Insect Armageddon
HIGH Surviving the final wave of a horde mode swarm when all seems lost.
LOW Crashing to the desktop, three times in a row.
WTF The available cosmetics are… uninspired… to say the least.
It’s an ugly planet – a bug planet! – and that just won’t do, so it’s time for humanity to rise up and destroy the alien threat before they destroy us!
It’s been a good year for fans of taking on relentless insect threats in videogames. Helldivers 2, the new Earth Defense Force, Space Marine 2 and its Tyranid onslaught… it seems like everywhere players look, there’s a bug with terrifying mandibles trying to chew their faces off. However, there’s now one more to consider, and it’s based on the most iconic movie featuring insect-stomping shenanigans ever made!
Enter Starship Troopers: Extermination, a follow up to Paul Verhoeven’s classic sci-fi war satire. Most people who saw it seemed to take away the message that blind faith in gung-ho jingoistic propaganda spewed out by a faceless government generally leads to a lot of naive recruits getting horrifically splattered across far off battlefields. I, as a member of the intelligentsia, took away a different and far more profound message – space bugs are coming, and they’re coming to kill us all.
Not to worry, though. As a first-person shooter supporting up to sixteen players at a time, Starship Troopers allows humanity to fight back and unleash hell upon any marauding spacebugs trying to turn humankind into plasma-melted soufflé.
After getting through a brief tutorial focusing on how to create and repair various structures in the field using a physics-defying building tool, players are given free rein to choose from various missions they want to be sent out on. There’s a largely forgettable singleplayer tutorial campaign voiced by Casper Van Dien (who played protagonist Johnny Rico in the film) but uninspired mission designs like “kill ten bugs” or “transport a single canister of ore” coupled with braindead AI companions will likely kill most people’s interest in this mode quickly.
The singleplayer’s clearly just been thrown together for the sake of it though. Multiplayer’s where the magic happens, and the magic typically involves smooshing innumerable bugs into paste alongside up to fifteen other players.
A number of modes are available to select across a variety of maps on a rotating timer. Horde mode features waves of combat against the bugs with short breaks in between to repair and upgrade the base. Advance and Secure dish out various objectives such as transporting ore from refineries dotted around the map before hunkering down into a final base defense mission, or there’s a smaller scale Hive Mode where a group of four players infiltrate an enemy hive to drop small-scale nukes into their nest.
There are six classes for players to choose from before heading into battle, each of which has certain inherent advantages. Guardians, for example, are adept at holding the line with beefier armor and the ability to chuck down a fortified enclosure which helps stabilize their aim. Medics can send drones out into dangerous hotspots to revive downed troopers and supply the team with healing items, Engineers are able to create and repair strong structures even during phases where other classes have their build option disabled, and more.
These classes can be leveled up for players to earn swanky new guns and equipment, some of which can eventually be made available to other classes once mastered. It’s pretty standard fare involving shotguns, assault rifles, LMGs and a few exotic energy weapons, though the Engineer’s disappointingly weak flamethrower was a bit of a letdown. If I’m close enough to smell the bugs cooking, I want them charbroiled within moments.
The bug menace features a few classes of their own. There are melee attackers of various shapes and sizes, with the bigger bugs naturally tanking more damage and biting troopers in half more easily than their smaller brethren, alongside ranged adversaries that either attack with linear projectiles or bombard the area with massive plasma explosions that can wreck a base in moments. It’s not a huge amount of enemy variety, but it does encourage team diversity when it comes to dealing with the threats players will encounter.
As a sixteen player game, the overall experience can vary wildly between matches. A poor or mismatched team will often struggle when things get hectic, clinging on for dear life as their base is blasted to bits from long range and the squad is downed one by one while nobody plays the objective. On the flip side, a well formed battalion can make newer recruits feel like a spare wheel, running around the map looking for ways to help out despite enemy threats being annihilated as soon as they appear.
One gripe is how building materials are shared between the whole team. I’d rarely ever find that I had enough time to build my own little corner of the base before others had used up all the resources, so I eventually just gave up on this aspect of the game entirely. With everybody ripping through resources as soon as they spawn in, it’s often a coin flip as to whether the team ends up with a sleekly efficient murder fortress to safely combat the bug menace, or an insanely constructed ass-backwards death pit for everyone to swiftly get overrun in.
Players who enjoy unlocking new skins and cosmetics so that their avatar stands out on the battlefield are going to be sorely disappointed. Don’t expect to be romping around the battlefield in a Michael Ironside or Casper Van Dien skin – a few almost-imperceptible color changes to the base uniform, helmet and gun are currently the extent of what’s on offer here.
In most aspects, Starship Troopers feels like it’s reaching for the heady heights of ‘good enough’. The shooting is good enough, the interface is good enough, the class and weapon selection is good enough… however, the final product falls short in one key area that clearly isn’t good enough, and that’s on a technical level.
Frankly, at the time of review, it was a mess. In the fifteen-plus hours I spent with the game, I’d wind up clipping through geometry, spawning with my gun obscuring my view at a weird angle whilst unable to fire it, witness companion AI in the singleplayer taking the scenic route straight into a lava pit, have annoyingly frequent hard crashes to the dashboard erasing all my hard earned XP during any given match, and more. It may have left early access, but Starship Troopers is definitely not ready for general release yet, at least on the Series X where I tested it.
Adding insult to all of this injury, it just lacks any flair that could set it apart from the competition. The combat is fine if somewhat uninspired, the writing and presentation frequently fall flat, and when it comes to chewing through hordes of enemies, there are plenty of competing titles on the market that offer a more compelling experience – the obvious comparisons are Earth Defense Force and Helldivers 2, and even something bug-adjacent like Exoprimal stands out more,
Sadly, as things stand I can’t recommend this to anyone except the most hardcore fans of the IP.
Rating: 4.5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed by Offworld Industries Ltd. and published by Knight’s Peak. It is currently available on XBX/S, PS5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the XBX. Approximately 17 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence and Language. There’s no description, but It’s about what you’d expect from a game based on the Starship Troopers franchise. Players die relatively bloodlessly and hordes of enemies spew small amounts of ichor when shot.
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. (See text examples above.) The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized, so good luck reading them — on a 77-inch screen they appeared to be about two pixels high and I couldn’t see a way to enlarge them. Also, not all dialogue is subtitled, but most of it doesn’t really matter too much. This game is not fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.
The chance discovery of a muddy, burnt out copy of '50 Shades of Grey' in a hunting pit gave him an appreciation for complex plots, characters and overarching narrative, and the unexpected gift of a Spectrum 48k allowed him to indulge in these newfound sensibilities with intelligent, highbrow games such as 'flee from the badly animated spinning turquoise dolphins' or 'avoid the deadly glowing bricks of doom'.
The fusion of both these interests finally culminated with Darren teaching himself how to write by basically guessing at what words might look like when jotted down on paper as opposed to being howled inarticulately at the skies.
Now others occasionally get to read his scribblings. Lucky them.
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