Recent reviews by Wayson

Having finished my playthrough - there is a fun game trapped inside of Ixion, good for one or two playthroughs, but if you're looking for Space Frostpunk then be aware that this isn't it. Yarhor's review is fairly comprehensive, but what stuck out to me here are the following.

1) Logistics are a pain and my biggest issue. You will fiddle with the resource sliders for each sector A LOT in order to move resources from sector to sector, and it doesn't really get better even with Drones near the end. The game inexplicably does not use a single repository for resources and it suffers as a result.

2) The tech tree is confusing and saturated with too many things that are often meaningless. It took me some time to realize that each 'bubble' in the tree has a number of child technologies that can be researched if you left-click on the bubble to see the list. This combined with the fact that many technologies are unnecessary - you don't need algae farms or the nuclear reactor or the observatory and so on - means that you can easily miss critical technologies (the Mess Hall ones are critical, for instance) and waste science. A key shuttle technology in Chapter 5 is put under Docking Bay (???) instead of being a unique bubble like the Piranesi techs are. Etc. Arguably the most important techs are in the Tech Lab child techs - you need to research here to get more Science points every n turns and more Science points per point of interest, and you should do this at your earliest convenience so that the cumulative gains are highest. Things like policies via the DLS Center are not clearly explained and are left to be intuited. I.e. you can research and build a DLS Center in each sector, go to a Waste Recycling policy across all sectors, and cover your water needs with that plus another building, but this is left to you to figure out how to achieve.

3) The delination between interior and exterior buildings is random and pointless. Key modules for anti-Piranesi and anti-EDDEN and so on are in the same exterior tab as the engines, meaning that you'll easily miss them if you don't know that they are there waiting to be built. Similarly, missile countermeasures (Chapters 4 and 5) are built in the probe launcher, but you have to manually toggle between 'auto build probe' and 'auto build missile countermeasure' by going all the way to your probe launcher manually instead of via the system view screen.

4) The story is firmly on rails, in that all your decisions are meaningless and you have only two meaningful choices available in Chapter 5 - land on Remus (default), or colonize Romulus (against DOLOS's plan). Before starting the game, I highly recommend finding a guide so you know what each exploration option does - optimize your choices for best outputs and move on. The only differentiation between choices prior to the Romulus/Remus bit is if people die or in the quantity of resources obtained. Also, throughout the game the language/grammar/etc in English is just a little bit ... off. It feels as though it was translated from another language into English, and this does detract from immersion.

5) The game gives you a false sense of urgency. Ignore this - the only penalty to lurking in a system for years and years is a temporary (only for that system) -1 to morale. Take the opportunity in all systems to get your research done, build out sectors, and farm up materials. Particularly do so in Chapter 4 (again, read a guide to see what's coming in Chapters 4 and 5), because if you are not otherwise prepared then those two chapters may be rather difficult.

For a concept that seems fairly ludicrous, such as space dwarves in power armor mining an alien planet while fighting giant bugs, Deep Rock Galactic pulls it off amazingly well. There's enough emergent chaos and variety in the game that it has a high degree of replayability, and the Early Access status of the game means that even though it's fairly well polished, content continues to both be added and refined. There are AAA games that are not nearly as entertaining or as deep (metaphorically and literally) as DRG.

Rock n Stone, brother!