Reseñas

• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  released in a non broken state in 2022 that's a achievement
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  AS LONG AS WE’RE LIVING AND BREATHING, THERE’S MORE WE CAN DO. WE JUST HAVE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH. ~ JAMES HOLDEN Remember the Cant
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  IXION is an excellent simulation of trying to manage a """self sufficient""" space station filled with electrical sockets, populated by suicidal children armed with forks, from trying to electrocute themselves. You have been appointed the captain of an unfinished space washing machine with a prototype hyperdrive that is constantly falling apart. Literally, if you do not spend hundreds of tons of alloys weekly to upkeep your ship, you will explode and lose. Coincidentally, you must also use the same resources to build repair facilities and also grow and expand your ship. This basically involves managing a medium sized fleet of haulers and miners to even attempt to keep up with raw resource demand, which take up a lot of space and resources back at home. After blowing up the earth with rotor wash, your crew decides that now is the time to start unionizing and forcing you to adopt very lax labor standards. They become extremely upset when having to work more than the contract they signed, and have also found a large stockpile of explosives and molotovs in the middle of your ship. At the slightest inconvenience, they will start blowing up random buildings in their sector and then complain about it. However, blowing up random buildings also really damages the washing machine, which requires alloys to fix. Alloys, which are made in the furnace that they just blew up 2 days ago. Also, they are now even more sad because the washing machine is falling apart from the explosion they caused and you cant fix it :( This is probably the best time for a labor strike in all of your other critical infrastructure, and probably cause some more explosions along the way. Oh, and best part about these very numerous explosions, is that you get to be part of them! Every 3-5 seconds, you need to find which sector something blew up in, and click the green button! Every single time! Otherwise you will hemorrhage ship health and die within days. You can, however, invest a little time into tidying up the situation, and spend a little time scooping up extra resources to fix holes and make people happier. Wait, you get a permanent mood debuff from staying in the same system and trying to solve problems? Awesome, I guess I have to jump to the next system and get even more permanent debuffs to cripple my already dying ship. Amazing difficulty options I can tweak on the fly as I'm learning the game. Jumping into the next system, the fleet of suicidal support ships so essential to my survival decide that their only possible routes are through the spicy thunderstorms that instantly kill them. You can research technologies to give them a *slightly* better chance at survival, but the limited amount of research you can acquire lie through those spicy thunderstorms. I gave up at this point because seeing my ship hull health meter go triple digits into the red from having ISIS cells onboard my ship and losing essential ships who decide that they need to electrocute themselves in the thunderstorm to fix those problems is not fun. Beautiful game, very enthralling story, fun city builder gameplay, horrible balance
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  Slow waste of your time. Accidents need fixed pronto. 1. Even on optimal conditions, severe accidents can occur, and should... OCCASIONALLY. Not once every 2 cycles, and even then, shouldn't kill 3 people and injure 6. 2. The aforementioned accident, that is 100% RNG. Can trigger a downward spiral where your population is SLIGHTLY overworked, and therefore 100% more prone to have an accident. Bringing the ratio to close to one a cycle. Which will make them MORE overworked causing MORE accidents, causing more population overwork, causing more accidents, etc etc. 3. Your ability to get new population to remedy this, is far outpaced by the rate at which accidents take your population out of commission. Seriously, your population are effing morons. 4. When you realize, that accidents are a constant and frequent thing, no matter how carefully you play the game, and understand that you are set up for failure, it makes you not want to play it. (Remember, its RNG based and even in optimal conditions, accidents seem to happen VERY frequently) When did I discover this? About half an hour after my ability to refund. Save yourself the money, and wait for the developer to fix, if that's even something they desire to do. If its "Working as intended", I can think of far better ways to simulate the end of humanity than forcing the player to invest hours into a game before they realize they are unable to fix the problem.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 9, 2022

