Creeper World IXE breaks the RTS mold and adds a dash of Noita's alchemy to the gooey war
How bad could cutting into a pipe filled with highly pressurized corrosive goo be? A question I have asked myself many times in just the first few hours of playing Creeper World IXE (pronounced "icks"), the latest in a long-running oddball indie strategy series. The answer, somehow, is always "very bad". And yet I continue to do it. Partly because I'm an idiot, and partly because the results are always oddly spectacular, especially when every single pixel of the world is physically modelled.
If you're new to the Creeper World series by micro-indie outfit Knuckle Cracker, they're a turtler's wet dream, emphasis on the wet. Slow-and-steady defensive strategy games where your enemy isn't some invading army or swarming bugs, but a spreading ocean of deadly blue goo (the titular Creeper) that will just keep flowing and dissolving all the things you hold dear until you can push back the tide (usually using explosives) and plug the interdimensional hole it's leaking out of. Something I've always found weirdly satisfying, and given that we're up to the sixth game, I'm not the only one.
While each game in the series experiments in strange new directions (Creeper World 4 is the only one in the series that's 3D), there's always elements of traditional, intuitive RTS gameplay here, including resource gathering and base-building. Creeper World has always been a solo experience: you versus a force of nature that needs to be mopped up rather than fought. As such, success is solely ranked by completion speed. You can take things slow and steady, but bold strategies get you a higher place on the online leaderboards, and there's randomly generated and user-made missions on top of those provided.
Sandbox strategy
Creeper World IXE is the sixth in the series (if we're counting space combat spinoff Particle Fleet), and returns to the side-on ant-farm perspective of Creeper World 2, but blends in a hefty helping of Falling Sand style particle simulation—the kind most recently seen in roguelike alchemical chaos simulator Noita. It makes for a very granular, unusual battlefield where your terrain-editing ships are every bit as important as the ones with big lasers, giving the missions a more puzzle-like feel than other games in the series.
Everything from your fleet of spaceships (which don't so much fly as disintegrate and rebuild themselves) to the terrain and the Creeper itself is physically modeled on a per-pixel basis, and each element interacts in interesting ways. Water turns non-interactable lava into excavatable rock. Acid and Pixelium form a Creeper-suppressing physical barrier, and there's a little in-game cheat sheet showing you the other useful alchemical mixtures you can exploit. Gases rise and liquids build in pressure against stone walls, just waiting for you to pop the cork and scramble to cut through the tide to reach the leaky source inside.
As with its predecessors, there's a satisfying rhythm to each mission here. Your mothership (which is able to dig, shoot, tank and act as a construction and resource-hoarding platform) is the first unit down, but you'll quickly deploy the rest of your fleet and rush to intercept any incoming Creeper tides and build force-barriers to contain liquid flows. From there it's an order-of-operations problem as you figure out which areas need your immediate attention and what parts of the cave systems can be left for a while. Messing around too long can result in unwinnable (or at least very difficult) situations, but you're free to pause, slow or accelerate time. In real-time, missions can often take upwards of half an hour, although that time just flies by, given the chance. The high-energy synthwave soundtrack doesn't hurt either.
Too greedily, too deep
Perhaps a little too fast, even. Creeper World IXE also has a lot of ideas and funky units introduced over the course of its relatively short 20-mission campaign, the most distinctive being a power-armored hero unit that you can control directly, platformer-style, shooting, transporting materials and blasting open paths through areas that your ships might not be able to reach. They're very interesting, but new units and ideas are introduced at such a rate that they don't really feel like they have room to breathe. This will become less of a problem over time as the community produces more levels (which you can access directly in-game), but you might feel a little rushed through the main story.
Rushed feels like the word of the day. If there's one thing holding Creeper World IXE back, it's the interface. It's not bad and works reasonably well once you adjust to it, but for some reason it defies standard RTS controls. There are no useful hotkeys for selecting or grouping units, and modifiers like Control and Shift are needed to do things as simple as drag-selecting ships. Likewise, digging, building shield tiles and clearing build orders feel a bit fiddlier than they should be. From what I've played, it would have made more sense (at least to my sludge-filled brain) to have separate unit command and terrain building modes that you switch between with a single toggle key.
The UI visuals are also an odd choice, reminding me of shareware-era programmer art, and a significant step down from the clean but classy layouts in Particle Fleet and Creeper World 4. While I dig the Amiga-esque aesthetics of the pixel world and ships, the buttons, boxes and menus feel less retro and more primitive. Especially when a lot of Amiga games had absolutely gorgeous interfaces. The tutorial videos in-game also hammer through ideas at a comical rate, and automatically move forward instead of pausing and repeating the one thing you're trying to look up details on.
It's a frustrating set of issues. Nothing that can't be fixed or worked past once you're over the initial learning curve, but it makes a rough first impression for newcomers to the series. All that being said, this is still a smart and creative evolution of the series, with a lot of fun new ideas that I hope to see the community properly explore, like the action-style power suit unit and zero-gravity levels. But it's hard to shake the feeling that this one was pushed out the door a little prematurely. Still, an interesting new direction for a continually evolving series. Creeper World IXE is out now on Steam for $17.99/£15.07, with a 10% launch discount running until December 26th.