Ixion - and on and on and on

"I don’t mean to be cramping your style
Just come home to me once in a while" 

Clare Fader & The Vaudevillains - Catch of the Day

 

 

It's Surviving Mars - IIINN SPAAAA- wait, wait, uhh... is Mars already in space? It is a planet but not this planet so spacey relative to us but rocks but gravity but atmosphere* but... actually never mind:

It's Frostpunk - IIINN SPAAAAAACE!!!

Not a very helpful error message without a "because" now is it?

Ixion does little to hide its strict Settlers-inspired village simulator genealogy. But where the similar Endzone is straightforwardly inspired by the trend's originator, Banished, Ixion skews more toward the mechanization / exploration themes of Surviving Mars and especially Frostpunk. Most all your resources, in fact, come from outside your city's buildable area, said city being a space station that can teleport between stars -

(Hey, I've been inside this art installation before... Milwaukee Art Museum, about ten years back?)

 

- via a suspiciously gate-like device on its patootie. 

Chevron six locked!

Ah, see, dere's yer problem, Mac, y'only put six chevrons on dis doodad. Ev'rybody knows ya need seven! (But, important plot point, you can engage them ALL AT ONCE!) And you better believe you'll need every chevron, because Kharak Is Burning!

Or maybe we're just re-enacting the intro from Thundarr

Anyway, though a bit derivative beyond the usual genre conventions - 

- Ixion does capture the melancholic atmosphere lacking in more cynically exploitative copycats of the Banished/Frostpunk lineage, thanks not least to Bulwark's secret weapon Guillaume David (how often do you see a game's composer get third billing?) While he takes a bow here and there echoing his lauded work on Mechanicus, the score here is lighter yet still mechanical and expansive, more... "spacey" to once again beautifully suit its spacefaring setting.

 

Sadly, it's gradually downhill from there. Ixion's core measure of player progress, building up your space station and filling it with crew, exploits the appeal of a mobile base of operations to its fullest in finest Homeworld fashion, yielding a true feeling of accomplishment with every new increase in electrical output or new sector. Like Surviving Mars, the visuals follow a futuristic, polished aesthetic, and quite aptly if not outstandingly. The writing is weaker, filled with stock SF episodes, bland heroics and a cheesy, easily hateable villain that won't pose any moral quandaries for its audience.

 

When you get down to gameplay, a fundamentally solid exploration, resource gathering and expansion system is constantly marred by misconceived straining to keep that routine fresh and temporize. First off, the spaceships you send out from your station to gather resources are deliberately dumbed down (dumber than a Roomba but a bit smarter than a Tesla autopilot) to force you to micromanage. They will not avoid hazards despite these being clearly marked, unless you manually deny individual destinations. And hey: quick quiz. You've got a map full of scattered resources. You tell your worker bees to prioritize all equally. Would it make sense for them to gather the closest ones first? Obviously not, since they have secret priorities of their own and will run across the map to fetch one scrap of nothing instead of clearing your immediate area.

 

The hazards you encounter on three of the campaign's five maps provoke just as much gratuitous frustration, since you only discover their individual properties when a ship blows up or your station eats hull damage. Calling this "exploration" ignores the basic idea of investigating the unknown and not simply flattening your nose against invisible walls. Individual science ship events skew similarly toward random nonsense. And don't ask me why you can't click-to-zoom to a particular ship.

 

Inside the station, things are less drastically but more routinely frustrating. Ixion could have been subtitled "a pull-my-finger city sim" since turning on a storage unit somehow blows up an apartment block or mushroom farm across town. Dipping below your available workers and electrical output can cause accidents. Great. Except they made a classical conditioning nightmare out of it, hitting you with a rolled up newspaper. You are not cited a risk assessment so you can make informed decisions. The moment you accept a risk, the game punishes you for doing things it doesn't like. Instant boom. I could have lived with truly random "accidents" but:

Ixion rather maintains a ceaseless and unpredictable stream of gratuitous punishments throughout. No matter how good your gameplay random shit just blows up, injuring and killing your workers** and though you can mitigate this by playing safe, individual buildings' accidents nonsensically scale in severity with the total number of passengers and the campaign chapter reached. Combine this with idiosyncratic resource transport automation and a bug causing said automation to stop functioning (especially for food!) until you reload a save, and you're left with a system not encouraging you to grit your teeth and adventure bravely onward in the face of adversity, but save-scum the shit out of each mission every few minutes.

