Hey Creep. Yeah, you.

Creeper World 4 is a perfect example of a game that shines through an exceptional cohesiveness of simple design, great execution, and enough polish to impress even the most jaded strategy gamer. Creeper World 4 is Knuckle Cracker’s latest addition to its Creeper World franchise with this sequel being, arguably, the best of the series.

If you’ve played any of the Creeper games in the past, you’ll know exactly what to expect when launching the game, but if you take a closer look you’ll notice that’s where the similarities end. The most notable change this time around is even more apparent and easily justifies a purchase. First of all, unlike the previous versions, this latest installment features a true 3D appearance which gives it a more refreshing look.

While we normally associate a creeper as being someone who lurks just beyond the shadows, or someone who peers through windows, the creeper in this game is actually a formidable foe.

creeping in

While we normally associate a creeper as being someone who lurks just beyond the shadows, or someone who peers through windows, the creeper in this game is actually a formidable foe. As the story goes, the Creeper is a blue fluid-like goo that is causing havoc across the galaxy taking over planets with its goo. Your job is to stop it from spreading by defeating it tactfully and meticulously one map at a time.

To do this, you can deploy an assortment of land, air, and orbital weapons which you logistically place within the terrain grid. From there, you must set up numerous energy stations and waypoints to power your base and provide enough juice to activate them.

Unlike other strategy games, resource gathering is kept to a minimum, meaning you can simply concentrate on the base building without having to worry about running low on resources. However, you'll still need to build factories to process those resources to energy so building the right structure and knowing where to place them becomes a top priority.

So the next time someone calls you a creep, smile and take it as a compliment.

creep on creeping

Gameplay-wise, Knuckle Cracker has spent much of the time balancing the gameplay so there is an incentive to keep going. Based on my early 20 plus hours of preliminary playing, I believe the developers have been quite successful.

The engaging gameplay combined with its robust technological tree offers so much variation in a strategy that even when you know what direction the Creeper is coming from, you really have no idea what it plans on doing next, making this style of unpredictability so immersive.

Creeper World 4 does creep in with some minor flaws that slightly tarnish its shiny coat of goo. For one, the interface can be somewhat convoluted making erroneous clicks prone to errors because you clicked on the wrong thing. Second, a more robust tooltip would help to understand certain gameplay mechanics because as of writing this there were some questions I had but couldn't really find anything about it in the tutorial. And third, increasing the range of specific weapons would go a long way in fighting back the fluid invasion. Plus, having more effective weapons would add more value to them as opposed to making them just novelty items to build.

Despite these flaws, however, Creeper World 4 is one of those games that doesn’t offer anything new but what it does it offer, it does so in abundance. The quality of the game mechanics and the elegance, but simple design, means that the Creeper World franchise is once again setting a high watermark for strategy games. It is truly a must-buy for anyone who loves a challenging game. So the next time someone calls you a creep, smile and take it as a compliment.

Joel

Healthcare Professional, Gamer, and Writer all rolled up in one. He once opened up an old Atari 2600 to see if it had a heart ... and it did. Hence, the lifelong love affair with gaming.

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