Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://www.kasedogames.com/ixion Price: 25-35 USD (source: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/ixion/info/) Blurb: “Authorised by DOLOS AEC, you will guide the Tiqqun space-station onwards in a perilous journey to find a new home for humanity. Station infrastructure, population management, exploration, survival, these responsibilities fall to you. Will you find hope out there in the dark? Good luck, Administrator.“ Before I get into this game, I would like you to experience what got me – hook line and sinker. The soundtrack! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhTXyUERugQ Should the link be removed due to copyright, search for; “IXION Vanir’s legacy”. Do crank that volume to 11 and I suggest headphones, something that can handle bass, as the first bass drops hard! Ixion is not a native Linux game though, which is a crying shame. If you want to play it, you need proton (https://www.protondb.com/app/1113120)
So as you already know, the soundtrack is amazing, coupled with the beautiful views of the earth and other planets, you get whisked away – right into the fantasy. Immersion levels during travel, and cut scenes, will let you forget about reality completely. I am not even going to say any more on this topic, as you need to experience it first hand. The main game play loop reminds me of Frostpunk, but there are enough differences for this to be its own game. At heart, this is a colony management sim, but there is no micro. You start in one of the six sectors of the ship, and you open more as you progress. You have to think about placing structures as you have limited space and/or resources. One of the bonuses is that the game does not penalise you for destroying a building. You get credited 100% of the materials. Though the game does not involve micro-management, the things like water and food and power are still present. The game also features a skill tree and quests. Yes, you get to build miners, cargo ships, science ships, and probes that let you play inside the craft and outside, in the solar system.
This is all fine and dandy, but the game rounds itself out with a kick-ass (can we say that?) story line. Your mission is to take humanity to their future on an exoplanet. To be honest, whenever I hear the word exoplanet, I think rogue planet. <Spoiler alert> Skip to the next paragraph, if you don’t want any spoilers.<Spoiler starts> However, your jump goes wrong and instead of jumping through space, you jump through time. You go from being the heroes of humanity, straight to being the villain.<Spoiler ends> There is the usual resource management, quests with outcomes that fit the old adage of: you can have something well done, cheap, or fast, but never all three. You also need to manage your “trust rating” as the administrator of the vessel as well as the people on the vessel’s happiness and work optimization. If you overwork your people, there will be accidents, which have an influence on things like morale. Nobody wants strikes and riots. Then again, you can employ the BBC, I mean propaganda centre (we are splitting hairs, aren’t we?) and nightclubs to improve morale. The game was the highest rated and most played demo in the steam next festival, which alone should tell you something. Though the reviews on Steam are “mixed”, the complaints are that people find it difficult, most are “stuck” on level two. This was the same with Frostpunk. You cannot play this game like you do Starcraft; it is not that type of game, you need to consider every move, like a game of chess. You need to weigh up your mission, with the needs of your population and with the resources at hand. For instance, you can keep building storage spaces, but each one requires power and workers, on top of the building cost. Sometimes you have to turn buildings off, to get power or people back to do other things, and this is where many players miss the plot completely.
The game play is actually fun and you are always chasing the next story point in the great mystery. Resource collection and management does not feel like a major grind. The game loads pretty quickly on your SSD, unlike another release this month that feels like it’s loading from a floppy – yes, I’m looking at YOU – Knights of Honor II! If you need to buy yourself a Christmas present this year, consider this awesome game. Local pricing puts the game at a respectable price too, considering Knights of honor II is double the price for half the fun. However, the game is a bit linear, with the quests providing multiple paths allowing for some replay-ability. Though I have not completed the game (it came out this week and I really have no time to play), I still recommend it based on what I have experienced so far. Yup, sounds nuts, but I am a sucker for story-rich games. The game does have a few paper cuts that need fixing: for instance, you can move anything between sectors, except water. Why not? Anyway, it does not take away from the game, so I will stick to calling these issues paper cuts.