like the building I just mentioned) later in the game, have a grand old time trying to fit that in your Sectors - you need 1 for every sector :) :) :) :) :)


TLDR

Honestly, this game would be great if they would allow Steam Workshop- the users will fix it by entirely reworking the Stability System, entirely reworking the Policy System, and creating a slew of useful 1x1 and 2x2 buildings to make up for the absolutely awful experience of trying to play this game with any degree of seriousness. Seriously, I want to love this game, but it is just not fun. I will absolutely come back to it if they rethink the building grid and resource management aspects of this game, maybe give us a "Replanner" function to "move" buildings or something, but whatever it is, it still needs a lot of love before this gets my recommendation.