Recent reviews by Chemix

"The Lunaclysm was inevitable": But was it though? Was it? Probably not. That element of the premise aside, this is a darn good game, and the most excitement I've had from a city builder, bar none. That's because this is a city builder- IN SPACE. You are the administrator of the Tycoon, they spell it Tiquun, but it's pronounced Tycoon, and while sadly this ring station doesn't come with any literal roller coasters, the plot does come with all the loops and break neck turns of one, and more than a few dips to watch out for.

You'll start out with a sector, 1/6th of the station, and it'll be mostly empty except for sparsely placed resource dumps. You'll lay down a road, and you might wonder why no one is building it; that's because you need to lay down a workshop, then a little yellow mech will come out and pave your roads, but keep in mind why he's making those connections, that YOU have to plan, to those resource dumps, which you then need to click on to receive the contents of, the mech can't build anything else. There's a lot of little things you might skim past in the tutorials, that are really vital. One of which, is that the tech tree has lots of bubbles for the various things you can work on, but DID YOU KNOW?! that inside those bubbles, are sub-technologies that are displayed on the right side of the screen when you click on them? I didn't, and I made it 2/3 through the game before hitting a brick wall because of it. It would have been a good idea to throw an early roadblock that demanded you look at sub-technologies early on to avoid this.

There are two key resources that are tied to two mine-able resources. Alloy- which constantly depletes like you would expect fuel to, and to make which you need IRON (or trash, but that's more mid-game). And Food- which gets eaten as you would expect, and to make large quantities, you need water, and for that you need ICE. You will need to balance your intake of these things CAREFULLY throughout the beginning to middle of the game, and even then, even when you think you're safe, you're going to look and see your Alloy down at 100 and dropping, and be like, oh I have a little bit of time, but no, because Alloy production takes time. As soon as you start getting low, you need to mess with the cargo ships to start hauling more Iron. Same thing with food and ice, but MORE SO, because it takes even longer, but you can go a little longer without it. The cargo and mining priority menu is a little buggy, because it seems to pick resources in the order you check the boxes, not necessarily the priority level you choose, which should be more elegant than 0-1-2-3, but what you may end up having to do, is just unchecking all the boxes, and rechecking them in the order you actually want them prioritized. Specialize your cargo shuttles when you get enough the do so. Try to keep your docking bays clean, and know it won't be easy, but if this they're full, then your missions where you need to send cargo somewhere, will just sit there.

The other vital resource is Trust, and if it runs out, the people on the Tycoon are coming for you, and there's nothing you can do about it. The biggest enemies to Trust are Starvation, which can sneak up on you, especially if you forget that YOU CAN TURN MESS HALLS BACK ON, even if someone else turns them off, and Blackouts, where you exceed the power capacity of your ship. People really hate it when the lights go out, even if it's a life or death, will the human race survive tomorrow situation. The bonuses you get for completing requests are sadly minor, and the trust system could use an overhaul, but it's fun to roleplay. Once you get enough Trust boosters, you can start collecting Trash; it might not make sense now, but it will.

TLDR: It's a great game, I sunk 46 hours into it, and I enjoyed about 2/3 of those hours. The other third is split between backtracking doomed runs, and micromanagement that feels clumsy. Hopefully if this review makes you want to try Ixion, then you'll read the tips here first, and you'll get that much more enjoyment out of it.

It's a cliche at this point, by have you ever played that java dust physics sim? You know, the one where you could make just about anything out of dust and then watch as a series of chain reactions eventually led to a blazing inferno that left the majority of your play space as ash, or lava, or ash and lava and rock. Well, this is a lot like that, except it's an actual game, where every dang pixel can react to something. It's got rough edges, but that's what early access is for.

Giving a soul to the mindless violence of Wolfenstein. What could be a tiresome slog through nigh endless corridors and courtyards is given a strange livelynss to it. If you like FPS and you can stomach some a few truly gorey, and unskippable scenes, for something with feeling, like a run on a bittercold day... You'll enjoy this game.

These are the voyages of the starship Kestrel, on a *spark* year mission to *spark* and, PUT OUT THAT FIRE, Put it out, Oh crap we've got fire in the engine room, 4 fires in the engine room, hull breaches in med bay, NOT THE MED BAY!? Fires are out... whew... wait a second, theres... no... air.... OXYGEN!!!!! We've lost crew and this is just the intro, how are we going to survive long enough for there to be a cliff hanger?

It's fun, but challenging, really, really challenging