IXION

Extremely disappointed in the developers. The game is really cool. Cool story, cool scenario, good ui, all that jazz. However, even after there being several posts between Reddit and Steam about a game breaking bug over the years, the bug still exists in the game and its completely game breaking. When you train colonists, which is a requirement to progress the story from Chapter 2 onward, they just poof dissappear. You are required to spend a full electronic resource as well as take 5 in-game days of time to produce 15 colonists. between 30-60 are requird for the first mission alone. So far I have put around 6-9 electronics into the colony just for the to fart out nothing at me. Cannot progress the story, and have wasted a significant amount of time between harvesting the resources necessary to build electronics. So now I cannot progress my game. I'm only in the second chapter and I've already been defeated by a bug. Seriously? Waste of my time. Like I said, very disappointed.

Try Frostpunk 1 first. If you like it and want more, IXION is a worthy challenge.

A lot like Frostpunk but with a better story. You are really always under pressure, you have to manage everything. The story is really awesome, you're always wondering what will happen and there are a lot of mysteries to be uncovered. The only thing I found a little tedious was the hull to repair in the latest stage of the game.

Unfortunately as much as I like the game, I'm not a fan of it only having a story mode, especially with limited resources. Its basically putting you on a rail and not giving you much room to do what you want with your colony. I'd love it if this game had a sandbox mode where you just explore. Procedural generation or something. If they ever make an update that does such a thing, I will change my review.

Very fun, immersive game with a great story line and decision making. Every decision you make even how you build out your station has challenges. Would love to see either some DLC or a IXION 2.

I recommend this game at about the 20-30 Australian dollar mark. In all it's a good game, and I see how people compare it to "frost punk in space." It's very well designed and I get the feeling the team put a fair bit of love into it. However, I rate it at a heavily discounted recommend because, in my opinion, there's little to no real replayability to this game. There is a campaign, no sandbox/free play and the campaign is very linear. The only real replayability is through increasing the difficulty, which wasn't enough for me because in the end if you know what you need to do to get through each component and then the end game, an increase in difficulty is more frustration (especially when you deal with the end of level gateway aspects which are a bit silly) rather than a real interesting challenge. For what is at times a very well crafted world and vessel, I will say that the overall story line isn't all that gripping either with some characters that don't really grip and instead feel very artificial. In the end I've played it, enjoyed the challenge of playing it through, and then uninstalled it - satisfied that I bought it at the discount I recommended and got value at that point, but wouldn't recommend it for more.

Frostpunk in space? Sort of. Frostpunk 1 is special this is a bit less and instead is very good. Pros -Vibes! -Great music -Engaging Art -Cool systems Cons -A bit short -Not much creativity in building your station -Because of its narrative nature you sometimes need to reload to get past crucial points, the unexpected stuff is fun though even if you need go back and try again. Good stuff all and all, worth full price.

The gameplay is solid and reminiscent of Frostpunk, but where Frostpunk's atmosphere is dramatic and tense this game's dialogue sinks down to pretentious and overbearing, only partially due to the mediocre voice acting.

Yes, the building mechanics are a little bit unusual and sometimes annoying, but overall it's a fun game. Always keeps you on the edge. If you are unsure, wait for a sale.

Pros: Beautiful and funny Cons: Too buggy to finish the tutorial It's been released for years. These are not new bugs. Devs: fix your game, or stop selling it.

It's not that hard/punishing honestly. Just a challenging but fun city builder that is actually willing to put pressure on you to make the right decisions and keep things moving forward instead of just accumulating an enormous mountain of all resources to cruise through the game (although you can still do this, it's just harder).

One part Battlestar Galactica, one part The Expanse, one part Interstellar. I'm not usually much for city-builders but this one does such a good job of making the moment-to-moment of station management feel urgent and compelling, and it doesn't help that it has some truly remarkable art direction and soundtrack work.

