IXION on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
IXION is an unrelenting, city-building odyssey across the stars. As Administrator of the Tiqqun, DOLOS’ prototype space station, you are tasked with balancing preservation and exploration as you manage infrastructure, resources and crew. Can you keep the flame of humanity alight in the cold dark?
IXION is a space, city builder and strategy game
developed by Bulwark Studios
and published by Kasedo Games.
Released on December 07th 2022 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, French and Italian.
It has received 15,291 reviews of which 11,957 were positive and 3,334 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.7 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 13.59€ on Steam and has a 60% discount.
The Steam community has classified IXION into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-3570K or AMD FX-8310
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 1060 4GB or Radeon RX 590
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 20 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
While "Short and Sweet" is a far cry from criticism, I can't help but desperately want more from this game. If want the TLDR: when I first played this game, I finished the tutorial *deeply* curious about where the hell it was going, and then had to pick my jaw off the floor when I saw the cutscene between it and Chapter 1. This game's got Style, and the Confidence to do a simple idea well. If that doesn't sell you on it, I don't know what would. ----- The Setup is relatively straightforward. You don't have nearly enough power, crew, stuff, or storage space for either people or things. Go find some resources to fix some of those problems, and maybe figure out what the hell is going on along the way. It's never all that difficult to understand what this game wants from you; at least, mechanically speaking. The difficulty arises from trying to accomplish these goals in a ship that is one bad 'Strike Negotiation' away from venting your entire crew, and constantly requires resources to maintain. Resource Management can get complex later on, but never to the Nightmare-Flowcharts of a more traditional Supply Chain Manager like Anno or, god-forbid, an actual Factory-Builder. There are a handful of Resources; most of which exist in a refined and un-refined form. You don't start with the ability to refine things, but careful planning can get you that tech in the first chapter. Tech Progression is Tiered, but relatively free-form. You have to research all the major Technologies in a tier to unlock the next one, but upgrades are optional. Most, but not *all*, of the Science you get comes from Exploration, which is limited in each chapter; providing an incentive to keep a "Narratively Appropriate" pace. IXION put some effort into its narrative, so it will occasionally remind you to wrap things up after you've completed the story for each chapter. Lingering for too long will damage the moral of your crew, but these are often offset by the problems inflicted by the next map. You can *absolutely* break this game like an egg if you are sufficiently tedious about optimizing. However, doing so would also require ignoring all the flashing lights trying to remind you of how much more fun you *could* be having, by just playing the damn game. The game is clever. Not particularly subtle, at least in that example, but I can respect that. And, Credit where credit is due; the Dev's never actually force your hand, on that front. I came back to this game after playing Frostpunk 2. While I have fewer bad things to say about FP2 than some; this game is a lot more compact, and a lot more polished. If this was your intro into the "Survival City-builder" genre, I think this could easily become an all time favorite. For me, IXION is a reminder of how much I prefer when a game does a simple thing well; as well as how rare it is for developers to have that kind of restraint P.S. Check out "Against the Storm", if this is your kind of thing. Extremely different game, but AtS is amazing, and criminally unheard of. <Edit>: Coming back to this AGAIN after beating FP2 on Max Difficulty with a Peace Ending, No Deaths, No Radical Ideas, and while saving all survivors, I can confidently say this game has better mechanics. It also has substantially more "Atmosphere", Ironically. AtS remains my favorite of the genre for the moment, but kudos to this game for refusing to get out of my head.</Edit>
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So much about this game is objectively good, but the truth is that I do not like playing it. The game consistently runs smooth, the art ranges from competent to glorious eye-candy, the structure of the story (you're saving earth from a cataclysm you yourself caused!) has so much meat on the bone. The heavy space constraints on building and the sizes of the various building blocks make it pretty interesting to construct and update your space-city. The makers of the game clearly knew what they were doing. But the game is still somehow scuffed. One part of it is obfuscation. The game has a *lot* of techs to research, and the grand majority of them are absolutely useless piddleshit crap that will do nothing to help your game. Hidden in that pile of bland are a few core techs that actually have an meaningful impact, but good luck sifting through them on your first game. And if you do know what the core techs are, you can pretty much trivialize the game in the first couple of levels. Or it's the logistics. Moving things from sector to sector is an absolute pain even with the lategame building designed to do just that. Or it's the data overlay. How much food are you making? There are readings that are just irrelevant, like a 5-cycle average production when your core buildings operate on a ten-cycle rhythm. Or it's the data overlay combined with logistics! The game tells you you're making more than enough food to meet your needs, but suddenly oh wait your stocks are dry - far as I can tell, this is because the game logs all food producers as constantly active but one type of them *actually* have to wait for an input good to arrive on time, which it won't, because nothing ever arrives on time and the only means you have of inspecting inter-sector logistics is your own damn eyeballs, but that won't help because you the only thing you can tell is that some transports are moving somewhere. And all of this is coming in a story that has just... The most inconsistent tone and the most scuffed english-is-my-second-language mode of telling it. You'll be going through the fairly inert and lifeless tone where you mostly talk to AIs or their data readouts of what people want, treating survival of humanity like a corporate assignment, and you'll go - hmm, I don't like the way this makes me feel, but there's something somber and true about this. And then you'll get blasted by some Wololo sound sample in the score or some goofball event outcome and go - what am I supposed to do with my attention? Am I to treat this game as serious, as frivolous, as what? Things aren't helped by the fact that most everything is written in not-quite-english. Words and terms will be *kind of* appropriate for what they mean but not really, the grammar of things will be slightly off, etcetera. I'm never really sure if I'm just reading a mid translation for a simple term or if I'm missing some subtle context for what would be obvious in french or if what I'm seeing is some kind of idea of wordplay that doesn't land. I *want* to know what I'm reading, things seem interesting enough from what little