Ixion (1992)

The cover is just this image in black and white. Like something out of the early '80s rather than the early '90s.

Name:Ixion
Number:233
Year:1992
Publisher:Software 42
Developer:Tom Cooper and Barry Clarkson
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:5/5
Time:4 hours
Won:Yes (103W/72L)

If you've been reading my previous entires on original FPS for the Acorn Archimedes range, you probably have a mental image of what this one will be already. Mouse-only, crude 3D graphics, straight-forward shooting action, frustrating difficulty and the usual British humor. Ixion is different, it tries to be a complex action-adventure game and as far as I can tell it isn't humorous.

Finding out about the game world on one of the computers.

Ixion has a strange backstory. Taking place in the future, the human race has colonized many other planets, but Earth itself has become an environmental hazard. All but a few places have turned completely uninhabitable. After Earth was evacuated, the population of the galaxy became poor and turned to crime. To combat this, Earth has been turned into a prison planet, what's still vaguely inhabitable of it, anyway. The game begins with the player arriving here, charged with narcotic possession. The objective is simply to escape the planet.

Spiritually, this reminds me a lot of Galactic Empire. Like it, this game comes out as a FPS with adventure game sensibilities. Whereas Empire had a clever dialog system and story to balance out a less than ideal combat system and sometimes frustrating puzzles; Ixion has none of that. Ixion is straightforward, has a bizarre world, and offers nothing but busywork. There isn't even a save system, so if you die or are forced to quit, you have to restart.

A relatively common starting view.

You are placed in the game world with no guidance outside of escape. So it's time to get used to the game world. You move around with the arrows on the GUI. There are no keyboard substitutes. The only keyboard commands are help, pause, minimize the game, (you quit by middle clicking the game's icon, remember Archimedes game) and controlling the size of your radar. To interact with objects in the game world, you left click on objects to use them, assuming you can or you have the item necessary, and right click to shoot.

Oh, except the two things near you when you start; The only non-hostile non-talking human, and a car. The first human you see cannot be interacted with. The first time around, I thought that meant I was pressing the wrong mouse button, and shot at a distance some ways away from him. This didn't turn him hostile, but other, wandering security machines did become hostile.

The car is weird, because you use it by walking into it from a certain angle, like one of the many buildings. It's a godsend of an object, because it allows you to speed around the map. Let me tell you, it isn't fun just walking around it. It's not that big, I think about five minutes from one corner to another, but speed is very helpful. I didn't check the manual enough to figure out that you just walk into the side of it in order to enter it. Considering that it's not obvious where the manual is, and that it violates the rest of the rules of interaction, it's a bit frustrating.

The game has a good amount of places to go to, but there is a proper sequence to it all. This is where the adventure aspect of the game comes in. Sort of. This is like an adventure game in that there is a sequence of puzzles you need to solve in order to advance through the game. It's less like one because you can boil down all puzzles to fetch quests and key to doors. Like a game that decided that the best part of Doom was hunting down all the keys.

I'll take you on a guided tour of the game, rather than the aimless wandering I had to do. To start with, the first location you should head to is west of the starting area. West, not south or north. South is a bar, that'll be important in a moment, and north...first is a locked door, then a place with two guys who kill you if you approach. At least when you first meet them you won't likely make that mistake again.

For a criminal, he's sure a nice fellow.

West is an office building...at least that's the only explanation I have for it. There are many rooms, which have some items. Food, a small amount of cash, some anti-radiation pills and a pair of sunglasses. The middle two are puzzle items, the first a healing item and the shades make the screen slightly darker. The food isn't just a healing item, it's the only healing item. There's also a computer with a floppy drive and no OS.

Then there are two people you can talk to. The first asks if you want some work, take out some guy who wronged him by stealing some of his equipment. The other is a creepy-looking alien who you can't speak to yet. He's very important. Were this a game with more serious world-building as opposed to things that happen, I would wonder what kind of prison colony this is if it has a guy who I later discover is an arms dealer and an alien who, while not as shady as the arms dealer, is still pretty shady.

The guards, from a very safe distance away.

The proper sequence of events now is to head south of your starting position, to a bar. Inside is a charming barman and a lady who wants something. You give money to the barman, and give the drink you get to the lady. She then tells you where the guy is, north of you in an L-shaped building, and gives you a pass so you can get past his guards.

