Creeper World 4

I was surprised when I found I hadn't written a review of Creeper World 3, but then I realized its release date was nearly 10 years ago. Turns out Creeper World 4 is not that different of a game, despite visually becoming 3D. Since the Creeper World series is something I've played since the Flash game era when I was still a child, I figured I'd cover the previous game in the series as well.

Creeper World is a mix between a tower defense game and an RTS. You must build towers and harvest resources to protect your base, but your enemy does not do the same. They, the "creeper", are a giant mass of viscous liquid that destroys anything it comes in contact with. It slowly creeps forward from its spawning points, and you have to build a defensive battlefront to halt its advance. After managing to do so, you must then slowly push back the creeper by having your defenses clear a small area in front of them, then building new defenses there. Each map is this tug-of-war between you and the creeper, usually ending when you have managed to push it all the way back. There are several different towers, types of resources, other buildings, and ways for the creeper to spread. Terrain is also an important part, with high ground generally being better to defend, but also harder to attack, as the creeper flows from high to low areas.

I think Creeper World is a very unique game, and I love the feeling of fighting against this giant mass that is bigger than yourself. It feels like keeping an ocean at bay. It's quite exciting for the first 10 or so minutes of each map, as you figure out how much area you can grab for yourself before the creeper reaches your outer buildings and you frantically try to allocate resources to get all the various types of defenses operational and strong enough to withstand the approaching flood. However, after some intial setbacks of maybe losing a few buildings if you were too greedy, or running out of resources if you weren't greedy enough, you arrive at a stable base that can keep the creeper at bay forever. Unless you do something really stupid, it becomes impossible to lose the game, and the remaining time, possibly even as long as an hour, you're just fighting a battle you know you've already won. This is by far the biggest weakness of Creeper World, but honestly, most strategy games suffer from it. At some point, you will just tip over the balance point and become stronger than your opponent, and from there on out, it's just a task of wiping them out. For the player's sake, hope that you can win soon after, but sadly, that's not usually the case with this game. I don't like RTS games, and I'm lukewarm on tower defense games, but despite that, Creeper World is still something that I've enjoyed. Perhaps I don't mind the tedious latter 75% of each map, because it feels satisfying to assert my superiority over the enemy that gave me trouble for the first quarter of the level.

Creeper World has always been a 3D game in some sense, as the creeper is a liquid and flows in accordance to the terrain, which has a different height at different points of the map. So, despite visually extending to the third dimension in Creeper World 4, the game still played the exact same. It looked quite nice, seeing the waves of creeper in 3D, and I found no downsides to the added dimension, but I also found very few benefits. I started off playing in 3D mode, but the erratic terrain elevation made it confusing where things really were, so after a few maps, I just switched to the top-down view, which was exactly like the old 2D mode, only switching back occasionally to admire the view.
Creeper World 3 was the best release in the series, and in terms of features, 4 didn't change a lot. In fact, I'd argue that despite improving the balance of the game in some aspects, it was made worse in others, to the point where I actually enjoyed it substantially less than its predecessor. I did still enjoy it, much like I enjoyed the first game in the series, but after over a hundred hours of playing them all, the new ones really need to innovate in order to keep me engaged for a similar length of time, and Creeper World 4 did not manage to do that.

Would I still recommend Creeper World 4? Yeah, sure. Although, if you have played Creeper World 3, don't really expect anything new or better. If you haven't played Creeper World 3, then maybe that would be the better starting point. The series is definitely starting to show its age, with not having many improvements for over a decade, but I think it's still good as long as there aren't any other games of this type. I do think it's a bit of a niche game, and it's hard to guess if you'd like it because it's so unique, but I know I like it, and if your interests generally align with mine, then perhaps you will too.