How bad could cutting into a pipe filled with highly pressurized corrosive goo be? A question I have asked myself many times in just the first few hours of playing Creeper World IXE (pronounced "icks"), the latest in a long-running oddball indie strategy series. The answer, somehow, is always "very bad". And yet I continue to do it. Partly because I'm an idiot, and partly because the results are always oddly spectacular, especially when every single pixel of the world is physically modelled.
If you're new to the Creeper World series by micro-indie outfit Knuckle Cracker, they're a turtler's wet dream, emphasis on the wet. Slow-and-steady defensive strategy games where your enemy isn't some invading army or swarming bugs, but a spreading ocean of deadly blue goo (the titular Creeper) that will just keep flowing and dissolving all the things you hold dear until you can push back the tide (usually using explosives) and plug the interdimensional hole it's leaking out of. Something I've always found weirdly satisfying, and given that we're up to the sixth game, I'm not the only one.
