Written Thomas G.J. Sharpe
In recent years, I’ve read more sci-fi and, in my head, the
aesthetic that is closest is stuff from The Expanse or Alien or IXION.
I like this robust and lived-in vision than the clean lines and pearlescent
wonder of a more magical cosmic design. IXION wants me to know that I’m
at the coalface; the administrator of a colonising space ship called the
Tiqqun. A big metal donut that is meant to be forging the path toward a new
planet for humankind to ruin afresh. Before the big interstellar jump (that
goes wrong and initiates the main thrust of the story), you are tutorialised by
building structures on the ship. Why the Tiqqun was not constructed properly on
Earth before launch seems to indicate to me some reasons why the jump engine
caused a solar-system wide cataclysmic event. I do not need clumsy Greek names
for menacing corporations to tell a cowboy builder.
Trying to draw on some of the social elements of things like
The Expanse, perhaps, there is now a focus on keeping your workers happy
in the new, changed, solar system where most life and planets have been reduced
to devastated baubles. You require workshops, eateries, residential buildings,
service ships, stock piles, and so on, and so on. A tech tree expands your
building options, and prospects of occupying other parts of the Tiqqun (again,
I have no clue why this ship was not finished before they sent it out as the
vanguard of humankind’s final hope).
You settle very quickly into a whack-a-mole problem solving
balancing act, which is (in my humble opinion) what a well designed
colony-sim/management game should not feel like, even if it is. Frostpunk
has an elegant groove it slots into and drives the point home to a crushing
climax. Tropico is a careful nurturing of balances. Workers and
Resources makes you enrol in Excel courses. IXION puts on a good
show, throws a lot of moves, but in the end I felt little of the joy that I get
from those other (similar-ish) titles. And I so desperately want to enjoy the
gameplay more than I did, as the world looks and sounds so good (bar the
pedestrian/robot traffic). It seeps and oozes atmosphere, dread and abandonment
to the brutality of space. Sadly, I spent more of my time trying to wrestle
with poor design choices that I made out of necessity and then am punished for.
I ended up resenting the population of my little metal life raft for humanity.
My first impression was that this would be if some grand
sci-fi opera writer did a version of Startopia, the criminally good
space station sim. Some de-flabbing of the unfun gameplay systems would’ve
served this beautiful looking, but slightly charmless, title better. Nearly a
three out of five, so maybe I’ve some personal disappointment going on as I
wanted to like it more. Not the worst space management, but unfortunately, not
the best either.
Overall 4/10
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