I've gleaned, but every page in the book is covered in fucking cellophane. And then there's the big thing. A large part of it is due to what I'll call narrative event-based difficulty. If you played through a scenario before, you know exactly what is coming and can prepare for it with trivial ease. You'll know that things that allude to urgency or an ongoing issue actually do fuck all, and some things that are not mentioned at all are coming that need your attention more. Or, since so much of the game runs off event triggers, you can manipulate them to trivialize what would otherwise be a challenge. And honestly you kind of have to because the means of solving the issue any other way are just too annoying to deal with. As an example - there's a space storm that's coming for you, oh fuck! Except when it creeps up hinges entirely off when science ship events complete. You could manage the ships that would be lost in the storm - mining and cargo - by manually forbidding every resource out there or manually making sixty clicks to make sure they have no target and hide in your bossom. Or you could cheese it by dropping a science vessel on every planet in range, waiting until they all complete their respective narrative chains but only confirming their completion when you're ready to do them all in one fell swoop. "There is an electromagnetic storm in front of us" "Congratulations, the electromagnetic storm is behind us!" This narrative event-based difficulty suffuses the game and the choice you are constantly met with is between dealing with the challenges of the game as intended, which will be either tedious or death spiral your ship... Or you can cheese it and remove all difficulty, which will lead to hours of waiting your research to accumulate and doing fuck else. I played this game on the hardest difficulty setting and did not even once wonder how other players are dealing with the resource management challenges presented. I did, however, constantly look up event tables. This is not how I want to play a strategy game. If there was a middle option available on steam, that is what I would give here. Happy to give my money for these developers to do something new with it because they obviously can. Not happy to play what they actually have so far.
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This is a survival city builder in which you constantly jockey for limited real estate and resources with multiple forms of penalties for every advantage you gain. If you want more space to grow you will pay the price of accelerated loss of hull integrity. If you progress too fast (or too slow) your population will inevitably pay the price of lost stability via overwork, starvation, stagnation, etc. You are balancing on a (subjectively) narrower razor's edge than Frostpunk, but one that is still manageable. You have 2 primary management views, an internal view of your superstructure (your city), and a view of the surrounding solar system. Both views must be regularly checked in order to manage various aspects of your operation. Internally, the resource/population exchange between sectors and other micromanaged elements of the game are slightly tedious and could be more elegantly designed, but it was still enjoyable. The only major gameplay issue I ran into was ship control in the external view. You are tasked with operating a few types of smaller ships that support your superstructure. However, later in the game space hazards will present themselves that could be easily avoided via direct ship control, but unfortunately manual ship control is only available for one vessel type, the others are autonomous and use a simple resource priority list. This lack of direct control will often result in a mining ship for instance flying directly through a space hazard on its way to a prioritized resource type. Thankfully this is my only serious frustration so far. The list of positives include an incredible soundtrack, striking visual design, great story told via regular well written events, and the balancing act of survival itself can be quite enjoyable. TL;DR - this game will please most survival city builder fans that are ready for some micro and a stiff difficulty curve. 8/10.
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If you're having a rough time, remember - for the first few chapters, you can just sit around in the system building stuff and gathering research, until you're ready to move on. The moral penalty is minimal. I would also recommend finding a guide on sector layouts to give you a general sense of how you might construct your station. Remember, you can put down buildings you want to construct and then order construction to pause. Doing this lets you lay out how you want your sector to be in advance without actually building anything. Then you can unpause construction on specific buildings according to your resources and needs. Power will be one of your biggest constraints in the game. I recommend building out all of the solar panels, with upgrades, ASAP and constructing at least one nuclear plant. I finished the game with an overabundance of every resource. Scarcity will never be a problem for you if you're careful about your logistics.
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This is absolutely one of the most enjoyable space "builders" I have ever played. I stumbled across this game by sheer coincidence. I was searching for games like the old "Outpost" title by Sierra as I was craving its gameplay. IXION goes above and beyond that, despite not actually getting to go planetside. I have been completely enthralled with IXION since purchasing it - staying up and playing for hours unknown as it just seemed to let time pass by without notice. The constant upkeep of your ship along with balancing people and resources as you plan the layout of your ship's city-like infrastructure can always keep you on your toes. Not only do you get to "build" your city, but you upgrade and repair your whole ship as you journey and you also get to explore all new solar systems by sending expeditions to nearby planets. There is always something to do while playing IXION. Paying careful attention to your surroundings, your AI assistant, your people, and your resources all at the same time is key to your survival and making it to the end. If you enjoy sci-fi games, city builders, story-driven gameplay, and feeling like you are living in a pressure cooker, I highly recommend checking out IXION. I do not think you will be disappointed. I have finished IXION. We eventually find a planet to colonize. So, hey, Mr. Game Developer, let's go planetside now? I want this game as a relaxed world-builder now and it will be everything I was looking for. Want some ideas? Check out the old Sierra Outpost title (NOT OUTPOST 2) and see what I mean! The probing and world-mapping were completely ahead of their time for a 90s game! Thanks for everything! Looking forward to playing this again and maybe YouTubing the experience!
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Last Updates| Steam data | 26 March 2025 05:17 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 30 March 2025 09:27 |
| Steam price | 02 April 2025 04:26 |
| Steam reviews | 31 March 2025 18:07 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about IXION, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about IXION
- SteamCharts - Analysis of IXION concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck IXION compatibility
Online players
556
Developer
Bulwark Studios
Publisher
Kasedo Games
Release
07 Dec 2022
Platforms
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