Starship Troopers: Extermination PS5 Review
Summary: Starship Troopers: Extermination finally brings an official game in the universe to modern platforms. An enjoyable shooter marred by a host of small issues that detract from the experience.
3.8
Another Bug Hunt?
Earlier in the year, Helldivers 2 was released to critical acclaim, heralded by many as a Starship Troopers game in all but name. Now, Starship Troopers: Extermination has come out of early access and been drop-shipped to PCs and consoles, bringing an authentic game based on the movie franchise to the masses.
The comparison to Helldivers 2 is obvious, with general gameplay being similar on a surface level. Starship Troopers: Extermination is different in many ways, however, and has enough unique mechanics to thoroughly set it apart from Helldivers 2, so much so that in the end, the two games are only similar in concept rather than in actuality.
Developed by Offworld Industries, Starship Troopers: Extermination is primarily a multiplayer first-person shooter. Players take on one of six different classes, each fulfilling a particular battlefield role such as sniper, medic, or engineer, with each player then dropped into a four-person squad. Each mission can accommodate up to five squads, with a maximum of 16 players. Defeating the bugs and completing missions awards experience points, that are used to level up a global rank as well as both the class and weapon used throughout. Levelling all of these up grants unlocks – new weapons, attachments, and skins to customise the player’s character.
Missions take place across three different planets (currently), attempts are made to make them visually distinct from one another, but most of them end up being some kind of desert. Some have lava flows running through them and sometimes take place at night, but they’re ultimately all fairly barren and lifeless. It isn’t really an issue, however, the hordes of arachnids that throw themselves at your squad quickly litter the battlefield, making the landscape almost unrecognisable not long after getting underway.
The maps themselves are large, open-play fields. Objectives are placed around the arena, with each mission type having different criteria for completion. Missions range from simple horde modes, where survival against waves of arachnids is key, to more complex objectives that require repairing generators and the protection of vital equipment. Most boil down to horde mode gameplay by the end, though.
What really sets Starship Troopers Extermination aside from other similar games in the genre, is its base-building mechanics. At key points during a mission, typically during the climactic survival section towards the end, it becomes necessary for players to construct a forward operating base, complete with walls, bunkers, turrets, and ammo reserves, to hold out against the waves of enemies. This is accomplished through the use of a special building tool, that is used like a secondary weapon. Equipping it brings up a menu that allows different components to be selected and can then be placed with the R2 button.
It’s in these sections where Starship Troopers: Extermination really comes alive. On lower difficulties, the challenge is almost non-existent, but once it’s cranked up to hard, you’re assaulted with hordes of enemies, endlessly spewing forth from bug holes, chipping away at the walls of your defence. The ‘Carnage System’, keeps bodies persistent after death. Corpses begin to pile up, only really removed when subjected to explosive damage. These piles of the dead can lead to areas, such as the top of your base walls, becoming accessible when they otherwise weren’t, like that seen in World War Z, with foes clambering across the fallen to get to you quicker.
Assuming that the objective is completed, and everyone survives, the final objective is to extract from the area. A dropship arrives some distance from your position. What follows is a mad dash to extract and a last stand against any remaining arachnids in the area while you wait for the ship to leave.
This all sounds pretty great so far, and when it all works as it should, it is. Unfortunately, it’s far from a flawless experience. I found matches to be frequently laggy, with frequent rubber-banding and stutters. Despite the Carnage System claiming that it allows for persistent bodies with little to no performance hit, when things ramped up, the framerate can get very rocky.
AI can be very buggy (some pun intended.) Arachnids would often just break, standing still on the spot ignoring everything around them until killed. Spawns would frequently break on extract, with enemies popping into existence directly in front of the dropship, within metres of the player, and there’s a whole litany of other smaller bugs, such as clipping through walls at random.
Starship Troopers: Extermination remains faithful to the movies. All the arachnids made famous by the 1997 Paul Verhoeven classic make a return including drones and the infamous warriors. Casper Van Dien reprises his role as Johnny Rico and provides voice-over for many of the game’s menus and scenes. Visuals in the game are unremarkable, it’s a very average-looking game, though it fairs a little better on the sound front, with weapons that have significant punch and impact when used. The banter made famous by characters in the film is largely missing.
Final Thoughts?
When everything comes together, Starship Troopers: Extermination is great. It excels on higher difficulties where overwhelming hordes of bugs relentlessly pursue your team and seek to destroy you in any way they can. This tends to be the exception rather than the rule in my experience though. None of the issues are deal breakers by any means, at no point did it completely destroy the experience, they did ruin the immersion from time to time though.
Along with the main multiplayer component of the game, there’s a single-player campaign. It’s admittedly fairly bare bones and feels like it’s just there to prepare players for the multiplayer experience, but it’s nice to have, nonetheless.
Starship Troopers: Extermination is a game that is occasionally fantastic, often issue-laden, but rarely frustratingly so. It’s the exact type of middle-market product that we need more of; and while it isn’t perfect, it can be a lot of fun.
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