Creeper World 4, then. I do enjoy tower defence as a genre and have got on famously well with games such as Defence Grid and Defender’s Quest and even the ancient Flash classic Desktop Tower Defence, but I’ve never managed to get into the Creeper World series. I think this is down to the series’ gimmick, where rather than defending against waves of enemies who rush in from offscreen to charge through your gauntlet of towers, you’re instead engaged in more of a hybrid RTS experience where you aggressively shuffle towers around the map to beat back a huge, constantly growing mass of purple goo called the Creeper that destroys everything it touches. It’s an interesting spin on the concept, and the guy behind Creeper World basically really likes making games out of simulations of cellular automata so the Creeper has always behaved like a believable fluid, pooling and flowing realistically before surging towards your woefully underprepared defence line. Unfortunately that hasn’t been all that clear up until this point, because the previous three Creeper World games were all top-down 2D affairs where you couldn’t really get a good impression of the true scale of the Creeper infestation; I ended up feeling more like I was fighting a war against the colour purple than I was a all-consuming blob monster and fell out of Creeper Worlds 2 and 3 quite quickly as a result.
Which, in a roundabout way, also explains why Creeper World 4 has been the one to finally click with me: it’s the first title in the series to go fully 3D, and so for the first time I am able to see just how sodding enormous the mass of Creeper bearing down on my base really is. This one change transforms Creeper World from what was ultimately a fairly standard turtling RTS game into something far more distinctive — and fun.