Fantastic game, scratches the itch I've felt since finishing frostpunk

All over the place, but still enjoyable. Art direction, story and game stability were all quite fine, but I feel like they over focused on designing the station's details (e.g. exterior), to which I almost never paid any attention to, instead of focusing on the gameplay aspect of the game. Unfortunately, the game was ridiculously easy and the only difficulties were artificially created by either omitting important information, forcing the player to manage every sector separately and the construction system was just plainly awful. Despite clearing the game on the first run, it was a close call, but not due to actual difficulty, but rather due to the fact that I kept struggling to understand on how to train my last 3 remaining colonists. If I wouldn't have figured it out like 1 minute before the hostile ship would reach Romulus how to transfer single individuals, my colony would have been toast. For instance, resources cannot even be transferred between sectors without a stockpile being present. e.g. if your cargo ships will bring resources back to sector 1, but need them at sector 2, you cannot directly have them transferred to sector 2 but need to construct stockpiles at sector 1, have them transferred there first from the loading bay, just for them being transported to the next sector afterwards. Same goes for building construction: If you dismantle a building, you MUST have empty stockpiles present or it won't work. Also the sizes of the buildings were deliberately chosen to make strategic placements a real pain. Next, once you develop certain techs, the game's economy is instantly broken and you will never have shortages at all. Stability is also never a problem, despite your board computer constantly giving warnings that the crew is losing trust in ones leadership after running on batteries for 5ms. Despite all the flaws, I liked the game for it's clear passion for sci-fi exodus type stories. I just wish they would have more focused on gameplay, rather than visuals (which are pretty nice, but mostly irrelevant).

I enjoyed playing this game, defo 9/10 from me on this one. As an avid base building/strategy player this defo scratched my gaming itches very nicely and yes its defo frostpunk 1 in space so works well. my only real nitpicks are some of the achievements (hidden ones) have very specific and dragged out requirements, there was one (can't honestly which sodding one it was) that started in the very early parts of the game and from the get go you had to work in a specific choice, then next chapter again repeat and then next chapter again specific choice repeat and they get to near end to finally the one odd running around the place specific thing to finally get the sodding achievement, was defo a headache on that one. so yeah besides this annoying achievement, the game itself very nicely done. defo recommend it

After 100% the game and returning several months later to completing it once more, I can say this game is an absolute masterpiece.

It's Frostpunk but in space, on an ark ship, and with logistics bugs.  Overall it's very good, and an excellent iteration upon frostpunk's work.  It elevates the formula through the setting and adding more in the way of materials and production trees as well as keeping the "feeling" of species extinction very real and center for the backdrop.  Voice acting, and  music do well to add to this atmosphere.  It even takes the idea of "useless mouths to feed" and takes that a bit farther.  It's good, it's smart.   Gameplay is solid, and on par with Frostpunk as far as difficulty goes, but lacks some replayability compared to the venerable title.   Overall it plays well, is addictive, and immersive... until the obnoxious transportation bugs start to plague your saves.  Having played the game for about 70 hours at this point, i still find myself perplexed as to why some production buildings "cant find their stockpiles" and why some districts just flat out give up on distributing wares to other districts... deleting roads and rebuilding them resets the issue with the former, but the latter... i don't know.  it's crippling for a playthrough. i would give this a FULL RECOMMENDATION if it wasn't for these bugs as well as some somewhat frequent crashing, sadly. with these unaddressed issues as of the timing of this review, recommendation is for getting it on a steep sale.  

For new players it would be nice if there were more guidance. More easily navigable and obvious visual cues would be ideal. Once you're familiar with the mechanics it's a fun distraction.

