IXION

I really enjoyed this game. In many reviews, you can read comparisons like "Frostpunk in space" or "a survival game in space." But in my opinion, this is not a very accurate comparison. It might seem that way after completing the prologue, but once you play through at least the end of the first chapter, you realize: this game is primarily about production and building the most optimal logistical chains under conditions of limited resources. The core gameplay mechanics felt very interesting to me. The building aspect was simply excellent - sometimes you need to reshuffle buildings, swap their positions, so that the robots can deliver resources faster. It was really satisfying when you change just a couple of things in the ship's layout and food production doubles as a result. I also enjoyed sending probes into space to extract resources. I also felt a pleasant sense of anticipation every time a probe was about to reveal a new planet, asteroid, or human-made ruins. It was always exciting to discover a new piece of the story hidden behind them. What I liked about the plot is that it doesn’t answer all the questions, leaving a lot to the player’s imagination. At the same time, it keeps you in constant suspense. Sometimes, when you lack motivation to push through a difficult building challenge, you still continue just to reach a new planet or uncover the next story fragment. I also really liked the ending. Every choice has its own advantages and disadvantages, but each one interestingly develops the main narrative conflict.

UA Ну що ж шановне панство, що можу додати. Рекомендую - якось банально. Розписувати детально? Якось давно то все було. Спогади ще лишились, але віддалені. Пам'ятаю, що пройшов її досить швидко, бо було цікаво, що ж далі. Гра затягнула надовго, як у свій час Frostpunk. Навіть не хотілось нівщо інше грати. Таких ігор в моєму не маленькому досвіді було близько 10 штук. Гра цікава, медитативна, може інколи потримати в напрузі, навіть можливо декілька разів пограти - реіграбельність присутня. Але суб'єктивний мінус, якщо грати трохи в довгу, досліджувати кожен куточок і добувати ресурси по максимуму. Не скільки треба по основному сюжетному завданні і все, то між ''Главами'' досить швидко забиваються ресурсами усі склади і не знаєш, як боротись з перелімітом. (Таким грішать багато ігор на середніх-пізніх етапах, та я спромігся і на почтковому) =) Гра хороша, цікава, музика повторюється, але не набридає. Суб'єктивно 10 з 10 Дякую за увагу =) Гарної вам гри! ENG Well then, dear audience, what can I add. Recommendation – sounds kind of trivial. Describe in detail? It all happened quite a while ago. The memories remain, but they’re distant. I remember finishing it rather quickly, because I was curious what would come next. The game pulled me in for a long time, just like Frostpunk did back in the day. I didn’t even want to play anything else. In my not-so-small experience, there have been about 10 such games. The game is interesting, meditative, sometimes it can keep you tense, and it even has replay value – you might play it several times. But a subjective downside: if you play for the long run, exploring every corner and extracting resources to the maximum, not just what’s needed for the main story task, then between the “Chapters” all the storages quickly get overloaded with resources, and you don’t know how to deal with the surplus. (Many games suffer from this in mid-to-late stages, but I managed to hit it even at the start) =) The game is good, interesting, the music repeats but doesn’t get annoying. Subjectively, 10 out of 10. Thank you for your attention =) Enjoy the game! JP さて、皆様、何を付け加えられるでしょうか。 おすすめする――少しありふれた感じ。 詳しく書く？ もうずいぶん前のことだ。記憶は残っているが、遠い。かなり早くクリアしたのを覚えている、次が気になって仕方なかったからだ。ゲームは長く夢中にさせてくれた、かつての『Frostpunk』のように。他の何も遊びたくないほどだった。私の少なくない経験の中で、そんなゲームは10本ほどしかない。 ゲームは面白く、瞑想的で、ときに緊張感を与え、何度か遊ぶこともできる――リプレイ性はある。ただし主観的なマイナス点として、長くプレイして隅々まで探索し、資源を最大限に集めると、メインのストーリー任務に必要な分だけではなく、「章」と「章」の間で倉庫がすぐに資源でいっぱいになり、余剰分にどう対処するか分からなくなる。（多くのゲームが中盤から後半でこの問題を抱えるが、私は序盤でもやってしまった） =) ゲームは良くできていて、面白い。音楽は繰り返されるが、飽きさせない。 主観的には10点満点中10点。 ご清聴ありがとうございました =) 良いゲーム体験を！

