Destroying emitters makes for a much more satisfactory and conclusive-feeling victory. The third game is back to the top-down view of the first, but brings along some of the mechanical improvements of the second game: that you can harvest ore (if it’s available) to produce your own “anti-creeper” that physically acts like creeper but is on your side, and that you can actually destroy the emitters instead of just parking cannons around them to destroy any creeper the moment it gets emitted. Creeper emerges from “emitters” and just kind of pools and spreads out until it starts damaging your structures. All three games are basically novel real-time strategy games, in which you expand a network of nodes that carries the “packets” you need to build and power weapons to fight an enemy called “creeper”, which is a fluid. I’ve posted briefly about Creeper World and its first sequel before. Probably more than it deserved, but I found it a tremendously easy pastime to default to.
Instead, I have to confess that I spent an enormous amount of time on Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal. I pretty much skipped the IF Comp this year - I tried, but it was an especially big year, and I just wasn’t in the mood for it, and wound up playing less then 10 games total. Now that I’ve broken silence, I should probably say something about what I’ve been playing for the past few months. It’s hard to capture in words, but I bet any strategy game made by the same people would feel this way.
This gives the level designer more control over how you can advance, but the cadence of that advancement still has the same basic feel. Particle Fleet instead puts a fixed number of energy sources on the map, which, once claimed, provide healing and ammo to anything within a certain range.
In Creeper World, you were limited by your network of Collectors, which you could build anywhere, as long as you could defend them. That’s character development.įor all that, it plays a lot like Creeper World! It’s all about advancing bit by bit, establishing a safe perimeter and then making risky sallies beyond it to seize important locations, with a big emphasis on supply lines, both maintaining yours and cutting off the enemy’s. Afterward, if it survived, it would visibly be severely damaged by the battle, carved into a different shape than when it started. There’s one ship whose chief virtue is that it has an extra-thick fan-shaped block of hull in front, and I frequently used it to shield the more fragile “Lance” ships as they moved in on an emitter. Even just their shape can make them meaningfully different from one another: damage isn’t just a matter of lowering a stat displayed in a little bar graph, but physically carves chunks out of the ships where they were hit, block by block, disabling any weapons or engines mounted on the destroyed bits. But so does the way that most of the ships are unique in some way. And yet, despite this, the game managed to get me thinking of the ships as essentially individuals, cooperating as a team rather than as an army.
Creeper world 3 arc eternal icon license#
You can rebuild ships when they get destroyed, but you’re limited in what you can have under your control at a time - in-fiction, this is explained by your galactic empire being essentially corporatist, and your company’s fleet being constrained by license agreements. Instead of building a vast army of autocannons to defend your border on multiple fronts, you have a fleet of about a dozen ships max. The main way this affects gameplay is a reduction of the scale of things, probably to keep that particulate from diffusing too much. To fit this, the battlefield is shifted into space - specifically, “Redacted Space”, a no-go zone chock-a-block with asteroids and shattered planets positioned to channel the mindless particulate in tactically interesting ways. The basic idea behind PF:E is that it’s like Creeper World, except that instead of the enemy being emitters that produce a slowly-spreading viscous substance that tends to pool in low places, the emitters produce particles that drift about the battlefield aimlessly and independently, weakly attracted to your own forces. I found it satisfying and reasonably short. I haven’t played it yet, but the release did spur me to try out Particle Fleet: Emergence, another similar game by the same devs and set in the same fictional universe.
Creeper world 3 arc eternal icon update#
Gemcraft wasn’t the only long-running originally-in-Flash series to get an update in 2020: the anticipated fourth entry in the Creeper World series was released, bringing its fight-the-ocean gameplay into full 3D and provoking the same sort of “Oh, so that’s how I was supposed to be picturing it!” reactions as other suddenly-in-3D games like Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time.