  Steam really needs a maybe option, more like a 5/10 rn Although right now it's definitely a "wait for balance patches" kinda review As much as I love the concept of IXION, the current balancing makes the game impossibly slow and difficult. You'll often find yourself in a death spiral of events and debuffs that leads you to either a mutiny or your ship falling apart from deterioration. Not to mention, the current version of the crew's "moral" is just a bunch of +1's and -1's. In which the game will randomly give you -1's to make you fail. Being in a system too long will give you a -1, but leaving the previous system ALSO gives you a -1 penalty. Many times I had to go back an autosave because a random -1 causes my crew to mutiny and I had no time to prepare, having to jump back a save and build a monument to give me a +1 in advance. It's not exactly a fun system in it's current form. TLDR; Needs balancing but it really cool. Way too punishing in it's current form.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 10, 2022

  Ixion is a great game with severe balancing issues, and odd design choices. PROS: - First game of this type I've played with an actually interesting storyline - Cool mechanics, and excellent use of the limited space you have as something to consider when building. - Fun to play for the first 3 or 4 hours until you run into the balancing issues. - Great graphics, music and performance. - Excellent atmosphere; it gives a cool space opera vibe, combined with a Frostpunk style desperation for survival feel. - Relatively bug free, from a functionality standpoint. CONS - Excessively punishing. I understand I need to learn the game and adapt to its challenges, but this is straight up annoying. I restarted the game 4 times with the knowledge accumulated in previous tries, only to get slightly better results...until the next jump, which makes things even worse. - Continuous hull damage which gets worse after each jump is just a resource sink which forces you to build duplicate structures in all your sectors, in order not to loose the game. - Excessively punishing "accidents" system. I don't mean the frequency, I get that's a bug, I mean you STRUGGLE to get a positive balance to your ship's repair rate, some moron trips at work and BAM, -26 damage to the hull. Seriously? I worked for 15 cycles to repair that damage! - Sector opening is a huge resource sink, and it seems like it's meant to throw your entire fragile economy out of balance. You're forced to open new sectors, and when that happens, you need to compensate FAST so your citizens don't revolt and you run out of resources. If you were already having issues with both, you are screwed. - Poorly made resource management system. It's incredibly frustrating to transfer resources from one sector to another with no reliable way to automate it. The interface doesn't help either. Due to this I am forced to duplicate many structures in each sector so I don't have to deal with moving stuff around. Example: my mining ship brings Iron in sector 2, but my warehouses assigned to iron are in sector 1 because that's where the steel mill is. You'd think the game would send the iron where there's room. It doesn't, so I need to build additional structures which eat up resources, power and people to get around it. The same goes for industry, which only links to warehouses in the same sector, not others. - Cumulative systems meant to punish you for: waiting too long in a sector / moving your mothership too much / people get home sick / people are upset there's too many cryo pods in storage because I have no way to feed them or give them housing / there's SPACE WEATHER which messes up your ships / side quests which fail because people are, again, home sick / you have too many resources in the space dock, etc. Individually these are interesting systems. When working together, they're too much. - You cannot have people live in a sector and work in another. The option to have people who awaken out of cryo automatically move to a sector where you know there's a workforce deficit doesn't work. I have to do it by hand. - There's more, but the stuff above is the most annoying. I AM SURE there is a "proper" way to build, research and expand which allows you to mitigate problems before they happen, and leave a system in a good enough shape to help you hold on until you get your shit together in the next one. I'm sure it can be done. But, if there's just one correct way to play the game, and I can't make any mistakes, because they all add up...well, that's not fun. Last point. I really like this game. If this stuff gets tweaked, I will for sure alter my review.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 10, 2022

  As many other reviews have already pointed out, this game is not difficult, it's tedious. It does not respect your time, nor your intelligence. Minor spoilers ahead. In the first chapter, you perform the station's maiden jump, only to seemingly cause the destruction of Earth and the majority of humanity. Because of this, your station gets a permanent -1 stability debuff due to mourning. Okay, fine, makes enough sense I guess. So then, you go about collecting resources and fixing what you can around the station. Apparently though, you're spending too much time in a dead system, so enjoy another permanent -1 stability debuff. But why? Why would you - you know what, never mind. The -2 permanent stability debuff you can work around. It's annoying, but sure, it can be dealt with. You've already got the debuffs and there's no way to get rid of them, might as well explore the first system and get as prepared as