Over the course of my life on Earth, I’ve seen the Starship Troopers franchise, most notably the 1997 movie, undergo a plethora of reassessments and overviews regarding its content and message. It started out being panned by people who didn’t understand it was a satire on fascism, then it became “that one cheesy and dumb movie from the 90s we all kinda liked”, then it became a bonafide B-movie staple, and nowadays, it’s actually seen as a cult classic from the 90s, with a neat message and way more depth most actually bothered to think about. With the franchise becoming a hot asset once again, it was but a matter of time before someone decided to make a Starship Troopers game and capitalize on its premise and brand. This is what led us to Starship Troopers: Extermination.

My initial thought of someone making a game based on Starship Troopers is that it would be a multiplayer-focused shooter, something quite brainless and easygoing (in terms of gameplay, not in terms of its themes), where all you’d need to do is shoot down a crapton of space bugs until you got bored with the premise. That is just half of what Starship Troopers: Extermination has to offer, and I don’t know if this is good or not.

Sure, you need to kill a lot of bugs, and the game is indeed squad-based. Communication isn’t exactly a key feature (at least not on the many games I’ve played where people couldn’t bother talking to each other), so if you want to go full Leroy Jenkins on a horde of insectoids… I wouldn’t recommend doing so, and everyone will hate your guts, but you can do it, with the game never fully punishing you for that. But there are objectives in each round, which extends their duration to an unnecessary degree, and adds some bureaucracy to the gameplay loop, but it does make it a bit more interesting.

A round usually starts with your (large) team being tasked with reaching an ore extracting site and protecting it for a while, ensuring enough of the game’s main resource is collected for you to advance to the next round. It usually means going to another extraction site, where the objective is repeated. Depending on the map, you will then be told to go to a more important site, where you’ll be tasked with defending a base from waves of foes. You can do that by basically building your defensive structures with a very simple, but admittedly interesting building system.

In short, you can build walls, bunkers, turrets, ammo crates, and other defensive structures with what resources your team has. The objective is pretty clear: you need to fend off the attackers until an evac team arrives to get you out of the warzone. That sounds a lot more complicated and risky than it needs to be, but the building mechanics are really intuitive; simply choose the Deus Ex Machina 3D printer from your arsenal, select what you want to build, and boom, done. Once the cooldown timer ends, simply use your barricades, turrets and your own skills and weapons to survive for the set amount of time.

Even if that sounds epic and dangerous, the enemy AI left a lot to be desired. I get that they are bugs, but they don’t need to act like complete idiots. A lot of them would simply get stuck in front of walls and gates, not trying to destroy them. There is a really neat feature in which enemy corpses do not disappear, meaning that a bug could, theoretically, climb on top of another dead bug and use it as a higher platform, but I never saw them using that feature during a match. Those dead bugs just felt like obstacles on the field for me.

Besides the multiplayer, which is, admittedly, like 80% of the content featured in Starship Troopers: Extermination, there is a small single player component, inexplicably labeled as a tutorial, when it isn’t. Granted, its levels are short, the stakes are low, and the production values are not impressive, but they are a neat pasttime at first, especially when you’re still trying to optimize your loadout. Furthermore, the campaign is narrated by Casper Van Dien himself, reprising his Johnny Rico role from the movies.

Speaking of production values, Starship Troopers: Extermination might be running on Unreal Engine 5, but it did not impress me that much in terms of its visuals. I simply don’t think it was well-optimized. I guess that some of the environments look neat, and that the bugs look exactly like the ones from the movie, but I don’t think that the visuals in this game felt impressive at all. Faulty lighting effects and framerate issues were noticeable. I loathed playing missions inside caves, as the game would constantly look like a low-budget horror in which only a small bit of the screen, the one lit by a flashlight, would be visible, even if there were clearly more light sources surrounding the environment.

Finally, what might be my biggest issue with Starship Troopers: Extermination isn’t even regarding any particular issue with the game itself, but just really poor timing. Refresh my mind for a second, what’s one of the hottest multiplayer games to have been released in 2024? Yep, that’s the biggest issue. Helldivers 2 is already out there, it’s well-estabilished, has more modes, content, concurrent players, and it’s also more polished. It’s also 100% inspired by Starship Troopers in ever single conceivable way, from its insectoid enemies to its tongue-in-cheek take on fascism and militaristic propaganda. All throughout my playthrough, I just couldn’t stop thinking I would be having more fun playing Helldivers 2 instead.

That’s not to say Starship Troopers: Extermination is a bad game, or not worth your time. It is, admittedly, pretty loyal to the source material, and can be fun with the right mindset and group of friends. If you can either put up with playing it on reduced visual settings in order to mitigate its optimization issues, or if you decide to just wait for a few patches, there might be some hope on what’s essentially a fun, but flawed, multiplayer shooter, one which will be constantly (and, unfortunately, unfairly) compared to a much better multiplayer game, also inspired by Starship Trooper, which also came out this year.

Graphics: 7.0 I guess that some of the environments look neat, and that the bugs look exactly like the ones from the movie, but I don’t think that the visuals in this game felt impressive at all. Faulty lighting effects and framerate issues were noticeable.	Gameplay: 7.0 Mixing base-building with (heavy and complicated) first person shooting mechanics is a unique selling point, but some rounds just felt like they were your typical extraction shooter with just some unnecessary bureaucracy. The controls are responsive, but the framerate is troublesome, and the enemy AI is idiotic at times.
Sound: 7.5 One of the game’s main selling points is the voice acting provided by Casper Van Dien. He mostly narrates the single player campaign. The music itself is sparse, but works somewhat well.	Fun Factor: 6.5 At the time of writing, the game is riddled with glitches, the single player campaign is undercooked, and the multiplayer gameplay loop can feel a bit repetitive after a while. It’s a neat concept for a game, and it does exhude the atmosphere seen in the movie, but it’s in dire need of some patches.
Final Verdict: 7.0

Starship Troopers: Extermination is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Starship Troopers: Extermination was provided by the publisher.