the performance is bad, there are a ton of bugs, the artstyle is pretty bad but worst of all, while not as abysmal as 2Ks XSOM movie, this is still not very good in its core gameplay the poor writing forces you to babysit 3 stupid factions who shoot each other in a burning building. the defence mission are repetitive and extra dull same 4 enemies on same 6 maps again and again. but that is actually a side effect. the designers wanted you not to be friends with them but to choose a side and literally genocide 66% of humanity. not conquest, not conversion. pure genocide against your overall end-goal. last boss is trash. without deliberately stalling for 100 irl hours to get DLC weapons, while defending repetitive maps, you will probably be entirely out of ammo and medkits due to tiny backpack equating a 5 bullets magazine and a giant gatling machinegun the console gui means the camera and controls are abysmal. it's a constant irritation, but at elast it's a turn based game (mostly) and yes the writing is one of the worst i ever saw. and instead of cutscenes you get abysmal comics and morph animations. it's better to not have any cutscenes than to make terrible ones. it's like a ufoEU cut down for appstore (as opposed to the XSOM visual novel). the crab people theme is kinda okay though
I've never played first or the second game, but i played through, like, about a half (or more) of the Creeper World 3. And this is basically exactly the same thing, but in THREE DEE — despite the new dimension the fluids still do not fall into the maps' infinite pits. They've missed the release there, it's third games which are traditionally go into THREE DEE, and it seems the third game is really similar to the first one anyway. These games (sans 2) are kind of a casual RTS derivative. People who did castle attacks in Age of Empires 2 or slowly moved army fronts on enemy's scripted paths in Sega's version of Dune 2 inspired the popular tower defence genre and PVE RTS genre, like in Периметр and this series. (And Creeper World has significant similarities with Периметр). What you do here is build your income\outcome based economy (reference Total Annihilation), set up your defences and start a war of attrition. For your convenience the towers can relocate and there's terraforming. I think here the nullifier works differently here. It disables the structures and the creeper can get its buildings back from you. Fourth game is faster paced and shorter, which is good. For people who want to play the same game for thousands of hours there are tens more of the maps, a map generator, and a ton of community made maps. This game is some kind of a prequel? Reboot? The overall story is kind of okay, but the plot is weak and the writing is dumb. You just read briefings from three unfunny unquirky mad AIs. Near the end you are asked to disperse your seed (of knowledge), by the people who have much greater capabilities than your solitary space-cell. Why didn't they do that? Also it seems the game makes a mistake of equating a clone and the original consciousness. Creeper World 4 uses low-poly simple graphics and layered terrain. It look good enough, even a little bit pretty at times. But the GUIs are ugly, flat and sometimes even improperly fit.