you can for the next chapter. But wait, what's that? Another permanent -1 debuff? Why ever for? Because you're no longer in your home system. The one you were punished for staying in. This is but one drop in the ocean of problems this game faces. Alloys are a constant drain, because apparently your station is brittle. To the vast emptiness of space. You are tasked with collecting 500 cryo pods, but are then simultaneously punished for ever having 250 or more cryo pods still frozen. Why? You need to set up more sectors to maintain the functionality of this impossibly brittle ship, but opening up more sectors increases the rate of decay of your station. Why? You need more crew, but the game decided that the majority of the people you de-thawed are non-workers - completely incapable of helping the station in any way whatsoever, other than taking up space. Why? Ultimately, the game leaves you asking the question why? over and over again. Not because the story is particularly interesting or the gameplay is innovative, but because it's fighting you. I really, really wanted to enjoy this game, but it's just mind mindbogglingly frustrating. Again, there's nothing overly complex going on in terms of gameplay, especially if you've played a colony sim before along the lines of Surviving Mars - the declared difficulty comes from poor balancing and arbitrary debuffs that you have no way to properly handle. Could you beat it? Absolutely. Would you enjoy getting to that fabled "golden run"? I know I wouldn't.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 11, 2022

  Game plays like frostpunk and cliff empire had a baby, attached a FTL drive and shot it into space. Is it tedious? At times for sure, the word I'd use is daunting. Is it hard? Sure. Will you have to learn through mistakes and death spirals and start again? Absolutely. Will you beat in your first attempt? Uhh, probably not. (its good to set expectations early) The balance may feel iffy at first until you realise that it's just not a city simulator - it's a strategy/logistics game that has you managing several spinning plates simultaneously. Ixion is closer to a puzzle game in a city building disguise than it is to City Skylines or Tropico. There is no putting the speed on max and walking away to make a coffee; neglect in any area will start a doom spiral that may take you an hour of play time to realize has already locked in your fate. The most limited resource isn't food, people, alloys or electronics, it's building space. Pressure ramps up due to a limited population that needs to be supported in the final bastion of human life - that doesn't sound like a walk in the park, and well, it's not. You both have to expand and continually reoptimize the space you consumed already. Buildings have a limited life span, few if any will stay with you to the end. Don't get attached to patterns or symmetry, you've been warned. Game takes place over the span of a decade, so you can't just breed a population to replace all the people that died from mismanagement and neglect. The population you get access to is just as much as resource to be as carefully managed as the rocks and ice that you mine. Time is not on your side, if you're not pausing to make use of each in game day that goes past, you're gonna fail. If you're not keen to ship people off to another area so you can tear it down and rebuild, you're in for a bad time. Too little building materials and food = doom Too much building materials and food = doom Too many houses = doom via wasting precious space Too few houses = doom via violent uprising The game has no difficulty setting - I like this. You're playing a finely tuned experience that needs as much real time pausing, planning as you spend on max speed waiting for your plans to unfold. When you've bought this amazing game and are struggling, before you come to complain and leave a negative review I have a few tips for you. -Build fewer roads, roads are wasted building space. As I mentioned previously, functionality > prettiness. -Plan your research ahead, research points are a precious resource and you won't be unlocking many upgrades till later on. -Waste is an important resource, make it work for you - stop ejecting it into space (as soon as you can). -Too many cargo ships will doom you, don't plan to mine out a sector. Cargo ships don't have to be active all the time, in fact it is often detrimental if they are. -Be wary of storage, until very late game, having 300+ of whatever resource sitting around is using a lot of building area to sit there and be unproductive. -Specialize your districts, the game only nudges you in that direction rather than grabbing you by the short and curlys and screaming it into your face. You will fail. Buckle up, learn from your mistakes, and throw yourself at it again. This is an excellent game that will test your intelligence and problem solving skills - after the prologue/tutorial, the game will not hold your hand. This game does not deserve the mixed reviews from people upset that they didn't get a trophy for just participating. This is not a pushover game one can blaze through at max speed without pausing to experience the story. Good Luck future Administrators.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 12, 2022

  Engagingly difficult, then boring, then just frustrating.