IXION is a city-building game where you take command of a space station full of survivors of a cataclysm that befalls Earth. Your mission, survive until you can find an exoplanet to let everyone resettle and be the future of humanity. The game revolves around building in sectors on the station Tiqqun. Each sector acts as its own mini-city with its own resources and population, which you need to manage. If resources are lacking in one sector, you can shift them to another that needs them. You can specialize sectors so they get extra bonuses for their buildings. You'll have to explore the system you're in, mine resources, refine into different items for construction, and you need to keep your population happy, which is no easy feat since people don't like being cooped up in a space station for months to years on end. While the overall concept is good, and it is fun, it does have some design choices that make the game frustrating. First off, the sectorization of the station causes build space to become a premium. Since each sector acts independently and only resources are shared between them, you have to make sure you have certain resources in each sector and if you find out later that you're lacking, you can find yourself in a world of hurt. For example, if you have a fire in one sector, have a fire station in another, but not in the sector where the fire is raging, the fire station won't help if the fire is in another sector. So you have to make sure you have a fire station in every sector. The space is also very limited and a lot of the buildings are very large, which puts a layer of frustration when you suddenly find that you'll have to make sure each sector has ANOTHER building. The game is also a fairly linear experience. There's no sandbox mode (at least not yet) and the only way to play is to go through the story. The story is decent and feels similar to another narrative city-builder: Frostpunk. Although both have stories that you are trying to navigate to get through the gameplay, I think Frostpunk does the narrative city-builder better. It also offers an endless mode where you can pick a campaign map and play it endlessly dealing with various events and gameplay elements. The devs could create randomly-generated systems that you can travel to that have various potential hazards and colonization opportunities. It's also mildly frustrating that there's no "universal storage" in the game. Every resource needs its own storage space. The larger storages are massive and offer more efficiency than their smaller counterparts, but trying to fit them in can be a challenge, especially when you need multiple of them. Moving resources can be a little frustrating at times as well. You have to purposefully set resources in one sector below the maximum and set resources in another sector to the level where you want to keep it at and that's the only way they'll transfer resources. If your storages are full in the one sector, production buildings won't work until there's space and they won't transfer surplus to other sectors that could use it. The electronics production is very skewed, requiring 20 Silicon to make 1 Electronics, while Steel requires 10 iron to make 15 Steel, and 6 Carbon to make 5 Alloys (or something similar). This skews storage requirements for resources and requires you to constantly mine several rare resources. Overall, the experience is fun, if challenging and frustrating. You may need to restart a few times to get your build right as you learn more about the dangers that await you in the depths of space. I don't really see much replayability with the game, since after you beat the story there's nothing else to really do. Enjoy it for what it is and go for the ride. I think if they make a sequel, they could make it closer to Frostpunk's style of circular building where unlocking sectors just gives you more build area where resources are shared and you have to provide for the people on the station.

Hardcore space station manager with epic music background, the feel you get is Interstellar but bad ending version. The thing I love in this game is the Cut scene when the ship jumping. Even you can't finish the game, it still worth to buy this as the collection.

Great city building in space. Story is great. I found the regular difficulty not hard. It was challenging. Complaints about the resource balance and stocking up resources I didn't understand. You are able to get yourself a good leg and the challenge presented are there more to push the game forward than penalize you.

Truly a hidden gem. Excellent design, pacing, and balance. If you enjoyed Frostpunk you will most likely enjoy this game as well. Like Frostpunk it's about managing scarce resources and making tough decisions.

Its just Frostpunk 1 in space, its more in-depth than that but if your looking for something that scratches the same itch of holding on to the last of humanity with a massive amount of stress then this is the game. people are less of a limiting factor in this than Frostpunk and there's 1 extra system to worry about,

It would be nice to get a second game as well. The game is good, hard but good. Make a mistake and your F. I had to save the game before a major decision. The game doesn't any game broken bugs. I enjoyed building and planing as well, the game mechanics are really good.

