IXION Review

Leisure may be the end of labor, but there’s no end to space.

IXION is a game that is mostly what you make of it. This city building survival simulation starts pretty slow, guiding you through tasks on a space station before eventually unleashing you into a journey focused on the preservation of humanity. Beyond the complex building mechanics, or choices you encounter throughout the story, the game is dripping with subtext and leaves empty space in the narrative for you to draw your own conclusions. For many players, this sort of storytelling may never land, but for anyone paying attention, there are signs all around the mostly empty reaches of space.

Some obvious ones hit you right off the bat, such as “DOLOS” — the name of both the company who created the space station Tiqqun, and the name of the company’s CEO. If you are familiar with Greek mythology, you may recognize Dolos as the spirit of deception and trickery; the names in general are sometimes a dead giveaway for the characters or places they represent, but they can serve a further purpose — obfuscation. If you take every event or person at face value, you’re going to get a completely different understanding of the events of the game than someone who tries to read into every name or event beyond what is given explicitly in text. Exactly just how much of what the players may imagine in their mind is true remains unanswered, with gaps purposefully laid out in the text for your own interpretation. Many names are references to famous people or characters, but just how many of those names mean anything is a bit up in the air, as well. 

Publisher: Kasedo Games

Developer: Bulwark Studios

Platform: Played on PS5

Availability:  Releasing on April 8, 2025 for PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Released on December 7, 2022 for Windows PC.

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Unfortunately, that open-ended writing does not translate well to all aspects of IXION, particularly its main gameplay, and its supporting tutorials and text. While the base-building is certainly deep, and there are a number of systems to engage with, things like the tech tree remain a bit too obtuse, with no clear explanations or expectations of the types of benefits you may receive. For players who are not intimately familiar with the genre, I suspect the overall development pathways and orderings will also remain unintelligible — a fact the game seemingly makes little effort to rectify through its opening tutorial section. 

On top of this, the speed of the events and timelines in any given scenario have a deleterious effect on the overall experience. By having building timers of double digit cycles, and resource transportation also taking some in-game time (depending on distance to your factory), any error becomes a profound waste of time — one you may not see the effects of for long periods. For example, say you are building along and everything seems fine, but a new objective appears that requires a resource you have no easy means of getting at this time. You will then have to shift your focus to developing this new project to the detriment of others, and if your earlier building introduced inefficiencies, you might be out of luck. While there is technically no timer pressing you, it adds up to be a frustrating endeavor. 

These issues are exacerbated by things like the game's decision to have dismantling bases take just as long as building them, and I would sometimes run into issues where buildings I was trying to dismantle would refuse to come down, no matter how close I placed a workshop or how many roads I had coming in and out of the buildings.

From the technical side, there remain several standout issues. Right off the bat it's obvious this game is not well suited for console as the UI is extremely busy, and elements are small. Icons like the directional input you use to inspect an element often blend in with the background, and using the control sticks to navigate such an intricate game is difficult. Some of this comes with the territory on a port of a base building game — there’s no easy answer for a game as mechanically complex as this. Text for the tutorials is also extremely small. While there is an option to increase text size in the menus, it does not seem to apply universally as UI text is still small and tutorial entries, which require heavy reading and inspection, are difficult to discern beyond a few feet from the screen.

IXION has many systems to play with, and a story that keeps things moving in interesting directions.

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That’s not to say this is a bad port. The game runs quite well, so no crashes or graphical issues, and I never experienced slowdown or other performance-related problems. I have not played IXION on PC, but as far as I can tell, the actual mechanics of the game have not been pared back in any way from the PC version. If you are a fan of this game from PC, but just want to experience it on console, you‘ll be relieved to learn the game is still fundamentally the same through the porting process. And while some elements can be hard to discern, the ability to jump to specific areas or UI elements at the press of a button does help with navigation.

Despite some qualms I may have, the game does land with me in many ways. I like the music, the base building and re-building is extensive if you like fiddling around with things like that, and the layered story is deeply interesting to me, even if I was unable to draw hard answers from elements here and there. I think there’s a lot here to engage with, but I am hard-pressed to draw major conclusions on so much of what exists. Some of these gameplay issues are exacerbated by my own failures to understand or engage with the mechanics in the intended ways, but without a guiding hand from the game, I’m a bit lost on where to begin. 

It’s a shame that so much of the core loop didn’t hit for me, as I do find the story and overall narrative to be endearing. I kept notes as I played, trying to find the truth of the matters at hand, suss out who was lying, guessing motivations and outcomes — all of this was fun. I think a lot of this does come down to my own fascination (especially recently) with philosophical works. I will say that if you are at all familiar with works such as Aristotle's Rhetoric or really any Socratic era philosophy, things might take a bit more shape for you in those empty spaces left by IXION’s narrative design. These things are not required reading, of course, but just something to keep in mind if you’re interested. The overarching plot is also pretty heavy-handed in the way it takes shape as an allegory or commentary on our own budding technocracy (and the technophiles who proselytize it), as well as its inherent failures or shortcomings. If real life circumstances are weighing on you regarding these issues, keep that in mind, as well.

I would like to add the caveat that I have not completed the game at this time. Not ideal for review purposes, so I’m gonna keep this one unscored. For now, these are my impressions of the incomplete experience. A score will be added once the game is finished.

Verdict

IXION is a bit of a mixed bag. Complex and vast systems at play often veer on the edge of tedium, all while being somewhat obtuse. Music is good, but there are not very many tracks, so you end up with repetition. The highlight might be the story for me, with layers of storytelling woven throughout, but as the events of the game may not be extremely straightforward or obvious, how this lands for each person is going to vary wildly. IXION may be what each person makes of it, but I’m not positive the ingredients ever coalesce into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Image Credits: Kasedo Games

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.