A Triumph of a Strategic Space-Faring Journey!
I’m not usually a massive fan of RTS games due to their difficult mechanics and skill threshold. I hold my head up high about this though – they’re just not for me!
That being said, IXION has proved my pre-conceived notion of the genre entirely wrong as I had an absolute blast playing this beast!
A Science Fiction Dystopia
IXION features one of the most gripping sci-fi narratives I’ve experienced in a video game for a long while. Everything here matches the dark sci-fi, dystopian aesthetic wonderfully, with the standout part being the soundtrack – but more on that later!
The narrative follows the slow decay of Earth after the moon collapses in a catastrophic accident, leaving what’s thought to be the last surviving humans on board the spaceship you control – the Tiqqun. As Administrator of the spacecraft you’ll be tasked with building and maintaining up to six different sectors, creating an optimized workflow and living quarters all whilst exploring different solar systems as you search for a hospitable planet.
After discovering certain parts of a planet or completing some tasks, players will be greeted with narrative segments presented in the form of audio clips. This might not sound like a very gripping way to tell a video game narrative, but believe me it works and you’ll be sucked into the story straight away.
The rest of the narrative beats are presented through text dialogues which read like extracts from classic sci-fi novels with a hint of roleplaying elements. The approach taken here reminds me of the best part of No Man’s Sky and IXION does an equally fantastic representation of pioneering your own sci-fi adventure.
Every choice you make for you, the ship and your crew will have an outcome. Sometimes these are positive, a lot of the time they’re negative. You never know quite what will happen even if you pick what should be the safe bet. It’s really gripping stuff!
Extreme Levels of Stress!
IXION is a stressful game, but it’s also a very addictive one. It doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table but it has all the classic RTS mechanics you would expect, all of which are finely polished.
Be prepared to manage hundreds of different factors all at once, from moving resources to population control, all whilst accidents and hazards keep ruining your hard work. I’ve not experienced such a level of stress and commitment in a game since playing Overcooked! But, when you get everything to click and it’s all working – this is one of the most satisfying RTS titles out there.
And that brings me to the difficulty. Not only is IXION a very stressful game, it’s also very challenging. It’s clearly designed for those who have had prior experience in the RTS genre and know what they’re doing. There are tutorial pages which you can look at yourself, but they’re often not very descriptive and only scratch the surface of the intricate mechanics. Ultimately, players will have to do a lot of experimenting with layouts and be prepared for lots of failure which can certainly get frustrating.
Luckily, the difficulty settings are highly customizable so you can essentially make the game as challenging or as easy as you like. I found the base “easy” difficulty setting to still be too challenging at times, but you can customize it further for a more forgiving experience. I didn’t even bother trialling the hardest difficulty as this would just be a crushing and soul destroying experience!
Top Notch Sound Design and Visuals
There’s a lot of good things about this game, but as I touched on earlier the real highlight for me is the music and sound design. The score by Guillaume David is synth-heavy ambience at its finest and it’s an absolute joy to listen to, pairing perfectly with the sci-fi dystopia. With howling drones and rhythmic tones, the whole soundtrack is really something special.
The sound design is also perfect, with the highlight being the voice acting – specifically for the robotic voices of the “PA” of different ships (especially the Protagoras). It drives home the immersion of the world through its heavily augmented voices that reverberate down your spine. I’ll continue to listen to the soundtrack on repeat for a long while yet, and it’ll be an equally long time until I forget about the chilling voice snippets.
In terms of visuals, everything looks great here. It’s got a realistic dark, sci-fi look to it that accentuates the grim reality of the universe. It never gets old to switch to the outside view of the Tiqqun and examine the solar system around it. Sometimes it would be surrounded by debris, sometimes whole planets and sometimes floating corpses. The attention to detail and commitment to the aesthetic is commendable. However, I did notice some textures failing to load in completely during cutscene segments where the ship flies to new solar systems or just initiates the engine, which somewhat takes you out of the moment.
On the subject of issues, I also encountered a bug where the dialogue display box remained stuck on my screen until I jumped to the following solar system. It wasn’t anything game breaking but it was certainly annoying and made controlling the space map especially awkward.
A Resounding Success
All round, IXION is a great foray into the realm of RTS titles, and whilst it fails to innovate the genre, it knows exactly what it’s trying to achieve and does that to great effect.
With addictive mechanics, great music and visuals and a compelling story from start to finish, IXION should be celebrated as a resounding success; an exemplary RTS game. Just be prepared for a seriously tricky and often overwhelming experience.
As I said at the start – I’m not normally an RTS kind of guy. IXION might just change that.
Important Links
Build, Survive, Explore: IXION’s Thrilling Space Adventure To Land on Xbox and PlayStation – https://www.thexboxhub.com/build-survive-explore-ixions-thrilling-space-adventure-to-land-on-xbox-and-playstation/
Blast Off Into Outer Space with IXION – the Newest City-Builder on Xbox & PlayStation – https://www.thexboxhub.com/blast-off-into-outer-space-with-ixion-the-newest-city-builder-on-xbox-playstation/
Buy IXION on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/ixion/9mvmphf8nkhb