这不是经典经营游戏，而是关于探索“定义人类”的的思考 很多人批评《IXION》资源匮乏、空间站持续破损、整体氛围压抑向下，认为它缺乏传统建造游戏“积累-突破-胜利”的正向反馈。但这源于用错了评价标准。 《IXION》的核心设计意图非常明确：它不是一款以数值成长或基地扩张为目标的管理游戏。资源限制、系统衰减与派系内耗是刻意为之的机制，目的是还原长期深空任务的实际状态：没有外部支援，没有阶段性胜利，只有维持生存的持续消耗。 游戏直接给出了一个清晰的结论：探索与求知是人类区别于其他物种的根本属性。人类文明的延续不仅依赖物质生存，更依赖对未知的好奇与向外拓展的意愿。 当“太坤号”最终选择放弃探索、转向内部封闭与维稳时，游戏明确表达了它的立场：失去探索精神的生存只是机械的自我循环；停止向外追问的文明，已经不再具备人类的本质。 这种“向下”的氛围不是设计缺陷，而是对“文明停滞”的直观呈现。如果你用传统经营游戏的标准衡量它，自然会感到挫败；但如果你接受它作为一场关于人类星际旅行面临的“困难”，以及生存的严肃讨论，它会清晰地告诉你：我们之所以为人，是因为我们永远选择走向未知，而不是在安全中停止脚步。 推荐。 本作不适合追求轻松建造与持续正反馈的玩家，但适合愿意在游戏中直面文明存续命题、理解“探索即人性”的受众。 Not a Management Game, But a Clear Statement on Exploration and Humanity Many criticize IXION for scarce resources, constant station decay, and a consistently bleak atmosphere, arguing it lacks the progression and payoff of traditional survival-builders. This misses the game’s actual design intent. IXION is not focused on base expansion or numerical growth. Its resource constraints, systemic degradation, and factional friction are deliberate. They simulate the reality of long-term deep-space operations: no external rescue, no milestone victories, only the continuous cost of staying alive. The game states its conclusion directly: Exploration and curiosity are fundamental to human identity. Human civilization depends not only on physical survival, but on the drive to seek out the unknown and push beyond established boundaries. When the station ultimately abandons exploration in favor of internal control and isolation, the game makes its position unambiguous: survival without the drive to explore is merely mechanical maintenance. A civilization that stops asking questions ceases to be human. The “downward” atmosphere is not a flaw. It is a direct representation of cultural and intellectual stagnation. If you judge it by standard management-game metrics, you will feel frustrated. If you approach it as a structured examination of human purpose, it delivers a clear message: we remain human only as long as we choose to move toward the unknown, rather than settling for safe stagnation. Recommended. Not for players seeking relaxed building or constant positive feedback, but for those willing to engage with a serious narrative about why exploration defines humanity.

Fun for the first few hours but starts to punish you really heavily for staying too long in one spot. Type of game where even with a lot of city builder experience, unless you know the events you will likely fail the first playthrough. Interesting story and mechanisms but too linear to be worth replaying in order to do everything right and succeed.

Hull Integrity Maintenance Simulator. I really wanted to play this game for a long time, since it has been announced. And when I finally found a time for it, it appeared to be a disappointment. It basically has the very same design issues as Frostpunk. There is only one successful path you need to figure out by replaying a lot the boring prologue. Before you will be able to find this one successful path - you will be left with lack of necessary resources literally all the time, waiting for game over. Also, after first engine test, constantly degrading hull integrity due to this test feels like a bug. You already used engine, and it shutdown/broken, then you started repairs of the hull. Why on earth that one engine run is now a source of continuous degradation of hull integrity? Since that event, the game is literally about keeping hull integrity and nothing else. At the end of the day, this game is just waste of money. Interesting idea, nice graphics, but execution is way below being playable or enjoyable. Annoying at best.

The game is difficult, just as many others say. It is not your typical city-builder simulator, the mechanics of finite resources and a constant 'ticking timer' make it much more stressful. The closest comparison is Oxygen Not Included: you literally have no option to just sit back and chill; you need to be doing something productive every single moment. I failed a couple of times and only managed to finish the game on my third attempt. If crisis management is your thing, this game is definitely for you. Just be prepared - it can absolutely make your stress levels peak!