  The most middle thumbs I have ever given a game. I generally enjoyed my time with it and think it's worth playing, but there are so many ridiculously frustrating parts about the core gameplay that get worse and worse the longer you keep playing. First, there's this narrative that the game is stupidly difficult. I disagree. I think most of the negative reviews touting this haven't gone past the second tier of research, but to be fair, there's very little indication of which techs are good and which techs aren't. It's unforgiving towards mistakes, but it's easy to avoid those mistakes. Accidents are only lethal to your workers if you overworked them - if it was optimal, they will only ever take injuries. And once you realize that the stability penalty from staying in a system too long only happens once and the only thing forcing you to progress is lack of iron, you can easily turtle up in the first chapter and get an incredibly stable economy and core techs. However, that leads to the first big issue. The tech tree is wildly unbalanced, and the game becomes so easy it's boring after you unlock a few of the important ones. For instance, let's look at the first tech lab upgrade. It makes it produce a 3 research points every 5 cycles. For reference, before the upgrade, it only produced 1 point every 30 cycles. It took so long that many players rightfully believed that you only got research from planets. This should have a tutorial yelling this information at you with how crucial it is. For god's sake, it's 18x more efficient than it was before. The stability complaints are similarly easily solved with a DLS center (which should also have a tutorial yelling at you about its importance), which once put down, can instantly give you +2 stability with more to come down the line. Upgrading your houses to the next tier will also give you a +1 stability. You can do this by the end of the first chapter, and I went into chapter 2 with +2 stability and never had stability problems from then on. And it only snowballs from there. The Waste Treatment Center, and waste in general, is the most unbalanced thing in the game. For the low low price of one stability per sector (by the midgame, you can easily have +5 stability on all sectors), you have now turned every resource into a renewable one save for Helium, which is irrelevant because you can turn off all your industry to save power and not bother with nuclear power plants. Even in the late, late game, three waste treatment centers can easily produce enough alloy to keep your hull from breaking down. There is no challenge in this game that can't be beaten by waiting. It's boring. At worst, you'll have to go back to a previous chapter to stock up on resources to tackle some time limited challenges in the endgame. Speaking of endgame, what makes it frustrating? Well, a lot of challenges in the endgame are entirely new ones that the game will throw at you out of nowhere that will necessitate you redesigning some of your sectors to meet these new challenges. It may suddenly demand a ton of a resource that hasn't been relevant for a full chapter or demand a couple thousand of a resource that you previously only ever needed 200 of. Which brings me to my absolute biggest complaint. Relocating your buildings is the most infuriating experience I've ever had in any city builder. There is no relocate button, so you have to deconstruct your buildings to move them. Problem is, every resource you spent on them needs to be taken to a stockpile before they're actually deconstructed. So if your alloy stockpiles are all full and you don't have space for a new stockpile, guess what? You'll need to somehow clear up alloy storage somewhere before the building will actually go away. And good luck if you're trying to relocate an alloy stockpile - all that alloy and maybe waste needs to go somewhere before you can actually move the damn thing. This can lead to one deconstruction project taking ten times longer than it has any right to be. You want to upgrade one of your buildings to a better version that takes more space? You're screwed. In the endgame, when time is actually critical and you need to shift things around fast, it is the single most infuriating experience I've ever had. This can all be solved with a simple option to discard all those resources in exchange for an instant deconstruct. Yes, it might lead to people softlocking themselves. But I say it's worth it. This change would bump this up a point on a ten point scale for me. It was that bad. Another complaint I have that's a bit more minor is resource management. Moving things between sectors is incredibly clunky. You need to set a minimum on the area you want to send it from and a large maximum on its destination. Doing this repeatedly is exhausting, and I'd far prefer something like Anno where you can just tell them to send resources to a certain sector so long as you're above a certain minimum. As it is now, it takes five clicks to do something that really feels like should only take one.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 14, 2022

  Nope, sadly I'm part of the 9-hour club. Here's the pros to start: - Incredible Music, 11/10 - Fascinating and engaging storyline - Great voice acting - Smooth visuals, great attention to detail. - Engaging. Easy to sink about 9 hours into until you hit the wall. Which brings me to my real hangups about this game. There's four, all of which undermine the very foundation of the game and replace any engagement with frustration for me. 1. Resources and Labor. You might imagine this as a city builder or a colony survival sim. It is not. Imagine, for a moment, the logistical realities of living in space. Oxygen is the big one (spoiler, there's no O2 mechanic here.) Food, which is present in the game, is as basic as building an insect farm and forgetting. Water, definitely not here unless you count the water I'm spraying on my crops. Seriously, are they drinking their own urine? Oh, that's another one, because the only waste here is industrial, so nobody in the final frontier is pooping, either. Entertainment, then? Well, there's a couple of monuments and an "Alternative Life Center," but we'll get to stability (aka happiness) later on. What there is plenty of, though, is jobs to do. Like, way too many jobs for what I'm dealing with. Those familiar with colony sims will recall the basics of assigning certain numbers of workers to each task or building, and carefully managing your labor pool to cover your operational needs. This is management 101 in 21st century city builders. Guess what? Not here. Your only option to control labor demands is to shut down the entire building. So you had better be ready to have five workers for every small storage stockpile to watch over those 100 crates of carbon you picked up. This game tries to be Frostpunk in space, but even Frostpunk had a labor assignment and management system. 