This game is not fun.

[Spicy Grasshopper]

Poor sequel to creeper world.
With CW it didnt feel like I was fighting the game, but playing the game, I was able to try new things, and sure sometimes they didnt work, but sometimes they did, and it was a learning experience, and therefore was having fun.

This game on the other hand from about mission 12ish onwards it feels like im fighting the game, fighting the developer, and that there is only 1-2 ways you can actually do the levels, which ruins the whole idea of trying different approaches.
This is not a fun experience.

The last mission is trash tier as well.
Like im actually considering refunding this game over this.
Its a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clown show.

Like what the ♥♥♥♥ is this, its not even like the other levels.
And if you want to try something different thats fine, but you do it with little explanation (which btw the guides/videos not that helpful, I had to come here just to figure out how to kill the nexus), and then once again I am fighting the game, every step.

I cant neutralise the creep spawners, the creep bomb is more like a grenade and not very effective. Its a complete joke, the loop is as follows;

>There is a box of creep > There is a creep spawner > The keycard/McGuffin you need is on the other side of the creep spawner > You must get keycard/McGuffin and then get back through it > Unlock door and proceed.

Cool, then what, you do the same thing again and again and again, in a slightly different way, but its the same thing, and it feels like its being done to pad out the level.

Oh and if the whole level is in one scene, that means the creep that you have to let out along the way is building up, so theres probably a time variable.
Again.

Its not fun to fight the developer, and if I have to figure out the 'correct way' (read only way) to do the game thats not fun either, youve removed player agency, and left me with this- anger at the game.

Difficulty spikes are fine, good even, but when you keep doing the same thing and add more to it, thats not a spike, thats a logarithmic curve that just goes upwards, and just leads to frustration, imagine if Elden Ring had you kill a boss, and then the dev says 'oh you beat that boss? Heres two of him now? Oh you did that? Heres three' etc.

You are punishing the player and thats not cool, the game doesnt have to be a hug box either, but it does have to have periods of down spiking, where the player can recover, have an easy win, and get back into it, which isnt the case here.

The last few missions have overall left a negative feeling, and im checking out of this.

[phillip_lynx]

You can neutralise the creep spawners in the Hero-Mission.
Bomb it enough or shoot it enough

Im my play of the mission there was no creeper on the map at the end, only anti-creeper.

[Furryana]

The game is more challenging than Creeper World 4 but the new game mechanics are much better than in Creeper World 4 and its predecessor.

The story gets more difficult as you level up but I like that because you have to think more about which tactics you can use to win. In all missions so far I have completely eliminated the creeper. From around mission 16 onwards the story states that you only have to survive for a certain amount of time and have no chance against the creep.

I am currently on the penultimate story mission (19) and I have also successfully completed all of the tangent missions, you just have to know the weaknesses. In some missions I had to try a different way several times to win.

For me this title is the best part of Creeper World so far and I am excited to see if there will be any updates with new functions and maps.

[Gra̶bz]

You've never actually explained what you're stuck on/having issue with on the level? Yeah it's pretty linear, but it's just supposed to be a fun mode the dev created. I didn't find the level particularly difficult, maybe a little monotonous but the novelty made up for it.

If you're interested in advice then we can give it. Not counting the final level, generally levels can be tackled in many different ways, players just aren't willing to try different possibilities and just go chamber to chamber without considering their approach or how environment can be used.

[Nainara]

While I thought it was fun, I kind of agree with many of OP's points.

1. Relative to prior installments, the mission solutions are almost always a linear sequence of steps, and every player's solution will look more or less identical. IMO This is partly a result of the game design and partly the level design.
   
2. The maps are really small compared to previous Creeper World games. I think this is the result of the engine implementation. It kind of feels like the team made some gameplay/engine sacrifices to make this game exportable to a mobile form factor, but I'm speculating here based on the UI design.
   
3. The player's action space is invariably limited by the number of deployable vessels, and the missions are all carefully calibrated so that creep generation is slightly less than the player's ability to delete creep. I don't recall that the past installments imposed such tight constraints on player agency.

I hope the next Creeper World shifts back to an RTS focus.

[Penguinator]

I just did my review of the game and agree with most of the negative ones, the basic gameplay is not fun (lacks the fundamental RTS from CW2 and the squad-action from PF:E). I hated the final mission simply because it forced a whole new control scheme on you despite being an even more monotonous grindfest than any main level.

