Starship Troopers: Extermination

Written by Jason Dailey on 10/20/2024 for PS5  

The 1997 film Starship Troopers is an undeniable cult classic. For sci-fi nerds like me, it is an iconic alien bug-blasting romp that has obviously enjoyed incredible longevity, inspiring a new video game a mere 27 years later. Starship Troopers: Extermination has been in early access on PC for a while now, but only recently released its full 1.0 version, which also ported the co-op PvE first person shooter over to consoles. While I can’t speak for the PC version of the game, on consoles, once the initial dopamine rush of nostalgia and novelty wears off, I found that I would not like to know more about Starship Troopers: Extermination.

When you first boot up Starship Troopers: Extermination (STE), you’ll be greeted by a brief but straightforward tutorial on base building, should you choose to accept it. It takes maybe two minutes to complete and teaches you nothing else about the game beyond its base-building mechanics. I found that strange of course, but still wanting to know more, I pushed on. I checked out solo mode next, which is a series of one-off missions where you deploy with three AI squadmates to complete various objectives issued by General Johnny Rico, voiced by Casper Van Dien, who played Johnny Rico in the original film. It was a cool bit of nostalgia, but the missions themselves are tedious and nothing to write home to earth about. Some of you may be screaming at your device, “This is a multiplayer game! Just play multiplayer!”. I hear you, but I’m the type of player who always tries to learn the basics before jumping into these co-op PvE games, out of an abundance of respect for my teammates. Afterall, there’s nothing worse than playing with a bunch of new recruits who didn’t take five minutes to learn how to play the game.

Now, if you’re done screaming at me, let’s talk about multiplayer. Up to 16 players in squads of four can shape up and ship out on various missions to push back the arachnids. There are four mission types currently: advance and secure, ARC defense, horde, and hive hunt. Advance and secure is just what it sounds like – you and your team will progressively secure strategic locations, eventually constructing a base and defending it while you wait for extraction. ARC defense leans more into arguably the game’s best feature – base building. Here you construct an outpost with your team and defend an ARC scanner to gather intel, fighting off hordes of enemies, and extracting at the end. Hive hunt drops the player count down to four and sees you locating and nuking arachnid nests. And finally, there is horde mode which is precisely what you think it is, tasking you with holding out until extraction arrives. Missions have multiple difficulty levels, and some also have modifiers, which generally add more bugs to the equation. The major struggle with STE isn’t the game modes (which are fine), it’s the gameplay itself, along with some other annoying quality-of-life issues.

After a few multiplayer missions, I grew frustrated with the gameplay and its design. At first, I enjoyed the chaos of fighting off arachnid hordes, especially during the base defense sections of missions, but the more I played the more it lost its luster. I realized that STE uses chaos as its crutch for fun. The answer to how to make every in-game situation more fun was seemingly to add more bugs, and while I understand that is in the DNA of the game, there are huge balancing issues. It feels chaotic just for the sake of being chaotic. There is nothing that feels truly dynamic or emergent about its design, leading to moment-to-moment gameplay that doesn’t have a sense of momentum, and struggles to remain compelling over the course of a mission. At nearly every turn, I was overwhelmed by enemies, often dying quickly, only to respawn and die quickly once more. A lot of times I would have to resort to the classic maneuver of spinning my right joystick 360-degrees while shooting, otherwise known as “spray and pray”. Meanwhile, teammates can hardly get to you for a revive, and I don’t know why they would even bother when they’d likely die themselves. And that is just on easy difficulty missions. Additionally, some missions have modifiers active, which cannot be changed or avoided. So, if you want to play a normal difficulty ARC defense mission for its increased XP payouts, but it has a modifier that adds an excruciating number of additional bugs, you’re left with no choice but to take your bug beating or play another mission type altogether. During one mission with a modifier, my team and I never even made it past the first objective before running out of respawns…on easy difficulty. You get my point.

The shooting itself is fine, with multiple soldier classes to choose from and a decent variety of weapons, including assault rifles, snipers, grenade launchers, shotguns, flamethrowers, and more. Each class also has unique abilities and unlockable equipment. I was fond of the Engineer class, which comes with a flamethrower and, with some progression, proximity mines and larger amounts of ammo. With the ridiculous number of enemies, I needed that extra ammo early and often. There are multiple bug types to shoot at too: drones, warriors, gunners, grenadiers, tiger elites, and even tankers. When they all spawn at the same time, it is utter madness, to the point of barely being able to see what is going on around you, or even what you’re supposed to be doing.

With all of that said, there is one gameplay element that should be applauded – base building. It’s incredibly intuitive, allowing you and your teammates to throw up a base with walls, gates, towers, machine gun turrets, and ammo crates in a matter of seconds. Building resources are shared amongst the entire team, and you can only build a certain number of each type of structure, but we always had what we needed. It’s so nifty that I found myself wanting a full-blown co-op PvE base-building survival game set in the Starship Troopers universe. Sadly, STE’s base defense sections are the only time teamwork felt truly viable and necessary. Sometimes I would run ammo crates to teammates on machine gun turrets to keep them in the fight. Other times I would make laps around the perimeter of the base repairing walls and gates. And then there were times when I would hop on a machine gun turret myself and blow bugs to bits. Those are the game’s best moments.

I can’t leave without also discussing the technical issues facing STE – this game can be a hot mess. Graphically on console, it’s just okay, but it is plagued by unstable framerates, texture pop-in, and occasional rubber-banding causing other players and enemies to slingshot back-and-forth on themselves. Being a console port of a PC game, these issues are not entirely shocking, but still unacceptable. Far more egregious is the implementation of some of the social features. For starters, cross-platform play is miserable. Me and some of the Gaming Nexus crew tried to team up one evening, with three of us on console and a fourth on PC. We spent 20 minutes (if not longer) trying to party up thanks to the inability to send friend requests to PC players or vice versa. Our next thought was to create a Company – the game’s version of clans – and squad up that way. Nope, not happening. You can create a Company, but you cannot invite people to it, regardless of whether it’s public or private. So, then we thought perhaps we could all join the same existing Company and squad up that way. Nope again. You can only send a request to join a company, which no one ever approved – ever. Hell, I still have not been accepted into one an entire week after launch. At our wits end trying to play this game together, we resorted to some old-school shenanigans of hitting the matchmake button at the same time in hopes that we get lucky and join the same server as our PC buddy. Finally, after multiple attempts, we defied the odds (and the gods) and were put in the same match together, where we quickly scrambled to send in-game friend requests to each other so this would never happen again. There we were, in 2024, playing a co-op multiplayer game and we couldn’t even squad up with our friends without jumping through all those hoops – and still we got lucky.

So, the ultimate question is would you like to know more about Starship Troopers: Extermination? For me, the answer is no, thank you. I’ve seen enough. This is an undercooked console port of a PC game with technical issues, frustrating social feature implementation, and gameplay design that struggles to remain compelling from match to match. I think they’re onto something with the base-building and defense mechanics, so there is a glimmer of hope for the future, but it’s not enough to redeem the entire experience, which frustrates more than it delights.