Starship Troopers: Extermination Review

I fucking love Starship Troopers. If you’ve read any of my reviews of science fiction games before, you already know that’s the case, and the reason I’m bringing it up again is because after about a year in Early Access, Starship Troopers: Extermination is finally out. And on paper, I should love it as much as I do the film (and not the awful book) that inspired it, because it’s a first-person horde shooter set in one of my favourite universes of all time. However, it hurts me like a throwing knife to the hand me to say that I don’t, because although it’s a decent enough shooter with reasonably solid horde mechanics, it lacks any uniqueness and contains a hive’s worth of bugs that you can’t shoot. Although it’s not a bad title by any stretch of the imagination, it’s also not a great one. Not to spoil this article, then, it’s worth buying about as much as a trip to Zegema Beach in the 23rd century.

Again, on paper, or code in this case, Starship Troopers: Extermination has the makings of a fantastic game. You play as a member of the Deep Space Vanguard, who along with either a handful of bots, fifteen other players or three other players depending on which of the title’s modes you play, are tasked with exterminating arachnids on a large handful of maps. Doing this involves little more than blasting those bugs with your Morita, or some other generic sci-fi weapons, for about twenty minutes before you hastily construct a base that you need to defend until your extraction shuttle arrives and you run to it while trying to avoid becoming Flores’d. It’s not exactly the most unique premise, however it is one that fits well with the IP’s over the top military theme, and one that also works relatively well. Starship Troopers: Extermination also has six semi-unique classes for you to pick from, a meta-game that’s almost identical to Helldivers 2, a levelling up system, and satisfying shooting, and because of all these things it is, if nothing else, fun. 

The problem with it, though, is that the same can be said for a lot of FPS games, most of which are objectively better in every respect. Although its gunplay is gratifying, for example, it’s not quite as over-the-top as Left 4 Dead. Its tower defence mechanics, which you experience at the end of most of its matches, are about as solid as protecting your base from creepers at night in Minecraft. Its progression systems pale in comparison to that of Call of Duty, and, well, you probably get the point. The title’s only real objective strength is its setting, which fully embraces the cheesy machismo tone of the media it’s based off by allowing you to play through a very brief campaign full of quotes from the movie/book, and by throwing in a bug nest full of references to that book/movie in both its sixteen- and four-player co-op modes. That aside, there just isn’t that much to the game. You throw nukes down bug holes, blast the buggers while waiting for your extraction shuttle, which is piloted by NPCs significantly less attractive than Denise Richards, unlock a handful of new weapons, and that’s just kind of it. You can easily experience everything the game has to offer in a matter of hours, and once you have, there isn’t anything to keep you hooked. Its gameplay is solid enough in its own right, but compared to its contemporaries, it’s severely lacking.

Which is all well and good, as repetitiveness is if nothing else a hallmark of the genre, but what isn’t are Starship Troopers: Extermination’s two issues. The first is, sadly, that it isn’t very good from a technical perspective; its graphics leave a lot to be desired, it doesn’t run very well, and it has a lot of bugs its developers failed to stomp on before launch. Although it isn’t broken, and all of its glitches will probably be patched out sooner rather than later, at the time of writing you can expect to persistently encounter problems that can take you out of the experience both literally and figuratively. And that’s the other problem with Starship Troopers: Extermination: its problems will probably be patched out, but there’s no guarantee of that happening. See, the game’s developer, Offworld, doesn’t exactly have the best reputation for fixing its titles. Outside of Squad, one of the best military FPS games ever made, it abandoned its World War One shooter Beyond The Wire, and effectively abandoned the strangely titled Squad 44. And given that the studio has only put out four games, well, it has about as good of a track record as the Starship Troopers movies themselves (there’s five of them, by the way).

It may seem harsh to hold what Starship Troopers: Extermination’s dev has done in the past against them, but frankly, there aren’t a lot of reasons not to be harsh to their latest title because it’s spectacularly unremarkable. Putting aside its setting, which will forever hold a place in my and a lot of other people’s hearts, there just isn’t a lot to recommend about it. Its gameplay is solid, and its narrative is certainly one of the narratives of all time, however there really isn’t anything else worth mentioning about it. It’s fun to kill bugs in it, but it has too many that you can’t launch a nuke at, and it also doesn’t give you a reason to ignore the latter, if not the former. If you’re a fan of the Starship Troopers IP, either play the Starship Troopers-inspired Helldivers 2 or the excellent RTS set in the same universe. If you like horde shooters, Days Gone is cheaper and a lot better. If you like shooters where teamplay is important, Arma 3 exists and is great. And if you know figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has…well, I’m not sure why you’re reading this review, but you should use that freedom. Because reader, you know what to do.