Preview – IXION [Demo] PC

I’ve not always been the biggest ‘city building’ fan, although I do love the hectic management that often goes right along with it. The problem is all of the downtime – one of my biggest gaming gripes. Waiting, like a mobile game, yuck! It’s possible to just be sitting there, stuck in purgatory as your crew members gather resources, work on accomplishing tasks you’ve pre-assigned, build what you’ve queued up, or simply just go about living their little lives. And whilst the demo of IXION does have its fair share of that, it quickly becomes clear that this setback is not meant to last. Teased with five other sectors to administrate and share materials across after only sort of getting to grips with just one, an entire fleet of ships to manage (including dedicated science ships to go off adventuring in all sorts of side-missions), and probes to send out for research purposes, it’s easy to see there’s a lot going on here. Consider there are three different views of your station – inside, where the workers and the buildings are; the exterior, where important machinery like giant solar panels and the hull are maintained; and the expanded view of the solar system, for sending ships and exploring the universe. There’s so much going on, in fact, that the demo is not much more than a tutorial, for better and for worse.

For better meaning that it shows off a lot of what the title has to offer by allowing the player direct interaction, and for worse meaning that the full eighty-minute trial is entirely learning new stuff you’ll never get a chance to take for a spin on your own, unless you opt to actually get the game. Another personal pet peeve – elongated and generally boring gameplay introductions. I know it’s necessary to go into a lot of details for complex games but isn’t there a better way, a more fun way, to do them? Fortunately there’s a light at the end of the tutorial-tunnel, as it were. Requiring a big investment of energy and focus up-front, in order to learn the numerous mechanics and interplaying systems, usually means the payout is a deeper, more gratifying experience, where the player feels accomplished and that their base (as well as all of the optimisations and hot-fixes they’ve made) is truly theirs. Sadly, by the time that happens it’s all over. But it does give me hope that the full release will continue to evolve as you play it, taking advantage of the many levels of gameplay – something the large tech-tree also implies!

Besides the actual creation and command of your infrastructure, there’s also a compelling narrative to the title that I didn’t really expect. Although much of the talk with other officers is around objectives they’d have you complete, the writing is well done and the voice acting really helps sell it. Even better were the cutscenes – a basic intro and a particularly inspiring outro that wrapped up the demo with an interesting (and destructive) cliff-hanger. Whilst I do wish I could have seen just a little of the next phase of the game in a more hands-on, training-wheels-off approach, I’m sure fans of the genre are going to enjoy getting to grips with this one. It may not be the most intricate, or anywhere near the most colourful in its class, but what it does offer is a real journey into the unknown. A chance at exploration beyond the stars, combined with all of the challenging risks that that entails.