Pros: - Insanely good soundtrack - Looks great. with plenty of attention to detail - Fun progression and interesting mechanics to pick up, plays differently enough from other games of this genre (closest one is probably Frostpunk) - Challenge level appropriate to be engaging without being stressful Cons: - Definitely a difficult one to get started on, you will spend the first couple of hours trying way too hard to manage things perfectly and inevitably fail because you weren't able to properly strategize from the beginning. Can be frustrating but also makes you feel good once you get a feel for it - Performance is far from perfect for what the game is, had a few crashes myself - Sountrack is 10 Euros :( Overall, great game. Could use some polish and will potentially frustrate you quite a lot at the beginning, but is well replayable and gives a sense of accomplishment when you finally feel like you can actually manage the station properly.

I want to preface this by saying this: I typically don't enjoy city-building games. With that out of the way, the review: IXION is a city-building game through and through, with some extra systems attached to give it the science fiction coat of paint (i.e planet exploration). There are plenty of standard sci-fi themes here as well if you're willing to read flavor text and sit and have a think while you're waiting for various events. It's a little on the nose in some places with, for lack of a better word, the "final boss", being heavily implied to be a caricature of a tech-billionaire, which isn't inherently a bad thing, and I do like the way it's presented. The overarching goal of IXION never really changes: you MUST find a new home for humanity, and you will need to Make Decisions that Matter. To be frank, the game is quite linear in it's storytelling, with admittedly little replay value outside of achievement hunting because events have no randomization and outside of small things like people dying or exactly how much resource you get, your decisions really don't matter all that much. The soundtrack does a fantastic job setting the mood as well Despite that, I found myself much more attached to the people living in my space station than I ever have been to citizens in other city builders, like SimCity. By the end of my first play-through, I had a final death rate of ~2%, but I cared a lot more about each death, each industrial accident adding to the body count. Part of that is absolutely influenced by the scale IXION is working on, with there being a good chance your final population probably hovering around 5-6 thousand. I played on normal difficulty and I mostly stayed away from wikis and threads, and I will admit I was a little surprised that it felt rather forgiving given the pitch. The first two chapters are far and away the hardest in my opinion as you scramble to get your bearings and refine your approach, and the latter half is basically a time sink if you put literally any amount of thought into your planning. There's a specialization system that feels intended to reward you for building your sectors to do one thing, but for the most part I ignored it, aside from dedicating one sector to waste processing simply because those buildings are very large and it was more economical to build 8 of them in one place rather than spreading them out. There are at least two endings to the game, but really it's a red/blue situation, with one focusing on liberating yourself from the chains of a mega-corp or simply doing what you are told. Near as I can tell it literally doesn't matter, with no real incentive to go one way or the other. Flip a coin, there's not really any way to lock yourself out unless you left the game running by accident while you went to the store or what-have-you. I took my time with this one. There being on-paper penalties for staying in one place for too long, but as long as you aren't overworking your workers or expanding too fast, the penalties are quite literally a non-issue, and there's plenty of leeway for messing up if you don't rush through the first couple of chapters. Take your time, make sure you gather up everything you can, and I have no doubt you'll be able to weather any challenge.

IXION has a lot of things going for it. It looks beautiful, the city-building is engaging and has interesting decisions to make, the system discovery and exploitation is fun, the story is reasonably interesting. A few annoying interface/QOL issues that will never be fixed. But ultimately, I can't recommend the game because the fundamental game design, from somewhere very early in the design process, is designed around two incompatible pillars: 1) you must replay the game a lot, with multiple playthroughs and/or savescumming, to be at all successful 2) you spend most of the game waiting. The replay mechanics are most obvious in the research events, which are completely static decision trees that can have either very good or very bad effects, and the only way to really know is to try them and then try differently next time. But there's also a lot of scripted events that you'll want to plan ahead for, and even building placement has an element of learn-and-retry because you can't move buildings and rebuilding them is slow. And when I say that you spend a lot of time waiting, I mean full hands-off-keyboard while the game runs at the max 3x speed, which you'll never leave unless you want to watch an environmental animation at 1x speed. If the game had a 10x speed I'd use it for most of the game. What this boils down to is that you simply cannot avoid spending a lot of time sitting and waiting for the game to run out some timer for the fifth time so you can fix some error or another. And that's simply not fun. If a full playthrough of the game took, like, three hours I think the retry factor would be fine, but I'm guessing a full run is at least 10 hours and that's just not happening.

故事向模拟经营类游戏，自由度较少，内容线性，但如果音乐、美术、叙事能够对你的胃口，会是一个很享受的游戏。 不过重复游玩性很低，我打通了剧情之后就封存、不开了。