For me mostly a downgrade to the previous installments. This is much more of a puzzle than an actual strategy game.

In previous games, you could be proactive and creative with your approach, you were constantly pushing in multiple directions, trying to keep approaches covered and figuring out how to best deal with the creeper.

In this, what units you have is fixed per map, and the ressources you have access to are frequently limited. So there is really only 1 solution the game wants you to implement, and then its just ages and ages of staring at the screen slowly waiting for enough push to happen and then moving all your ships up bit by bit. Its... really boring actually.

Honestly disappointed as I love the CW games...
The biggest disappointment is the lack of decision making. The limit on unit amount means you can basically get away with building a gunship or two, focus fully on economy, then build the rest of your stuff within the first few minutes of every level. One of my favorite things about other Creeper World games is fighting against the clock, trying to push out that initial creeper, while still needing to build up your economy to fight off that impending massive wave in the future. There's no real decisions to make in this one.

Digging new area is like "capturing ground" in old creeper games, which could be really cool. But you can't do anything with this new area. No collectors to place, limited reactors. There's no sense of real progression or powering up in this one.

The amount of mindless afk is also not fun. Probably around half of my 90 minute playtime was spent afking (again making no decisions) and just waiting for creeper to be killed. It felt like a slog. Other CW games mitigate this by letting you continually build more weapons and economy to speed it along and give you something else to do while waiting. This game has limited resources, so there's nothing to do but wait for your paltry few ships to chip away at the creeper.

Maybe later missions change this a bit, but I'm not really enjoying the game enough to push through to get there.

I'm a big fan of all the previous creeper world iterations. They were excellent RTS options. This latest iteration is just too...specific. Each level once you get to the hard ones can only be beat with one specific strategy that almost has to be perfectly executed down to the pixel. CW4 was so magnificient! Where is the 3D? Why are all of my weapons and attacks so weak? The dopamine of watching that first cannon destroy a deep pool of creeper is gone. Since units are limited, there is no energy management any more, just "build all your reactors" at the start of each mission and then forget about it. How can there be energy strategy when you only have 8-10 units per level? Why is energy even a collectable instead of jsut giving all units infinite ammo? I have to sit and wait 10-15 min for each advance, it feels like an AFK game. This installment so far is very disappointing. I hope to return after some balancing and find a fun game!