For a long time, I thought that Outpost would hold an unchallenged position as the most functionally broken game I’d ever played. The degree of dumb luck you needed to find the right spot and not have the game decide to screw you over definitely put a damper on the wonder of trying to build a new colony far from Earth. And then IXION came along to show how you can make things so much worse.
IXION puts you in command of humanity’s first interstellar colony ship, the Tiqqun, a project overseen by the DOLOS Aerospace Engineering Corporation. During a routine test of the FTL propulsion system, you find yourself launched forward a number of years without really moving out of the Solar System. From there, you’re on an odyssey of constantly failing systems, space hazards, perpetually dropping crew morale, and the vague promise that you will reach an end.
Visually, IXION doesn’t look bad. There’s plenty of cool lights, special effects, and interesting object models. From a design perspective, the Tiqqun calls to mind the idea of an O’Neill cylinder, a structure which has been put forward as a possible platform for human habitation in deep space. The UI is fairly informative and not too hard to navigate, though it’s not exactly intuitive and doesn’t quite flow as well on a console as you’d expect. Different event vignettes have a impressionistic style which gets the idea across but doesn’t quite hit hard. And I would argue that, given the small number of scenarios, there’s an overuse of ‘weather’ effects which is entirely unnecessary. Overall, the visuals get the job done but they don’t stand out. Nor do they seem to benefit from being on a console. It also doesn’t help that the port isn’t entirely implemented correctly. The ‘Share’ button on the DualShock controller brings up the menu the same way the Options button does in most cases, making it difficult to capture screenshots.
The audio components of IXION might be considered better than the visuals, if they weren’t executed so badly. As far as the actual quality of sound effects and voice work, it’s pretty good. The sound effects are clear and certainly give the sense of things happening. The voice actors deliver their lines without any sense of overdramatic cheese, but for some reason they don’t come across as particularly sincere, either. This isn’t helped by the fact that there seem to be periodic losses of voice audio, where things are quiet for long stretches and then a flood of voice notifications just burst forth. With regards to the musical score, I was deeply underwhelmed. It seemed to be the same three or four tracks playing over and over in a cycle, all of them trying to be ethereal and melodious, but just sounding like overdriven synth-driven pap. Either Guillaume David’s work is somehow being kept hidden by some quirk of how the developerss implemented Unity, or the soundtrack is just phoned in.
I hesitate to say Bulwark Studios have grossly overstated the gameplay elements which are inflicted on a player. It is advertised primarily as a “city-builder in space”, yet it feels like every structure you build, no matter how necessary, is deliberately engineered to fail, either through breakdowns or through bad implementation. Worse, the logistical systems conspire to screw you over virtually at every turn. If you happen to create overlapping paths with the road construction tool, “eddies” will occur which shut down the flow of material to the entire ship. There’s no organic growth to the crew, only those souls that you find in cryonic storage pods. And you have no control over who might be in those pods. To borrow a line from George R.R. Martin, “every time a cryopod is unthawed, the gods flip a coin and tremble.” Might be a Worker who can staff one of the various facilities you built. Might be a Non-Worker, who has absolutely no utility other than to take up space, eat food, and maybe become an expendable Colonist. The only sort of training you can do is turn Non-Workers into Colonists. You cannot turn either of them into Workers. The tech tree is completely obnoxious, with a lot of possible improvements requiring advances in completely unrelated technologies, as well as techs that just don’t seem to do anything useful for you. Adding insult to injury, you’re reliant on making the most of your advances off what science ships pull off different points of interest in a given star system. Your sole science facility can generate tech points, but it does so in such a painfully slow fashion even with upgrades that you start to resent the hell out of the building which has such a massive footprint and seemingly produces so little.
In the same vein, building up the ship requires unlocking different sections with a commitment of manpower and materials. Of course, doing so causes the structural integrity of the Tiqqun to degrade, requiring constant repairs. And the more you unlock, the faster the damage comes in. Oh, and jumping to a new star system permanently reduces the amount of hull integrity you have to work with, pushing you even faster towards an explosive end. There’s no actual planning or thought going on here. You’re basically having to try and figure out the “one true way” to complete a scenario which the developers thought made sense and hope it doesn’t cause too much damage.
There’s really no good way to say this: every narrative element in IXION makes it clear that the writers absolutely hate humanity in every conceivable way. It’s the ludonarrative equivalent of being told by a parent, “I wish you’d never been born.” The tone is unspeakably nihilistic and misanthropic. Your efforts to preserve your crew as much as possible cheats you out of at least one possible ending. There is little in the way of anything you can do to try and improve your crew’s morale, save for stumbling over certain incidents and taking up large chunks of real estate within a sector with specific buildings to improve “stability.” You’re basically expected to casually let your exploration crews get killed by various environmental hazards and strange artifacts. Your colonist teams are expected to be left behind. Of course, you’re punished for actually doing these things. Your options at choosing “policies” all suck, either pissing off your already irate crew or kneecapping your production capabilities. And if you stick around in any given star system, you take another morale hit because “you’re taking too long,” even when you’re trying to build up stocks of resources and new construction to maybe survive the next engineered wave of misery you’re going to sail into. Given all this, I’m genuinely surprised there wasn’t a self-destruct system installed, a fact which you learn about towards the end of the campaign.
Beside all that, the actual storyline feels completely half-assed, suffering from what I can only assume is somebody’s idea of being cute and or edgy, while completely dropping the ball to form a cohesive narrative. There are too many loose ends in terms of narrative which never get properly resolved. We’re shown some characters in the prologue who have all the pomposity of potentially important characters, but who get killed off between the prologue and the first chapter, and whose repeated mentions are handled with all the build-up and narrative tension of runny oatmeal. We’re given a version of the UN turning into a band of murderous marauders hunting down any DOLOS staff who somehow escaped on a second ship that is barely explained. Then to add to the feeling of overwhelming suck, we’re also presented with a quasi-illegal faction literally called “Black Market Society” which is even more trigger happy and genocidal than the UN. The ending I managed to reach, which puts colonists on a new world permanently, feels completely unearned and narratively flaccid. I’m sure somebody thought it might be clever to make the name of the ship you’re carting the last of humanity around in a homophone for “tycoon.” And then you find it’s the name of a French post-Marxist/anarchist zine from the Millennium which advocates a similarly named process of radicalization intended to oppose “modern capitalist society.” Everything kind of crystalized for me at that moment. The core concept of IXION is what you’d expect space exploration to be like if it was overseen by Pol Pot.
It’s rare for me to say this: don’t spend your money on IXION. This is a middling port of a fundamentally awful game, not only in its technical shortcomings, but in its narrative tone and willfully ignorant mechanics. Its absolute contempt for any human aspiration beyond basic survival flies in the face of genre conventions of both city building sims and sci-fi. Some will undoubtedly try to defend it, claiming that it’s trying to make a statement. Yes, it is. And that statement is “Fuck all y’all!” Let this pass out of sight and into the void where it so desperately wants to be.
Axel reviewed IXION on PlayStation 5 with a provided review copy.
