Why I DON'T Recommend Starship Troopers: Extermination (Yet)
72An honest review of Starship Troopers: Extermination, a new multiplayer co-op fps and base builder by Offword Industries, the guys who made Squad and published Beyond the Wire and Post Scriptum, and honestly its seems to have generated quite a bit of hype and the internet seems generally positive about it with Steam reviews currently sitting at 92% positive and a bunch of different creators on YouTube recommending it, but if you want this particular dumbasses opinion, though I can’t realistically believe that you would, but IF you do, then I’d suggest holding off on buying it until it’s got a bit more meat on its bones, because if you strip away the Starship Troopers branding and the familiar yellow and black arachnids charging about the place and what’s left is a fairly janky, mediocre and repetitive shooter that under normal circumstances would be a fairly forgettable experience with a boring gameplay loop that would struggle to get a decent size player base.
The general gist of the game is you get dropped into a hostile world which is effectively the same map every time, and then you’ve gotta work together in a team of 16 players to move around the map securing objectives such as defending an outpost and repairing beacons until you get to the final stage which is where you’ve got to hastily build a base and then hold out against a swarm of bugs just long enough for the arc to finish extracting something or other and then make it to the extract point in one piece.
It’s not that it’s a bad game per say, and it’s still in early access so it might improve over time if the devs give it as much love as they gave Squad, although my faith in early access games is practically non-existent at this point, but I was disappointed to see really early on that each match plays out in pretty much the exact same way, and the feeling of firing your weapon into a swarm of bugs while screaming YEAH YA LIKE THAT, YA LIKE THAT before getting brutally mauled by a spiky spiders foot just doesn’t pack the punch I was hoping for.
Graphically it looks… Okay? I guess maybe a little bit outdated but it works well enough for the relatively niche game that it is. The sounds are OK as well even if they won’t necessarily blow your socks off, but for me it’s the weapon handling that really falls short.
For lack of a better description, it’s janky, the same kind of jankiness you get in all their other games like Squad and Post Scriptum, but the difference is that those games and stuff like ARMA are aiming to be proper hardcore military simulations so you expect to have to put up with a bit of jankiness to get a deeper simulation that immerses you in as much realism as possible, but this game isn’t trying to be a milsim and so I find the clunky weapon handling to be harder to bare.
The Starship Troopers movies put most of the emphasis on epic, over-the-top human vs bug action complete with big explosions, ridiculous one-liners and seemingly endless rounds of ammo in each magazine, and if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t get any of those vibes from this game whatsoever.
I had some fun moments here and there, like watching a dude get stabbed by an arachnid and throw halfway across the map screaming, but I found the core gameplay itself to be fairly forgettable and in need of a lot of work if it wants to still have an active player base once the initial hype of a new Starship Troopers game dies down.
The final stage where you’ve gotta build and defend a base showed the most promise but it was hit and miss whether or not the team would work together to build a solid foundation or if everyone would just wander off and place random walls and bunkers everywhere which get quickly overrun once the bugs start spawning.
I dunno I guess I was hoping for something more than a stand alone total conversation mod for Squad with a Starship Troopers theme but so far that’s what it feels like it is. Hopefully they’ll iron out the kinks over the course of its time in early access and turn it into a sustainable game more akin to Deep Rock Galactic than just Squad with arachnids, but given that these guys also publish Beyond the Wire and Post Scriptum it doesn’t fill me with confidence that they know what they’re doing, because many people feel that both of those games failed to live up to their full potential, with one dying a slow and painful death, and the other being dead out the gate, and if you know what I’m talking about then you know what I’m talking about.
Remove the Starship Troopers name for the game and what you’ve got left is a clunky little indie shooter that’s fun for a couple of hours and then you move on and forget about it until 6 months later you see an article on Rock Paper Shotgun saying that they’re closing the servers due to a lack of players.
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