2. Clumsy Crew AKA, the death spiral in space. Working your people too hard leads to labor shortages which you have no real control over, since you need the food or alloys the building makes, but you can't afford the 5 or 15 people needed to man it. Extra Hours leads to overworked which then leads into the Danger threshold. Each stage has an increased risk of accidents occurring (understandable, considering how volatile those boxes of iron can be if you don't have all 5 people in the stockpile. I'm not bitter.) When an accident happens, you hear an explosion and the computer announces it like a weather report. The accident will injure and kill a number of crew members, which go to the infirmary. Those injured workers not watching the iron boxes anymore means that someone else has to stop watching their boxes, which means more overwork, which means more accidents, which takes more workers out of the equation, etc etc ad nauseum. Lets just say that I've watched perfectly stable sectors collapse into depopulation because of explosive food stockpiles. 3. Stability System Every sector has a stability rating. You might think that this is something to do with obedience or government, but you'd be wrong. It's happiness. Let's just call it what it is. Here's where I finally threw in the towel and walked away. You start at a stable base happiness, as with most games. Certain things add a positive score while others add a malus, or a negative score. While this could have been a very dynamic system (people having to eat insect protein to survive, not having good waste-removal and management, bad accommodations, bad entertainment, hopelessness, etc.) So far, the only thing that really impacts happiness is hull integrity (see below) and random, uncontrollable, permanent maluses added throughout the game. *********** STORY SPOILERS! *********** So lets get this straight. The earth is destroyed, everyone gets sad. This is understandable, as you were never meant to be the Earth's last hope of survival, that honor fell to your sister ship. Dead Earth Syndrome, -1 happiness. Here's where it gets weird. After this moon-shattering news, your valiant crew of 100-200 astronauts realize that they are the only hope left for all of humankind, they steel their resolve and ~ Just kidding, they just spiral into depression and madness. If you're in the solar system too long, preparing and building up the last remnant of the entire species, the game throws more maluses at you. This is to prod you on into the next chapter, ignoring the fact that running off into uncharted space without preparation is the most reckless plan available to the Earth's best and last hope. Now you're out of that emotionally toxic solar system, hopefully they'll stop adding more negative points to your... oh, all those maluses are permanent. Oh, and here's a new one! -1 happiness because you left the solar system that was making everyone so sad. Okay, well we'll work on finding our sister shi- and it's been damaged and you're the literal last hope of the species. -1 happiness. That's fine, we'll unload these thousand cryopods, get our resources stocked, renovate our systems and prepare to go off into the great unknown. Oh, what's that? -1 happiness because you've been in the system too long. Good luck, everyone goes on strike. The final hope of all humans everywhere goes on strike because they feel sad, leaving hull integrity to... well, we'll get that next. 4. Hull Integrity This is the big one. This is the boogieman, and not a bad mechanic. It's a little strange, though, but not unreasonable. (For example, people working too hard somehow makes the hull less willing to stay put together.) This value is constantly dropping. You have no choice but to consciously focus on getting the resources to patch it up. Every VOHLE and IXION jump you make subtracts 100 points from the total score, representing parts that can never be repaired, so you're not going to be playing Starship Enterprise for very long. Again, perfectly reasonable. Here's where it gets unreasonable: Striking workers. You need alloys to patch up the hull. You need workers in the EVA bays to make those repairs. If your candy-ass crew gets too far into their feels, they'll go on strike. This does 2 things: first, EVA stations run the risk of striking and being out of operation and leaving the station to literally fall apart. (Let that sink in... the bravest humans, safeguarding the survival of the species, will refuse to work and let everyone die because of the fact that they are our last hope.) Strikes ramp up the overworked hours in a sector, which leads to rampant accidents and every damaged building or overworked sector cause hull integrity to drop faster. So now this emotional breakdown kills everyone. But I'm supposed to believe that I'm the one that lost their trust. To wrap it up, I'll add a quick list of absolutely essential revisions that need to be made before I would consider this game worth a purchase. If these things aren't in the game, don't waste your 9.8 hours. 1. Unhappiness mitigation like laws, policies, extra food, religion, police, etc. (similar to Frostpunk) 2. Labor management system, including assigned crew, work hours, multiple shifts and the like. 3. Drop the DES maluses, period. They're so absurd in comparison to the task these people face. 4. More authentic space-based challenges, such as oxygen, water, waste, etc. Real off-world challenges. 5. Explorer mode, to play without being saddled with the linear storyline. Thanks for reading this, and I hope this helped you find your next favorite game!