IXION from Kasedo Games and Bulwark Studios is a city-builder sim experience now available on PlayStation 5. Learn more in our IXION review!
IXION from Kasedo Games and Bulwark Studios is a city-builder sim experience now available on PlayStation 5. Since the planet is pretty much on the brink of ecosystemic collapse, DOLOS A.E.C. is leading efforts to try and find a new place for humanity to call home. Unfortunately, the prototype space station Tiqqun finds itself cast adrift, and it’s now up to you to fix things to carry on with the main mission. You are the Administrator and must always be on high alert so that you can assess the current situation, reevaluate your plan, and adapt accordingly. Space is a dangerous place to find yourself in without the resources needed to keep the lights on, so you’ll have to scavenge as much stuff as possible to upgrade the Tiqqun so that it can carry onward with its mission.
Actions have consequences, so you’ll always need to consider what the outcome of your choices will be and if they are going to lead to a new achievement or doom everyone in the Tiqqun. You’re not only managing resources, you’re also managing the lives of the people on the station. You’re searching for survivors. You’re making sure that you have enough energy to power all structures within the station so that you can feed the crrew, sort out resources, and build more important and costly buildings.
The game can be played in one of three difficulty modes: Journey, Default, or Challenge. The Journey setting will disable some hard mechanics, the hull will be studier, your crew will be understanding, your crew will have more workers, accidents will be infrequent, and resources will be abundant. The Default setting will have you take on the originally intended experience, which is recommended for gamers who are familiar with city-builder games. For Default, the hull will need constant maintenance, your crew is demanding, accidents are frequent, and resources are limited. If you go with the Challenge setting, then you’ll need to be ready to take on many issues all at once! For this one, the hill is very much falling apart, your crew is uncompromising, accidents are frequent and more lethal, and resources are scarce, but at least you’ll be rewarded with a trophy – more on this in a bit.
You can also play this in the Custom setting, which will allow you to fine-tune and customize your experience. Thanks to this, you’ll be able to choose the values for hull integrity changes for things such as VOHLE jump penalty and depletion – that is, when you make a massive jump elsewhere – or the depletion for opened sectors. You can also set how many repairs take place per cycle and the amount per repair. Choose if there are to be any penalties for failures, as well as enable or disable penalties for overwork, unpowered sectors, homelessness, homesickness, deaths, weather, and more. You can select the meal frequency as well as how many crew members are fed with each food unit. There are many more customization options, so you can definitely find a combination that suits your playing style.
You’ll be switching between the different sectors inside the station, the outside of the station, and space itself. The inside of the station is where you’ll be adding buildings such as stockpiles to store resources like alloy and food, crew quarters for crew members, a lab where you can spend the valuable science you collect so that you can unlock new research or a massive engine that you’ll need to install in order to make huge jumps through space. On the outside of the station, you could, for example, install a solar panel or two that will boost energy levels.
The game features a full trophy list with a Platinum trophy waiting for you. The list is split into 42 Bronze trophies, 9 silver trophies, and a single Gold trophy for you to work on. It’s a long list, so there are plenty of objectives for you to complete as you aim to add that shiny Platinum trophy to your collection. Along with a trophy tied to completing the game’s prologue – and another one that will pop if you fail to complete the prologue – some of the things you’ll need to work on for this Platinum include building a health center, having 5 accidents within a single cycle, transferring 300 resources between sectors in a single cycle, having 5 mining ships active at the same time, destroying 200 buildings in a single playthrough, having an observatory in each sector, having fires in 20 buildings at the same time, visiting 15 planets, and, as mentioned before, completing the game while playing in the Challenge Mode.
IXION is a city-builder sim experience set in a space station. Since the planet is pretty much on the brink of ecosystemic collapse, DOLOS A.E.C. is leading efforts to try and find a new place for humanity to call home. Unfortunately, the prototype space station Tiqqun finds itself cast adrift, and it’s now up to you to fix things to carry on with the main mission. You are the Administrator and must always be on high alert so that you can assess the current situation, reevaluate your plan, and adapt accordingly. Space is a dangerous place to find yourself in without the resources needed to keep the lights on, so you’ll have to scavenge as much stuff as possible to upgrade the Tiqqun so that it can carry onward with its mission. IXION is out today on PlayStation 5 with a $34.99 price tag.
Disclaimer
This IXION review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by Kasedo Games.