When it comes to the core gameplay, the fact that the developer put out a patch so quickly after release with modes that break limits already tells everything. It's ironic how CW4 looks great and runs fine while IXE looks primitive (in a bad way) yet its CPU usage is greedier than the Nexus itself.

[der.dida83]

I do agree with your criticism, but to me the game was fun nevertheless. There are enough missions where you had to figure out stuff and which where challenging because you had a sorta time limit and needed to find the best way to survive.

So if you see it as its own thing, imo it can be fun, if you compare it to CW4, which was pretty much the peak they can push this concept to (imo), it isn't as good, but I don't think they attempted to surpas CW4, it feels more like a spin-off which mixes CW2 and Particle Fleet and adds a few new ideas (like the mixing thing), and the blend (imo) works quite well.

[Swiftyhorn]

Wish it was particle fleet tbh. Such a wasted opportunity

[Kedirius]

I totally disagree with you OP.
Who said the dev has to do every Creeper game the way YOU think it HAS to be ??? Its his freedom and i think he did a good job on this one!
I really like the approach of this Creeper game and every level is like a puzzle you have to solve.
Yeah, its sad that you dont have the fun like most of us, but talking about "trash tier" and stuff like that is just disrespectful and the way a child would act when his lollipop doesnt taste the way it imagined.

[slaxxTB]

agreed... the game is not fun, a way to pixelated, the zoom is a mess, the controls are a mess... i refunded this because i was hugely disappointed. previous partsw ere fun :) and good

[Argonwolf]

It feels a bit unfinished, but the overall gameplay loop is reasonably fun in my opinion. I won't discuss the epilogue level because it's basically a custom scripting showcase for modders similar to the CW3 epilogue.

The UI is admittedly a bit obnoxious, especially in the level editor where buttons are often represented by pixelated images instead of text, making it rather difficult to understand what you're doing a lot of the time, and the scripting currently has no documentation and it's not clear how you actually import scripts for use in custom levels. I'm hoping this will change over time, because that's usually how it goes; the game releases, then the documentation comes later.

As far as levels go, they can be pretty fun. Finding ways to use the environment to your advantage, using shields to make cauldrons for brewing pixel chemicals or tiny pressure vessels to fill up with anti-creeper to 1000 pressure and then tunnel into a creeper pocket and inject it with liquid death, using bombers to soften up the front lines. But it's not as deep as the previous games were. The mechanics just don't intermingle very well. You have two entire ships that exist solely to counter their own specific type of enemy; one is more than enough. The ship-mounted creeper fighting weaponry is also fairly weak, except for the missiles, but they're far too unpredictable to be of good use. I'd love to be able to set a manual missile target and micromanage my gunships to strategically bombard specific pockets of creeper. It would also be nice to have a bit more anti-creeper manipulation ability, and/or perhaps some anti-particulate that amplifies or just straight up manufactures anti-creeper.

I get that this is an experimental game, but it just feels so shallow compared to his other works. I just hope some QoL updates/new features come in the future to flesh out IXE.

[Crunchy[Daz]]

Your issue is that you decided you didn't like the game, but then kept forcing yourself to play it knowing you don't like it. This is evident in the words you are choosing and the attitude you are displaying.

Its okay to not like a game, you don't have to force yourself to play it. You should have stopped long before the cursing started.

[Bad Medic Buddy]

I'm not finding it very fun either.

The limited ship numbers doesn't work here nearly as well as it did in particle fleet, since creeper is mostly just a static liquid that doesn't respond to your actions, and can build up to crazy amounts. In particle fleet the particulate was capped at pretty low levels, could move towards your ships on its own, and the doppels and copied ships were very dynamic threats. All this together made the challenge of particle fleet much more about dynamically reaction to dynamic challenges using limited resources, which was very fun.

In ixe and traditional creeper world games, the enemy is very simple and relies almost exclusively on amassing brute force. This makes the ship limit much less fun, as much of the game play boils down to a simple mathematic equation of DPS vs creeper/bot spawn rate, with your DPS being hard capped. In the other creeper world games, your DPS was based on which resources and areas in the map you controlled, and how you built your infrastructure in those areas. That's where the challenge and fun of those games was, deciding which parts of the map to take next, how to take them the quickest, how to defend them, ect. In ixe you just pick the weakest creeper chamber, cut a small hole, wait for your ships to slowly grind away the creeper, nullify everything inside, and repeat, gaining nothing to help you in each chamber unless it happens to have a story related item in it.

