IXION
I originally played IXION as a demo and was immediately impressed. The atmosphere and building mechanics were really engaging and I hung on until full release. It wasn't that well received due to lack of difficulty options and bugs, but it's had a ton of work done on it since then. If you enjoyed Frostpunk, you'll probably like this. Personally, the amount of micromanaging and lack of QoL features stopped me from playing past the first chapter.
Pros
- Looks awesome
- Runs well
- Voice acted
- Nice UI
- Send science ships on missions
- Tech tree for upgrades
- A HUGE number of difficulty settings. Not just hard or easy, but you can change all the metrics of how the game works to suit your playstyle. I don't have the time or patience to replay hours of the game if you fail, so being able to turn off some mechanics was wonderful. Most of the negative reviews are about the difficulty, which has been rectified with the addition of all these difficulty settings.
- Interesting story and events to follow
- Amazing aesthetic and atmosphere
Cons
- Building mechanics are annoying. You can't move things, and you rapidly run out of space, so you have to deconstruct, store the materials, add a new building, wait for materials to be delivered, then constructed
- It's very easy to misclick while looking for probe locations, which launches it and wastes the resources
- I found the food mechanic confusing. Food is measured every 5 days, with 1 insect farm making 1 food per day. Which means every time I gain crew members (all the time) I have to think "number of insect farms * 5 / 10" instead of just looking at a number
- There are no buildings that take up 2 tiles, so there's loads of wasted space
- In order to transfer resources from one sector to another, you have to have a stockpile in each one. If your ship brings in resources to an airlock in a sector where you don't want those resources, you still have to build a stockpile to hold them, to move them. Which means you need all 11 stockpiles in every sector, even in sectors where you don't want that resource
- I dislike there being arbitrarily workers and non-workers on the ship. It just adds another layer of annoyance
- It's one of those games (like Frostpunk) where everything starts against you, and just gets worse. You get penalised for staying in a system too long. You get penalised for moving to a new system. You get permanent hull damage for moving. Accidents happen all the time even when everything is happy and well staffed
- Mining ships do not avoid hazardous areas, so unless you watch them every 10 seconds, they fly through danger clouds and die