Ixion PS5 Review!

Some games hook you simply by way of a good story, others by strong gameplay and design. Some games make it too easy to play and complete, while others challenge you so hard that the payoff isn’t worth the stress. It’s a balance that is seemingly impossible to master, Triple A and Indie companies alike have struggled with this balance since the dawn of gaming many decades ago. Gamers in their truest nature are always looking for more, that next big challenge, that next deep lore adventure. Much like life itself, we are simply never satisfied and will always find things to replace, fix, or expand detail into. But sometimes there comes a game that can satisfy most of those desires in one hit, a game that despite its shortcomings or its difficulty, you find yourself playing it again even after you told yourself you’d had enough.

Ixion, has been that game for me. Having read a little bit about the game before playing it and seen mixed reviews for it’s difficulty but being hooked in by its artstyle and premise I just had to try it out for myself and see what all the fuss was about.

If the world was on the brink of collapse, do you think you could lead the best and brightest to find a new home and begin anew? Ixion asks that very question. The year is 2049 and the DOLOS Aerospace Engineering Corporation has completed construction of a new engine for interstellar travel. The VOHLE engine, and it has been equipped to the Tiqqun mobile space station and is ready for it’s first test and maiden journey to find Humanity a new home. Before you can set off however, you need to establish the basics of a habitat within the station. A mess hall, food production, accommodation, supply and production facilities. This serves as a tutorial for the bulk of what you’ll be doing for the entire game.

Once the basics have been established, your journey begins. The VOHLE engine is fired up and the fabric of space and time shifts in front of you. Only something has gone horribly wrong. In the process of jumping into interstellar space, the sheer power of the drive process by which it accesses this hyperspace, causes an immense energy burst that tears a chunk out of the moon as you blast open the fabric of space time. The ensuing chaos causes a lunarclysm on Earth. Storms, Volcano eruptions, Tsunamis, you name it. The world is ravaged and devastated by disaster until nothing is left. No seas, no lush land. Just a solid ball of scorched, arid land and toxic air remains. The Tiqqun exits hyperspace at an unknown time in the distant future, actually, it isn’t clear if it’s the future or an alternate reality, one changed to the very core as a result of our actions. But the mission has not changed. It’s up to you to find what’s little is left of humanity, and a new home to begin again.

Ixion requires an iron will, to see out it’s challenging gameplay, after all, yours is the shoulders that the fate of humanity rests!

Gameplay

Ixion starts out seemingly simple enough. You’re shown the Tiqqun in all it’s glory, a massive space station that is literally empty. The first load of specialists arrive and you need to set up the basics, the game holds your hand for a little while, guiding you through the steps of setting up the basics. A workshop; so that you can build all the necessary buildings to run the Tiqqun. A mess hall; to feed all your workers. An insect farm; to make the food your workers will eat in said mess hall. And a stockpile; to store all that food for automatic distribution when the mess hall requires said food.

From here it’s all about learning how to find, mine and consume the resources you’ll need for you and the Tiqqun to survive. A probe launcher to find resources, science and points of interest throughout each system you travel to, including your starting system. As you progress deeper into the game and days, or “cycles” go by, events start occurring more frequently. Events like dispatching crews to points of interest and learning more about what happened to Earth and your mission to find a new home. Events like crew members experiencing loss or sadness at the realisation that Earth and likely all their loved ones are gone. These all have effects on the crews’ trust in your leadership and all this is happening while the hull of the Tiqqun is slowly degrading, from general wear and tear. Even beyond this steady hull decline, every warp permanently damages the hull irreparably. So after the initial Earth phase tutorial, the game quickly becomes a game about managing rapidly declining resources, hull repair and crew trust, all whilst trying to complete your mission and find everyone a new home.

Along your journey, the points of interest you find tell the story about what happened after the Tiqqun warped for the first time. The damage left in its wake, the subsequent declaration of DOLOS as an enemy of the United Nations. The creation and deployment of other similar ships and their own journeys, you can also send expeditions to planets to find useful tech to help in future exploration. Accidents can happen both on the station and during research expeditions, causing injuries or even death. Many of these events can have permanent detriments to the crews’ trust in you and you can mitigate that by building monuments and entertainments that counter that instability and keep the balance in your favour.

All of these mechanics synergise very well with each other, but be prepared for the long haul. I’m sure if you play smarter than I did, you can likely progress far quicker than I did, but my tortoise RTS brain wants to make sure I cover all my bases tenfold before I make any solid progress. So my time on each step was likely far too thorough, both play styles have their merits too. The crew generally don’t like it when you stay too long in a system and thus you’ll get a permanent -1 in stability, affecting their trust. Production is a key part of progression, as is expansion and space management. Every structure takes up a specific amount of grid size and there’s only so many you can have in one sector before the game recommends you expand to other sectors.