I gave this a couple of tries on the default difficulty and ended up the same way as I did when I tried Frostpunk, which is the game over screen. The game is not very forgiving or I'm just taking my sweet time with everything way too much. Luckily there's a "Journey" difficulty setting, which made the game a hell of a lot more manageable and enjoyable. From my understanding the main issue people have with this game is how it punishes you for completely unexpected events such as staying in the solar system for too long or picking the wrong option in an event and at the same time it's super linear, so it's always the same. This means the game is not "hard but fair" but just a bully, who will stomp all over your sandcastle without any warning or reason and the only way to fight the bully is with a time machine (load game button). I tend to agree, but even when I knew what was coming, I still couldn't prevent it, because the game is a bit too complex and the UI is far from perfect, so you can miss certain notifications or not have a good handle on your micro-management. So I'm happy the difficulty sliders were added and I can at least progress through the game. I would like to finish it and then try the default settings, but from what I've seen so far, the game is painfully linear, so it would probably be pretty boring. All events are predetermined and I think even the resource patches are always in the same place. This game badly needs an endless mode, but it would be very difficult to balance since the whole campaign is hand-crafted and tailored to always be the same. It's a fun game to try and finish once I guess, but doesn't have much replayability. Devs should definitely think about a random Endless mode. it's a recommend from me, but only because I bought it for 14€. Not worth the full price in my opinion, maybe with Endless mode. There are many other games in this genre that have way more variability and replayability and don't cost 30€. I do understand the price though, because the game is very pretty, detailed, with good voice acting and it just has that expensive feel of something like Anno or Civilization, but it just falls short where it matters most - it's just not fun for a very long time.

storyline is good with good length. its not easy to find a management game comes with a good storyline. thoroughly enjoyed it :)) although i think the learning curve is a bit high

A masterpiece cult-classic that fell under the radar. Needs to be experienced.

Scratches the same itch as Frostpunk, but in space!

would buy it again for the soundtrack alone... It's a great and fun game too!

7hrs of game play so far and I am enjoying it. Yes I am making many mistakes and tutorial and action has an affect later on, regarding what to choose next... So many restarts from last save point... but it is worth it, as I have a better understanding each time. The key thing I am finding is what to micromanage and by turning off or closing resources for a short time, or space management. Power output, roads, placement, and how far can this take me to the restaurant at the end of the universe. I look forward to more hours of this... Edited: 5hrs more, outstanding... Even though it is more of a decision driven base building game.... I am getting Deserts of Kharak vibe.... Although one thing about the story so far.... who in the right mind would fold space near a stellar body like a moon or a planet... surely they would of learnt from books of Asimov, Clarke, Dune series, Battletech series... That folding space ie jump between stellar systems or long jumps requires jumpships to go near pirate zone or zenith of the solar body.... Owe I am going to do a burn out in a large vechile right next to a kindergarden .... surely nothing bad would happen... LOL

its a pretty fun rss manager with a decent story and upgrade system.

It´s like crack, I couldnt sleep beacuse I kept thinking about how to opitimize my layout. Great visual design, great soundtrack. Fantastic atmosphere. Had to fail and learn abit before succeeded. Great game.

Very fun colony building and management game,but was quite easy even on challenge mode.

Great story, excellent gameplay, and a phenomenal soundtrack. Very similar to Frostpunk but much more forgiving whereas if you screw up within the first hour, you can still recover relatively easily. It does turn into resource management hell toward the end. My only complaint is that resources on the docks cannot be pulled to areas that need them, they must be first transported to a storage area which is kinda dumb imo.

This game is cool as heck, makes my laptop VERY hot, but very playable. I wonder why the devs havent done any content updates since release? Seems like it would be a pretty simple matter to add a new chapter and run some adds to get new players, rinse/repeat (I want more).

Игру порекомендовал бы, хотя со многими негативными обзорщиками согласен. Из абсолютных плюсов соглашусь с большинством, 1) Сеттинг. Не далекое будущее а ля ваха, а "ближайшее", еогда технологии выше наших, но еще не ваха, с миллиардом захваченных миров. Дают повозиться в солнечной системе 2) Красивая и милая картинка. Затягивает 3) Атмосфера и музыка как в сай фай 80-90-00х, что круто Из плюсов не для всех 1) Не долгая. У меня нет столько свободного времени, чтобы играть миллион часов 2) На самом деле в игре очень легко освоиться, а засчет атмосферы и скорости ее не впадлу "переначать" сначала. 3) Нет адской духоты с долгими цепочками производства, которые скучно и сложно держать в голове, как у многих других градостроительных игр. Игра быстрая и понятная. Из минусов 1) заскриптованность и прямолинейность некая 2) тупизм в некоторых вопросах, типа дизморали за все. В целом одна из лучших игр, в которые играл в последнее время, в первую очередь из за того, что разобраться в ней очень просто и нет каких-то супер сложных и душных цепочек производства и/или огромного количества цифр, которые надо держать в голове

My first time playing a strategy civ builder / survival game. I love the story and am really enjoying the game play. I would recommend to anyone interested in it.

