I could always sit down at night with a level I had never seen before, and finish it. But the fact is, that seemed to be what I wanted at that point. The standard strategy still applies, without a lot of the frills they added to the main campaign. They vary on a limited set of axes: map size, whether or not there’s ore and aether, whether the map is fully-connected or broken into islands, what enemies you’re facing in addition to mere creeper. Probably because of the quantity, there’s a certain sameness to the maps after a while. I’ve barely made a dent in even the Prospector Zone, let alone Tormented Space. And in both cases, there are many, many levels to try.
#Creeper world 3 arc eternal mrantifun full
By the time you reach Farbor, you’ve unlocked two distinct sets of bonus levels: Tormented Space, which consists of ultra-hard levels, and Prospector Zone, which has fairly gentle levels full of collectible nubbins. And that’s where it turned from a game to a habit. And I remained in that state for a couple of months.ĭuring those months, I tried the bonus levels. But the first several times I tried the level, I quit and restarted well before that point, when all seemed lost. And if it reaches that building intact, you’re then told that it will take a full twenty minutes to power up. If you fail to keep the ship from being built, you’re told that it’s going to go over to another building that will power it up and make it unstoppable.
In fact, it’s not as difficult as it seems, because it moves the goalposts a couple times. It seems utterly impossible to do everything fast enough.
You can build weapons to shoot down drones and slow down progress, but some of them are are out of reach, and you still have to fend off creeper while you do it. In it, a number of enemy drones are collecting ore - the same ore you use to create anti-creeper - to build a monstrous invincible spacecraft, Sinistar-style. Levels vary what challenges they present, and what resources they provide to meet them, but the rhythm of the game remains constant.įarbor is the second-to-last level in the campaign, and it makes you hurry. If you have enough power to keep a stable border with the creeper, you can spend any excess on building what you need to break the stalemate and grab more land. Rush to grab as much land as you can defend. Still, even as the mechanics get more complicated, the winning strategy remains more or less the same. I suppose it’s the game design pattern of “Impose arbitrary restrictions, then grant the player special powers to overcome them”, but it’s a well-done example of it. This lets you leapfrog past creeper-infested areas and build in areas disconnected from your base, enabling tactics otherwise impossible. I particularly like the “guppy”, a flying non-combat unit that carries a cargo of packets to a designated landing spot. There’s a “forge” that lets you mine “aether” to research upgrades, terraforming machines that slowly reshape the land per your instructions, and so forth. It then adds some new mechanisms of its own, steadily increasing the complexity by introducing new things you can build and the conditions that make them necessary, as is customary in RTS campaign modes. 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.
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