Oh did I mention there’s more than one sector? Yeah, the game actually gives you a total of six sectors. But don’t be fooled thinking they’re free expansions that only cost a one time fee to unlock and then give you complete freedom of expansion. No, with each expansion, comes more stress on the hull. Suddenly you need more buildings to maintain that, requiring more materials at a faster rate. Each sector has to feed and house its own workers. Suddenly your resources are stretched thinner than ever and it’s a race to make sure you don’t run out and have the crew start losing their faith in you.

You can have each sector specialise in one area of expertise however, and simply transfer resources between each sector as necessary. This might actually be the go to strategy in hindsight, but every time I tried to expand, I wound up running too close to failure states and would always reload and stick to one sector.

It’s a challenging game that’s no lie, during my playthrough I had to lower the difficulty from normal to easy as I was rapidly approaching my own doom at several points, for varying reasons. Sometimes I was running low on trust, other times I ran dangerously low on hull integrity. Even after changing the difficulty and saving my skin, I chose to remain on easy mode, which still itself feels like what normal mode perhaps should have been. Now I see why reviews said the game was more for seasoned vets or masochists who love being slowly tortured with constant stability decreases. It’s a cat/mouse/dog game; your objective of finding a new home being the mouse, you and the Tiqqun are the cat chasing it down and the dog chasing you is everything from the crews’ trust in you, resource management, to the slow approach of death by hull depletion and station destruction. It’s a lot to take in, but if you ever find yourself with the hull almost breached, barely holding onto the crews’ trust and fighting for all your lives. It can be a rather invigorating rush!

Graphics

The presentation and design of Ixion feels like it has been gathered and inspired by a multitude of Sci-fi games sprinkled with a bit of Real Time Strategy flair. The star system map that shows the current star system in real time, is reminiscent of the galaxy map from the Mass Effect franchise and the interior view gives me the 3 quarter, top down view, vibe of Command and Conquer games. Even the radial menu is taken straight out of a multitude of sci-fi and some FPS game series that use very similar models. And it’s this sort of familiarity that made Ixion easy to understand at first. Its various camera modes are all gorgeous to look at, building models within the interior of the Tiqqun are really detailed. Gone are the days when we could excuse indie developers for sub-optimal graphics and art direction due to lack of funding, gone are the days where indie games couldn’t be compared to triple A titles. In fact, I’d go so far as to say indie developers are now setting an unprecedented standard of quality that triple A titles are now struggling to match or exceed despite their often several times larger budget and development teams.

I have come across a few bugs, but they’ve been nothing crazy, the most common bug I seem to find is that I get a text box that gets stuck on screen and won’t allow me to dismiss it. It’s not game breaking in any way, it’s more just an annoyance I wish I didn’t have to deal with. But it’s fixed with a quick save and reload, so it’s not so bad.

I think my favourite thing about the graphics is the same thing I always love seeing in games like this. Watching things build in real time. Ixion has a more futuristic way of building, but you can still see the stages of the build in real time, so long as you aren’t fast forwarding time. And it is quite amusing to watch them tear down a structure at 3x speed. I love how alive the stations’ interior feels. Lots of moving parts, almost every building has an animation when it is actively churning away. The roads are filled with tiny people shaped sprites walking around and a set of supply vehicles that move around as resources are made, stored or transferred to their respective stations for consumption. The exterior view shows the same features about anything that is currently in construction on the hull but the best thing about this camera is the detail in the stations’ model and its surrounding environment. Whenever you move the station to orbit a new planet, you can watch the station move in real time to its plotted destination, which I think is really neat. From the system view, you can see the star system, from here you can send out probes to find planets, valuable resources and points of interest to further the story or acquire other sorts of resources like research and science. Some star systems have system wide events, for example one system I travelled to had an Ion storm surging around half of the star system. Making it dangerous territory to send any ships through, but within those areas might be areas of interests, or large deposits of resources so it’s a risk you might have to take.

It all comes together nicely, being able to use the different cameras to get different perspectives on what’s going on as you build, upgrade, probe, mine and research new ways to survive in the cold, dangerous, unforgiving vastness of space is something only a few games have been able to accurately present and I think that Ixion does a great job of this.