So, combat. As you can imagine from the controls, combat is not fun. Right click releases a steady stream of bullets. From the start, your options are to either launch a preemptive attack and hope you can kill them first, or shift between dodging and shooting. You get a crosshair when you shoot, but it's slightly off-center from where you're aiming. You can dodge behind cover, but enemies that can move will find you, and most of the time you get cover it isn't a fight you should be having anyway. You can shoot enemy bullets, but good luck with that.

And if you get hit, you are in bad luck. The food barely heals you, and health regeneration is extremely slow. I know it happened, but waiting around never seems to make it work. Perhaps it's related to the radiation icon on my HUD being active half the time. The rad pills nullify it just enough so that my health regeneration can deal with it, but not anything else.

Going back to the arms dealer, I get a missile launcher for my trouble. This is another weapon, though it isn't obvious at first. Sometimes it works on an enemy, sometimes it doesn't. Instead of a stream of bullets, it's a higher damaging but slower to fire homing missile. The first time it happened I was confused, because it's much slower. It does make dodging easier when you aren't trying to fire constantly. Not really sure how much better it made combat, for reasons that will be made clear in a moment.

I'm surprised they even bothered to put labels on these things since I just walked in.

The next step is to go to the nuclear power plant to the southwest of the starting area. At this point, sometimes the robot security wandering around the map started to attack me. Why? Dunno, there's no consistent explanation. It's not killing the guy or going near the plant, sometimes it just happens, sometimes it doesn't.

For the power plant, you need the rad pills, otherwise you'll die. There are some slightly more clever puzzles in here. Like shoot some crates to open a door, or use a button to find a slightly hidden elevator. There's a lot of items here, a couple of key cards with letters on them, a floppy disk hidden away, and some Infrared Glasses, which turn the screen red and allow you to see hidden messages. I never found it, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Also in here is a computer. From it, you can log onto different system OSes, but the one here allows you to mess around with the reactor. You can turn it off, and this allows you to get past a force field in another building. I wouldn't ponder the ramifications of this, if any thought was put in, it's clearly that the people behind the design of this place are incompetent. The game suggests that if you wait around for a long enough time, the plant will explode, but I didn't check. If it does, that's a better ending than what you get.

More importantly, the other OSes do things like explain the game world, the backstory, and if you have the right code, invincibility. Yeah, you can cheat in this game by...well, you can just check through the game files. I took advantage of this because I wasn't going to finish the game otherwise. You'll see why.
 

Feels very ZZT-like, which is guess tracks.

At this point the game gets really into the whole keycard and door thing, because now that's basically going to be all you're doing. Your two keycards open a door south and one northeast, which have more keycards in them. These open up the central building, but it's not where you go yet. Instead, there's another puzzle in the building that's dead south, move a big cannon so it'll shoot some crates, this reveals a room with a translator.

That's certainly a charming design.

But before you go talk to the alien, you need to put the floppy in the computer. Why? Because the computer allows access to a room with a battery that's very important. You just need a password which I guess requires the IR Glasses to find, but I never found it. The intended sequence here is to go up to the alien, sell him the battery, bribe two guards in another building so you can get another keycard and enough money to buy back the battery. Or you could just run past the guards.

The central building requires you to first use the battery on one door, then the keycard you got from the place with the two guards you bribe. This gets you a keycard for another door in the room, which has the teleporter. Hope you read the game's backstory and kept a note of the location of the nearby spaceport, because that's where you need to set it too.

 

This is what you get if you don't fall down, because there's no looking up or down.

The spaceport is just pure combat. Go to one of the two buildings, and hope you don't accidentally fall down, then shoot the big crystal to deactivate a force field on the other building. Inside there, shoot a weird flying robot, get a boarding pass, then leave the planet. You slowly fly off into space.

In addition to the puzzles that come off as busywork, there are many robots wandering around the two sectors. Obviously in the second they're always hostile to you, but in the first they start off friendly, but for no reason, turn hostile. I have no idea what triggers the change here, time is the only consistent cause. Shooting someone inside a building, entering the power plant, none of these actions caused me trouble all the time. Which I guess gets down to the game's problem if you somehow fixed the controls.

