You know, games with strange title names should come with a pronunciation guide. Is it I-Xion or Ic-se-ion? I don’t think that is what the little people whose lives I had in my hands cared about when it came to their inevitable deaths. Ixion is another one of those survival management games, similar to the fantastic Frostpunk though this time I’m playing on PC, which has the added benefit of quality control set-ups and 60 fps. It is less brutal than the post-apocalyptic tundra I found myself ruling like a Dickens villain, but at least in space, you can’t hear the screams of child labor.

The first time I saw French Developer Bulwark Studios’ latest city-building strategy game was during last year’s PC Gaming Show. The one where they tried to be funny as well as featuring Mica Burton, daughter of a great blind reader. It was the video where there are thousands of people at a festival for a tech giant as he unveiled space tech to save humanity. That’s the wet dream of Elon, Jeffrey, and the rest of them. As the new administrator of the DOLOS AEC-backed mission, you take control of a new spacecraft with an experimental new engine to voyage across the stars. 

At least you would if it wasn’t for being an experimental new sci-fi toy in a survival game where you’ll have to stretch your resources thinner than the strip of cloth up a man’s crack in Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Fall of Ixion (1588). Similar to the idea of a Dyson Sphere, your mega hotel for the unlucky vestiges of humanity is built just so your engine can look cool and your mobile space station fits conventional ideas of awesome. We all know the truth, you don’t need aerodynamics in space, and that’s why the Borg Cube is the most efficient ship despite looking as ugly as sin.

Efficient is a key phrase here too, as with all of the resource management survival titles out there right now, you need to be efficient with materials and space. This is why I draw the comparison of Frostpunk. With only a small area to start in and later the entire space station through expansion, you have to reserve space for homes, healthcare, a place to eat and produce food, and more. Each section of the Tiqqun separately stores each material, making it important to micro-manage resources a little more.

Sometimes those resources are raw and have to be produced. More room is taken up by that, both in terms of storage and space as well as taking up the resources to build. This is where the challenge comes in, maintaining those resources once you’ve effectively jumped to a new star system or so far into the future that you need to use many of them to stay afloat. To repair the hull (or build anything) you need iron. To get iron you need to send out satellites, which are made of iron, and those deposits can only be obtained by ships, which are made of iron. The problem there is that these aren’t very abundant deposits.

There were a couple of times I thought I should stop and restart, hitting a theoretical brick wall. In practice, I sometimes just needed a break to look at the problem in a different way. Overall, the difficulty of Ixion is certainly there, and like its frosty genre-defining counterpart it is difficult to tell at the moment whether your hubris will be your downfall. Ixion is a game of spinning plates in a space opera focused on details. Most of the time, I feel in control of those plates as more and more chaos and drama plays out.

Where I think Ixion failed to entirely grab me was the many bountiful paragraphs of detail when your ship would explore the ruins of humanity’s other attempts to explore the stars. One instance was the “They Call It A Mine” mission where towards the end there is a note of: “but it [is] accompanied by a helical-shaped symbol;” for love nor money, I can’t see the tittle (the dot in an I) on that I in helical without getting far too close to the monitor. Though there are ways to help with things like dyslexia, such as bolding important details to draw attention, not all of the font or typeface work is helpful to me.

Though Ixion is captivating in terms of its narrative that space is dangerous and will hand you back some bitter consequences if you mess around, that is only one part of this brilliantly crafted puzzle. The rest is in your city/resource management inside major Tom’s capsule of horrible efficiency, the outer shell of the Tiqqun being a resource-hungry shell of misery, and the final aspect being your space exploration map. Balancing those with any sense of expertise is difficult at the best of times, never mind when you don’t have enough workers to make each sector of the Tiqqun safe.

A bit part of the USP from Ixion is the ability to move your space station. As you might guess, it isn’t as easy as just pointing in a direction and going. Soon enough you’ll find you can create batteries, storing a small amount of power during stationary phases, which becomes very important when trying to explore.

This adds a layer of difficulty to moving your colony of hundreds, as you need to maintain power to continue production, but only have a small amount of backup. You can make as many batteries as you can conceivably make, but each section needs to be powered by its own energy reserves. This makes even “simple” exploration a game of strategically building up resources.

Ultimately, I think Bulwark Studios’ sci-fi opera not only stuns visually with the picturesque scale on display when you part up next to where I’ve killed many Kerbals but wonderfully balances city building with survival management. It isn’t purposefully easy but also isn’t demonstrably hard either unless your hubris leads you to spinning wheels for eternity. Dramatic, fun, and challenging, Ixion is a great entry into the survival management genre.

A PC review copy of IXION was provided by Kasedo Games for the purposes of this review.

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Ixion

$34.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• A stellar example of survival management.
• Look at it, it's beautiful!

Cons

• That font is not exactly dyslexic-friendly.
• Less than perfect performance.