Audio

Okay, now, hear me out. Audio is hard, I totally get that, especially when you have a specific theme of the game. However, for a game with a price tag like Ixions’, I guess I expected better? I’ll break it down for you;

The music is good, by no means is it bad. But it isn’t great, and I’ve seen smaller games do more with less. But the music is good, full of that wonder and intrigue that one expects when playing games set amongst the sparkling vastness of space and the mysterious unknown that comes with it. There’s voice acting too, but it’s nothing really to write home about. Real “highschool performing arts video project vibes”, if there’s anything that can be called as such, Ixion would be it. But that’s not a great disappointment, what is, is probably the on board AI Edden. You’ll get used to hearing her every few minutes as you progress through the game. She narrates basically everything, from research tasks, to resource management and of course, the crews’ trust in you and hull integrity. You’ll hear her so often, that after a while, her flat, emotionless, robotic voice goes from being informative, to grating on the ears, then she fades into white noise and you’ll barely even register her. Or you’ll brush her off because you’ve heard the same “Administrator, the crews’ trust in you is falling” about a dozen times in the space of about twenty minutes.

The sound effects in this game fall into the same category as the music. Good, but not great. Heard it all before and done better in games with smaller budgets and price tags. It is nice to hear the whur of electrics and the pangs of industrial construction, but beyond that, there’s not a lot to mention here. I do wish that there was more intense music that played when things got heated, I mean there was, but nothing that really spoke to me in a way that said “the hull is critical and needs repairs asap” or “the crew is about to mutiny if you don’t improve their trust in you”. So while I appreciate that it is there, it just sorta slides into background noise that I never really paid all that much attention to. When it comes to game music, I want to FEEL the moment just as much as I HEAR it. I want music that invigorates me when I need invigoration, that unnerves me when I need to be unnerved, that saddens me when I need to feel sad. And with Ixion, I just don’t really feel anything with its music. Though it might actually be thematically a perfect fit, because you are the administrator. Responsible for the care and growth of all those beneath you, some, likely many, will die. So maybe the music does fit in that sense of “you are the administrator and you’re not allowed to feel emotion or else risk the success of the entire mission”. But I just don’t really feel any connection to it, so if that was their point, then I guess they nailed it.

All in all, a pretty average experience in sound design.

Final Thoughts?

I can say with a great deal of confidence that I spent way too many hours playing this game in the time since I got my hands on it. That in itself should speak volumes for the enjoyment I experienced while playing this game. Ixion is a step outside of my usual genre, but still invokes some of my core interests; Space and Strategy. At its core, it presents an interesting story, one of survival out of necessity. But also one of intrigue and mystery. I do find myself getting lost in games with deep exploration, especially ones of cosmic proportions. But small things like the occasional bug, or music that doesn’t invoke feeling take me out of the experience. It’s not cheap either, for a game with a price tag of $50+ on Steam and the Playstation store, I usually expect a lot more. But I suppose it’s not entirely without its merit as I definitely spent a lot more hours playing this than I probably needed for the review. And it is one that I plan on playing more in future. But for the game’s difficulty, especially for those who haven’t played games like this before. It might be viewed as too high an entry price for such a challenging game.

I sing its praises from the rooftops, it has beautiful cinematics and gorgeous graphics for how simplistic the style is. It features an intriguing story and premise, full of mystery, betrayal and survival. Where it could stand to improve would indeed be price, first and foremost, that is what I see as the biggest blocker to it being picked up more readily. If you ever catch it on sale, do pick it up if you’re interested at all in a space survival game. Other points would mostly just be sound design, a more varied soundtrack with more pronounced highs and lows. Better mixing of voice talents and maybe even some voice lines for random crew events, just to break up the autonomy that is the AI companion Edden. I would have legitimately loved to hear even just a couple voice lines from random crew members in response to sudden and hefty trust lost/gained. Or even in response to accidents happening in the Tiqqun, instead of the generic “Administrator, an accident has occurred on the Tiqqun” something more specific, delivered by a crew member would have much more impact and urgency.

I would also love to see some DLC expand on other possible outcomes or even a new threat. But the ending to the game makes such a thing probably unlikely. If DLC was possible, it would probably have to occur before the final star system leading to the games’ conclusion.

Ixion is a solid experience and I’m glad I got the chance to sink my teeth into something new. And if you get the chance, I think you will too!

Game Details

Game Genre – Space, Survival, Strategy
Developers – Bulwark Studios
Publishers – Kasedo Games
Rating – PG
Year of Release – 2025 (PS5), 2022 (PC)
Platforms – PS5, PC (Steam)
Mode(s) of Play – Single player

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