 

Otherwise, the game could've been great. Resource acquisition and the tech tree are well balanced, prompting you to shift priorities as you open up more of your city map, and the mix of plucky industry and cozy domesticity indoors contrasts beautifully with the inimical lonely infinity without your hull. But when I first fired up Ixion I thought I'd be finishing up my summary by saying "Frostpunk has some serious competition" and... no, it doesn't. Not even close. It has an awkwardly charming but weakly written, amateurish imitator relying entirely too much on artificial constraints on player input and "wouldn't it be cool if" ideas that could've greatly benefited from another few cycles of tester feedback.

***

 

Now we must return to my observation that both Ixion and Endzone share a suspicious number of novel similarities. With both coming out a year-and-a-half apart ('21-'22) I doubt one had time to copy directly from the other. More likely these were just ideas tossed around at conventions, and as means to keep the city sim routine fresh, they're a mixed bag:

- Buildings of irregular sizes, making it impossible to fill your town's grid. Almost everything has a different x-by-y footprint of grid squares, meaning they not only cannot fill the same spaces, but cannot even be reliably added up to the same sums. A quaint space-filling challenge at first, but ultimately not very rewarding. Dead space is dead space. It does not add to the game experience. At least Endzone lets you fill a few squares with decorations.

- Flipping the old resource scarcity precept. It's not the vespene gas that limits you but the ore, needed for constant maintenance. Interesting. Can feel a bit grindy but pre-empts much of the mid-game complacency plaguing strategy genres in general. An expanded interpretation of Frostpunk's coal, I suppose.

- Overdrawing on your workforce kills you. Partly, fighting to stay above a threshold of constant resource depletion penalizes overexpansion, though Ixion goes further to actively punish you for even taking a single step in that direction. Goes in hand with:

- Random death. Workers are weirdly brittle in both cases. This may be an attempt to make you care more about their well-being than Banished's bleakness or Frostpunk's grimness, but mostly it's just annoying, and comes across as underserved punishment of the player. Goes in hand with:

- Socially conscious. Not so much in terms of cozying to racial or other "minorities" but touting egalitarian societies where well-being is actively valued. Neither game's writers were up the the task of conveying such ideas/ideals cogently though, so it mostly results in bland, facetious niceties at odds with your supposedly harsh survival setting.

- Quest system as crutches. In Endzone giving you free resources, in Ixion mostly opportunities to raise crew morale. Slow worker and resource transport reactivity though tends to doom such recovery efforts. Also, a reactive quest system is a bit demoralizing when compared to the basic precept of a quest as a grandiose goal, a fundamentally proactive challenge, boldly going and so forth.

- Economy unmanageable except by maintaining massive stockpiles of everything. Largely an artifact of poor resource transport automation combined with worker brittleness. No brinksmanship permitted, no gambles, tends to sap some of the excitement Banished added to the city sim formula, where you could run decades or generations on a clothing or tool shortage and still recover.

- Decreased tangibility. Surviving Mars or Dawn of Man made a huge show of keeping resources as a physical presence on the map. You could track unit by unit of rock or food as it's dug up at its worksite, in its worker's pockets, added to its storage facility, in the claws of a delivery drone and finally at its consumer. Endzone and Ixion's larger population sizes and rapid resource churn negate this and lose not only the satisfaction of knowing where each egg is in the basket, but some of the accountability necessary to troubleshoot production chains.

 

Overall, it's weird that something like Medieval Dynasty cleaves to the Banished village simulator formula more successfully by simply transposing it to first-person perspective than these two did by trying to build it up. Maybe it also explains Frostpunk 2's decision to return to RCI district management a la Sim City instead, and village simulators will transition to first person from now on.

 

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* I so wanted to write that as "but gas" ... heehee, butt gas

** Note to self: have got to go back and try playing Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare again.