This game is addictive! Absolutely loved playing this through over and over!

Amazing! Perfect combo of RTS, base building, resource management with a brutal story and decision making that counts. A must have game! You wont regret it

This game is pretty difficult but rewarding and fun. If you like Frostpunk this game is similar to that but obviously quite different in its own way. Cannot wait to finally complete the main story. I finally finished the main story and it was well worth it. Very fun

Its good. Is it a city builder? No. Is it a base builder? Ehhh.. This is more in in my opinion a craft builder. The store is very linear but choices made in early game effect the late game. Its a good playthrough, I just wish it had a sandbox or other mod/ story support. I have played the story again to get all the outcomes but I want more...

For me, it's the spiritual successor to Alien Legacy from 1994. I would have given it a thumbs up for that alone. And the game is fun, too. 8/10

Like Frostpunk but set in space, fun storyline and mechanics and amazing sounds track.

A fantastic game that's more about space exploration than being a city builder (which I preferred). If you go into it thinking everything is going to work first time, you're going to have a bad time. If you go in, accept you might fail some chapters and need to restart them and try different strategies, you're in for an excellent story!

Played the hell out of this game. Something about managing this little city, trying to get everything to fix just right, is something I easily find myself getting lost in. Currently one of my favorites. I really hope the devs take what they learned from making this, and give us an improved squeal. Can be hard at first.

Game is fine, but some UI designs are poor and the issue of needing to set how much your resources can travel from one sector to another is really annoying. Can't it be just connected? Also, the fact that it doesn't run in background, in 2025, is really a down point. 4.5/10.

Not your normal city builder sim. The survival mechanics add a very pleasant twist on the genre. It took me 10-15 hours of game play (and several retries) to really feel like I've got the hang of it, It's a lot of fun, and I would recommend this to anyone who likes the city builder genre and is looking to mix things up a bit.

i have looked for amazing city builder games and this delivers. throughout the story you keep the same station, through each chapter. it is a bit confusing to begin with but after some time playing its simple to understand. the way you research is also very well done and the space you get for each sector (sorry for spoilers) really gets you into thinking what youre gonna use that sector for. the story is well done and very interesting 9.5/10

Game will make you want to cry because you will mess up but it is rewarding and fun and the story is great.

IXION is, quite literally, the Frostpunk of the Space genre. It is a colony survival builder with a narrative of twists and turns, and an enjoyable building and management system that keeps you entertained between the hard choices and careful timed planning you must make on your journey. That being said, it is a more laid back experience than Frostpunk. While the latter serves you with feelings of desperation for humanity, with the very elements bringing your colony to its end, IXION only bears a fraction of that stress, giving you plenty to work with so much that you can actually be rather decorative with your decisions without too much of a time constraint throughout a significant portion of the game. The visuals and sound design of IXION work well to compliment the story and gameplay. The music feels space-y, while impactful when it needs to be. The UI is clear (although some mechanics could use some more explaining, either through tooltips, hints, or a dedicated tutorial), and there are enough tools in the game to help you solve most of its challenges. However, there are some moments that do feel rather obviously scripted, but only AFTER you engage with them, which can leave a minor sour taste in your mouth. This game also begs for more exploration in the form of procedural star systems. The developers were trying to create a curated narrative experience, and so the star systems and their contents are the same in every playthrough, but this kind of game benefits most from the replayability of the unknown, such as how FTL plays out. Overall, I'd definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a relaxed space game, or wants more of that Frostpunk flavour.