As others have said, the ship limit also means if you make a mistake, it's possible you won't be able to recover, or will have to spend 10x as long doing so as you're total DPS output just isn't enough to counter the creeper. In other creeper world games, there was almost always the option to retreat, set up a temporary defense, build a ton of reactors and weapons, and launch an offensive to retake lost ground or fix a mistake. You can disable the ship limit, but that feels like it just trivializes the difficulty since the game was not built around limitless ships.

The ships being ship but functioning like creeper world weapon buildings adds insult to injury. Not only am I limited in what weapons I can build, I'm limited in what configurations I can use those weapons because they are attached to ships. And unlike particle fleet, they aren't actual ships which I can maneuver around like ships. They stop firing if they move, they don't physically block the enemy from what I can tell, and they don't have components that matter and need to be protected other than their weapons. They're just a grouping of turrets with a funky hitbox that struggles to move when creeper is around. The pixels moving individually is cool, but the fact that my *ship* stops firing entirely and takes ages just to move forward in the direction it is facing is really unfun to play around. If the ships could move at a faster pace without dissolving when possible, only dissolving when they need to in order to get past obstacles, they would be a lot more engaging to play with (though the limit issue would still apply)

The sand mechanics in general are cool and I loved sand simulators back in the flash era, but I don't feel like they really add much to the game. I either ignore it beyond "cutting holes in the static terrain" and trying to mine anti-creeper ore without the spawner jumping off somewhere else, or I mine a bunch of various sand types, drop them in a pit, and then mine the result and drop it somewhere else. It's very samey, and I'm not sure it's worth the performance hit the game takes because of it.

I appreciate that the game is experimental and the good, hard work the dev put into the sand mechanics and making it all work, but I don't think enough time was spent on the game aspect of this game, which is a shame because an engine this cool deserves equally cool and fun game mechanics.

[Valkerion™]

Not sure what I'm reading, other than mission 12 being an absolute slog because you have no breeding land to help push and enemy has absolute space advantage, you just push your ships all together through the facility (I made a small hole with acid at the top, ignored the bottom) and eventually got through it. It's a very drawn out mission but there is really nothing pressuring you so you can turtle until you are ready. Any time you want to push through unfair creeper advantage you can just bundle all your ships and aggressively place shield cover with all builders to overcome nearly anything, since you can hardly output AC to compete here.

Mission 13 the asteroids was by far my favorite of all. You can use shields to control where your AC goes around your start and then push extremely easily using portals aggressively to simply force your AC onto the enemy breeding ground and instantly take that over for yourself. Honestly any mission with breeding ground after you get portals that's basically the way to go.

Mission 14 where you must "escape" from the middle another quick and easy mission, deploy diggers first to get all powerups and put up shields, then reactors and defense ships, you can turtle forever at this point with shields and keeping enemy creep in tunnels. Then just push down where there isn't even an emitter and break one suppressor.

Mission 15 continues this trend of story over challenge again, you may have few ships but you are given the ability to create over a thousand creeper eater fluid and flood the river at no cost, then flood the reactor and allow the buildup (even if 500/pixel) to flow out the top of the map, after not too long you will win attrition by filling the reactor pit with the creeper eater and then you can let your thousands of stored AC in to easily win. The only threat after that is the bot surge you release from the bottom river which you can just hide your main ship from and let the bots chase your other ships through you caves of AC until they all die.

I had more challenge on all missions before 12 at this point.

[Neomessiah]

the game is more a sequel to CW2 than it is CW3 or 4, its fun but I prefer the top down games. Its different like the particle fleet game was different but that doesn't make it a bad game only different.

[JoshuaJSlone]

"It's ironic how CW4 looks great and runs fine while IXE looks primitive (in a bad way) yet its CPU usage is greedier than the Nexus itself."

Nothing ironic about it. A game of relatively simple pieces displayed in polygons is going to scale very well. A game simulating the interactions of something like a million pixels which can act separately is going to eat processor and be difficult to display more beautifully than the pixels they are.