Turning an adventure game into a real-time 3D action game is just a bad idea. Unwinnable by design puzzles are something most are firmly against, to the point that this hurts the genre a lot in the constant attempts to revive it. But this ignores how bad unwinnable by poor luck is and why games like these haven't been revived in the years since. If it's intended, it can be worked around, if it's bad luck, you don't ever know if what you did was something wrong or just bad luck.

It doesn't help that this game also lacks saving and has numerous gotcha moments. Perilously walking over catwalks, one of which is near the end of the game, and oh, if you keep walking after entering a building you fall down and are completely out of luck. Unless you dig deep, the adventure games you're likely to play aren't that cruel. Even Elvira, which delights in mocking the player, has saving despite more gotcha moments than a game of tag.

That said, there's some stuff that deserves some credit. The computers are fairly interesting, if slightly too full of having to guess at things. Then, the skyboxes, or rather the sky. It probably doesn't come off too well in static images, but there's some clever stuff going on there. Slowly moving around, clouds which are independent objects. Shame it's tied up in a game that really had no need for it. With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
I don't think there's much depth when I was unsure if the missile launcher was an upgrade. 1/10

Enemies:
Nearly all variations on your plain shooter enemy or a turret. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Non-combat NPCs with limited dialog. 0/10

Levels:
There is some semblance of a more natural world, which I kind of liked, but it was counter balanced by the large focus on walking back and forth. A lot of walking back and forth. 2/10

Player Agency:
Mouse-only shooters will be my bane until someone figures out that the keyboard is a helpful tool. 2/10

Interactivity:
For a game that seems to be trying to be an adventure game, far too crude. You use most items automatically, and others you have to enter your inventory to use. It's basically click and the occasional shot towards a crate. 2/10

Atmosphere:
I'll give the game one thing, I certainly feel like I'm walking around an irradiated hellscape of a prison planet. 4/10

Graphics:
Hey, animated people walking around a true 3D world. Take that, Alone in the Dark! Besides that, I noticed that some stationary objects can become invisible depending on where you're standing. I also liked the particle effects. 2/10

Story:
The game world makes no sense. Why does this prison sector have an alien? Why is there some semblance of civilization? Why can I just walk into the power plant? Why do people have food? I don't understand what the game is going for at all! 0/10

Sound/Music:
A title theme, some effects when you walk around, and some interesting sound effects. This one has some early footstep sound effects, which is pretty nice. 4/10

That comes up to 19. Taking out 2 points for no save system, we get 17 in total. Not the worst game or even FPS I've ever played. I appreciate what it tried to do, even if it failed.

Acorn User had a review of the game which feels less like a review and more the act of someone who doesn't want to admit that it isn't as good as he wants to think. He praises basically everything except the lack of saves. You'll get used to the mouse-only controls and it gets rid of the stuffiness of adventure games. He didn't finish the game. Normally, I'd move on, but I'm not feeling charitable about this today. This is the thought process of someone who has developed a cult-like mindset with his system of choice. They don't want to admit that maybe they backed the wrong horse, and instead try to shill whatever seems to them to be the best thing the system has to offer. In comparison to a lot of people I've seen who have this mindset, I think that this isn't so bad. It's outclassed by games I've talked about in the past, but I don't think that the writer knew about those. Taken in the usual isolation these games I've been covering have, this does seem to be a cool prototype. But the gameplay is nothing special, and it doesn't matter how cool a prototype you have if it's just cool without even passable gameplay to go with it.

With that, we've pretty much ended our time with this branch of FPS design. 3D focused open worlds which tend to view pretty much any aspect except the world itself as secondary at best. It's not really a mystery as to why these games failed. Most of them seemed to try to combine action and adventure elements, but the action was never really fun enough to want to run through it and the adventure half was amateurishly done.

It's strange that most of all, what killed most of these games was an insistence on either a bizarre control scheme or simply just using the mouse. I wouldn't recommend most of them if they had traditional control schemes, but I would be more favorable towards them. Some of them might have even been worth checking out for historical purposes.

Next time, I'm afraid I've got a busy week coming up and I've suddenly fallen ill, so I'm probably going to pull out something from 1984. Somehow I still have a good chunk of games from there, but hopefully this will cut it down a little.