IXION review – an exciting journey into space

Sometimes it happens that an unexpected game genre hides a quality story. Who would have thought that an inconspicuous indie strategy from a French team of fifteen would in places resemble the best of Mass Effect or the movie Interstellar in its plot. But it turned out that way, and with each next chapter and each next hyperspace jump deeper into the universe, the game tricks you more around your finger, including through a gripping story, great music, unexpected twists in a clever plot and, of course, great gameplay. . Just as the end of last year gave us the brilliant indie game Inscryption, this year we also got a last-minute strong entry into this alternative gaming scene.

• Platform: PC
• Publication date: 07/12/2022
• Producer: Studios Boulevard (France)
• Genre: story building strategy
• Czech localization: Not
• Multiplayer: Not
• Data to download: 20 GB
• Game time: from 30 to 70 hours
• Price: 1499 CZK (couples)

Millionaire Space Expedition

The best science fiction stories are usually those that don’t go too far into the future, but instead build on the real foundations of our present. This is how the introduction to IXION begins, set in the year 2059 and tells the story of an eccentric millionaire whose name is not Elon Musk, but who is also obsessed with the idea of ​​a private expedition into space to change the fate of the human race. The expedition will take place aboard a massive vessel called the Tiqqun, designed to carry thousands of passengers and equipped with its own greenhouses or factories to extract and process raw materials during the journey. However, above all, Tiqqun is equipped with the revolutionary Vole Engine, which allows you to travel through “self-similar space” or warp reality and travel through “hyperspace”, as we could see in the movie “Interstellar”.

But during a trial run of the engine in lunar orbit, a terrible catastrophe occurs, and Tikkun ends up in the solar system a few decades later (“This little maneuver will cost us decades!”), when all signs of human life and civilization have long since died out. But traces remain, indicating that humanity may have managed to send other expeditions into the depths of space in an attempt to find a new home. Having extracted raw materials from the remnants of the solar system, you also go on a long journey into the depths of space. In the process, you will face terrifying dangers of human, alien and completely natural nature. The game combines the ideas and elements of many classic sci-fi stories very well, from Alien to Thing and even Space Odyssey, Sphere or Event Horizon.

A terrible disaster occurs when the drive is subjected to a test run.

Your role in this story is that of an administrator in charge of the overall management of the Tiqqun vessel. Initially, you have to build a “small city” on a huge deck, which will serve both for the crew’s accommodation and for the production and processing of raw materials, including food or water. During your long journey, you will invent and improve technology, repair damage to the station, explore new planets, and make political decisions that affect the morale and confidence of your team. If you have played the legendary Polish strategy game Frostpunk, then you know exactly what awaits you. Among other things, both games have similar visual design, especially the illustrations for them. But IXION is much more diverse and its history is much more interesting.

Killing cold darkness

For a strategy game, IXION does a very good job of creating an atmosphere of horror evoked by the unforgiving cold void of space. As soon as you start the engine for the first time, your craft will inevitably begin to fall apart, and from then on you will need to constantly patch it with new steel plates to keep it in working condition at all. The initial meager amount of resources, including food, will quickly dry up, and you will have to work hard to start growing enough of your own resources. But from time to time, some kind of active threat is thrown into it, like a hostile spaceship with people accusing you of destroying your home planet. And far worse things lurk deep in the darkness. One of the best moments of the story is when you jump to the coordinates of the place where the next human expedition was supposed to wait … and find yourself among its wreckage, among which dead bodies float. Supported by amazing music, this game is able to create a stunning atmosphere that this year’s “horror” Callisto Protocol would envy.

The creators themselves say that their main idea was to capture and subordinate everything to this atmosphere of a desperate journey into the unknown, where you are surrounded by immense and merciless cold darkness. That’s why the game is relatively difficult in terms of difficulty – at least on the first try. Keeping the entire plant up and running, despite all the restrictions and threats, is a difficult task that you may not be able to handle the first time. But the creators are counting on it and warmly recommend starting over. When you try again, learning from the past, you will find that you are much better at it. At about the thirtieth hour of the game, I was in despair, but from the fiftieth hour all the processes were already so polished for me that I literally “passed” the last chapters of the non-linear plot without any problems. A very interesting part of the challenge that you won’t fully appreciate until you’ve experienced it is that there are 6 sectors/decks in Tikkun and you control each of them as your own “separate city”. This makes the game much more difficult than the single city offered in Frostpunk.

The intention was to subordinate everything to the atmosphere of a desperate pilgrimage into the unknown.

After all of the above, you will probably look at the average rating on Steam and think that I have lost my mind. The game currently has very mixed reviews. However, as someone who played the game very actively prior to its release, on its “launch day” and after, as well as actively watching streams about it and participating in discussions with the developers and the community on Discord, I know very well that this negative rating does not reflect the actual quality of the game, but its technical condition at the time of launch. On the one hand, the game is very demanding on hardware. Some will say “poorly optimized”, but I think it has more to do with the absurd sophistication of the 3D graphics details in such a massive strategy. But first of all, during the release, the developers released several patches that, although they fixed the balancing of raw materials, broke many other things – and many players also came to saved positions. Other negative reviews come from players who find the game unnecessarily difficult. But that’s exactly how it should work – to the limit, which I spoke about above. Once you realize that literally everything on board, from steel to water, is completely recyclable, the complexity of the game almost disappears, leaving only a great journey through a non-linear story. But the feeling of complete satisfaction from the correct construction of Tikun will never be taken away from you.