Sci-fi city builder Ixion gets a much-needed difficulty update

It adds three base difficulty settings, plus a customisable option.

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I was impressed by the atmosphere and detail of last year’s sci-fi city building simIxion, but it was undoubtedly a game with a few scorch marks seared across its hull. One of the bigger issues was its unpredictable level of challenge, something Alexander Chatziioannou noted in hisreview: “The way Ixion stealthily slides into doom-spirals of unsustainability makes reloading preferable to redesigning.”

Developer Bulwark Studios has clearly been listening, as the game’s latest update introduces a suite of difficulty options. In a press release, Bulwark detailed the three primary difficulty options as follows:

Alongside these is a fourth option which lets players customise the difficulty specifically to suit their desired challenge. Bulwark doesn’t specific which parameters can be adjusted, but the studio does point out that these setting can be tweaked “mid-game”, letting players find the sweet spot as they hop across the galaxy.

Ixion’s difficulty update is live right now. But Ixion isn’t the only intriguing twist on the city-building genre to arrive lately. In the last few months, we’ve seen games that let you build citiesunderwater,in the sky, and even one that lets you build on the back of agiant space turtle. The genre is truly having a moment, and that’sbeforeCities: Skylines 2launches later this year.

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