Starship Troopers: Extermination Review | Do Your Part!

After over a year of early access, Starship Troopers: Extermination 1.0 is finally here. Largely overshadowed by Helldivers 2, Starship Troopers: Extermination is actually based on the franchise the Helldivers series is parodying, and both games have one big major similarity: squashing bugs. That’s where most of the comparisons end, though, because Starship Troopers: Extermination is a mix of first-person cooperative play and base-building mechanics, and here are my thoughts on the full release.

I’m Doing My Part!

Starship Troopers: Extermination doesn’t lean on the parody aspect of the film but instead plays it straight. 16 players are dropped on a map to drain the planet’s resources by constructing refineries and killing as many bugs as possible. The aesthetics, dialogue, and general presentation draw heavily from the first film, and it’s a fairly faithful experience on that front.

During any given mission, players have to work together in the form of squads and take on an overwhelming bug threat. This is something that the game does really well, and it’s absolute chaos when the bugs spawn and fill the map. It’s been a while since I’ve seen my screen turn into an incomprehensible combination of bug guts, explosions, and green blood that I can’t help but feel giddy.

This is a janky game, there is no doubt about that, but it’s also a lot of fun when you accept it for what it is. It’s not an excuse for the execution and lack of polish, but there’s a lot of fun to be had when you’re running through the map and taking down a threat together that doesn’t know when to stop. This is when everything actually does work as expected, and the stars align in the game’s favor, which we’ll get to soon.

The gunplay feels a bit floaty at first, and the recoil on the starting weapons is through the roof, but after you’ve settled into the feel and adjusted the mouse sensitivity, there’s satisfying feedback and kick to the weapons. The more you play, the more weapons, attachments, and abilities you unlock for each class, and the progression never feels tedious or unrewarding.

Each class has a few base active and passive abilities that work in most cases. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but these are useful and serve their purpose. The Ranger class can do a forward boost, which is more useful when performed after a jump, allowing you to get around the map and away from danger if needed. On the other hand, the Bastion class, which carries heavier weapons, can bunker down and deploy an armored barrier around them. The cooldowns are low, and it’s clear that the game wants you to use them as much as possible.

The Only Good Bug Is A Dead Bug

There’s a decent variety of bugs in Starship Troopers: Extermination, and you’ll get used to their special attacks after a few matches. While most of these pose a direct threat at close quarters, some bugs like the Gunner will stick back and attack you from afar. It’s important to prioritize targets because the larger bugs will deal tons of damage to you and the base.

The base-building aspect feels a bit overwhelming initially, but it’s pretty easy to get used to. Throughout missions, you’ll need to create bases around refineries to keep the bugs away. Walls, towers, turrets, and ammo crates need to be deployed in a timely fashion so that you have a fighting chance against the incoming waves of bugs.

It’s a glorious sight seeing hundreds of bugs claw at your defenses as you spray bullets from higher ground, exhilarated and terrified at the same time.

All players can repair these structures at the same time, and it’s a lot of fun. One thing that isn’t fun is the combined currency for building these structures. You weren’t fast enough to deploy a turret? Too bad! Player 14 already spent that on an electric fence that wasn’t even needed right now.

At its core, Starship Troopers: Extermination is a fun co-op shooter that makes good use of the source material and offers a straightforward experience that’s a blast when it works. I keep bringing this up because now we have to talk about the issues with this game and why it hasn’t been able to really catch on.

Would You Like To Know More?

As mentioned previously, this is a janky and buggy game, and it’s not always the funny kind of jank that you can laugh at and move on from. For starters, Starship Troopers: Extermination is not a well-optimized game, and it has performance issues no matter what settings you choose. I played this on an RTX 4070 Super paired with a Ryzen 7 5700X3D and had frequent frame time issues that led to an inconsistent experience, even though smoothness in a shooter should be the first thing to prioritize.

The game lets you choose between different server regions but doesn’t list the ping next to them. This means you have to choose a server region, start a match, and then check the ping from the scoreboard. This is needlessly tedious, and you have to start over and over till you can figure out which region is the best for you. The in-game ping doesn’t seem reliable either because even when I was getting 40ms in a map, players would rubberband around the area, and there was a noticeable lag throughout.

Enemies will randomly forget what they were doing and freeze in place. They sometimes spawn beneath you and appear out of concrete, which makes zero sense. I know this is a video game, but there should be some level of believability, at least when it comes to how enemies spawn in an area. This is more common in closed areas like a cave where the floor will suddenly spawn enemies that just look goofy and random.

Janky games certainly have their charm, and there is a lot of charm to Starship Troopers: Extermination, but its instability, odd user-interface choices, and poor performance are holding it back even at full release. I still think it’s a lot of fun, but it’s hard to recommend in this state unless you have a system that can just push through the performance issues. Thankfully, the developers are still committed to it, and I hope that performance is something they seriously consider improving.

7

Starship Troopers: Extermination

Starship Troopers: Extermination is a fun, cooperative shooter that's easy to get into and hard to put down. Its clever base-building mechanics and ridiculous chaos are a delight, but constant performance issues, bugs, and instability keep it from greatness.

Pros

• Solid gunplay with appropriate feedback and variety
• Classes are diverse, and have meaningful progression
• Plenty of bugs to shoot, and types to adapt to
• Faithful recreation of the 1997 film, its tone, and aesthetics

Cons

• Constant performance issues even on high-end systems
• Bugs, both big and small
• Uneven visuals that don't justify the performance cost
• Laggy servers despite lower ping
• Lack of overall polish

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review. Reviewed on PC