Creeper World 4 is an excellent RTS/tower defense hybrid about fighting off fluids coming ever so closer to your base. It’s quite a unique game, or well – the franchise as a whole is unique, and you don’t have to worry about playing previous entries to enjoy this installment, which represents the first 3D game in the underrated franchise.
Don’t be fooled by the game’s UI both in the menus and during missions – it may not look the best, but it’s functional and readable enough to get you to grips with the game’s fantastic tactical depth. There are number of different settings to tinker with, most notably UI scaling (my favorite feature in perhaps any game ever), controls and visibility options. Graphics settings aren’t aplenty but are enough – even a “High FPS” option can be found there, which does exactly what it says, and it doesn’t seem to affect the visuals at all. When it comes to controls, while they are fortunately customizable, the absence of checkboxes for the left mouse button alongside the other mouse buttons is a bit odd, but not game-breaking.
When it comes to playing the game itself, boy is there plenty of content! Players new to the franchise will definitely want to jump in the Farsite Expedition campaign first and foremost, as it does a great job of easing you into the basics, carefully introducing new units to use and new structures to place as you progress through the missions accompanied by a somewhat comedic narrative, though the story is certainly not the key aspect of this title – it’s the gameplay.
So, how does this game actually work? In essence, it’s basically about making sure your artillery constantly has enough power in order to fire at the incoming fluid, while slowly advancing forward to your objective. You place towers within suitable distance in order to transfer energy from one tower to the other, sending the energy to the weaponry at the frontline. Depending on the objective, you’ll not only be doing ‘tower defense’ but you’ll also be doing ‘tower offence’. If you’re ever unsure about how something in the game works, then the Info button found in the top left during missions should do a good job explaining what you’re looking for – if not, then opening the official wiki found in the Info area will most likely get you up to speed.
The objectives can vary – from nullifying Creepers such as Emitters that spread the blue goo to holding your ground for a certain amount of time – lots of fun strategy is to be had. If you find it difficult to think on the fly, then you can simply pause the game’s time in order to carefully examine the situation and plan out your next move. You can do the opposite as well – speed up the game by 2x and 4x. While your units remain static when deployed, you can select them and order them where to move, in which case they’ll start slowly flying over to the destination set – your base can be moved this way as well. Not only will you get to use land units, but air units too!
At the end of every mission you can put a random name and submit your stats to the ‘Play Log’ a list showing how much time a player took to complete a certain objective and more. Aside from the lengthy campaign, there are many other things to enjoy too, such as Chronom, where you’ll find daily missions; Span Experiments – experimental missions made while the game was in beta and in development. There’s even a random mission generator called Mark V where, next to choosing things such as map size and enemy difficulty also lets you input a seed like you would in Minecraft – numbers, words and even symbols are acceptable.
In the Colonies area you’ll find community-created maps! That’s right; Creeper World 4 lets you make your own maps! It has a simple yet very powerful and complex built-in map editor, letting you make the kind of missions the devs made too! Even custom units and scripting is supported, allowing you to import and create epic scripts if you want to go beyond the vanilla capabilities.
Last but not least, every mission you play is actually recorded. Unfortunately the recordings aren’t in 3D, but it’s still a pretty nice feature that lets you see how you progressed through a mission. The recorder even has a ‘Create Video’ option, allowing you to export the video into an MP4 or GIF file; for some reasons the MP4 option is grayed out for me, but your mileage may vary.
Overall, Creeper World 4 is a hidden RTS/tower-defense gem with endless replay value that you don’t want to miss out on, especially if you love strategy games. It certainly has an old-school feel to it, and it’s a game that definitely deserves more coverage on top gaming sites, which for some reasons it hasn’t gotten as much as it should – fortunately that hasn’t stopped it from doing very well on Steam and GOG, which are the stores you can get this wonderful game on! Only Windows is supported unfortunately, but hopefully Mac and Linux support will be added in the future, as the previous games in the series do support those platforms too.
If you’re still hesitant after this review, then be sure to try out the game’s demo, that should give you a good idea of whether you’ll like this game or not. As someone who isn’t really into tower-defense games I still found Creeper World 4 to be a great game, and it in fact makes me wonder what it’d be like to put an ever-spreading blue fluid as an enemy in other genres…
I hope you enjoyed this review. Stay safe, and I wish you all happy holidays and a happy New Year!