Starship Troopers: Extermination Review

Overview

What do you get when you pit 16 heavily armed strangers against hordes of alien bugs and teamwork-centric objectives? The complete and utter chaos of Starship Troopers: Extermination.

Sometimes that chaos is full of fun and spectacle. There is something incredible about standing on a wall with your fellow soldiers firing at a tide of aliens who are more than happy to climb over the bodies of their fallen brethren to scale your defenses.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

It’s an awesome experience that ramps up even further when a giant ball of plasma strikes the tower next to you, a wall on the opposite side of the compound crumbles, medics move to revive the fallen, and engineers repair the damage while the gunners cover them.

In those moments, Starship Troopers: Extermination is at its best, and you get a real taste of the magic that the game can offer. However, at other times, utter chaos can be confusing, frustrating, and unenjoyable.

Throwing 16 strangers into a scenario that requires very specific player roles with very little structure to support that kind of coordination often leads to a type of chaos that’s akin to having a sudden bout of explosive diarrhea in the middle of a tornado while the family dog is on fire.

When Starship Troopers: Extermination is good, it’s really good, but it’s only good some of the time and it honestly feels a bit unfinished. That’s problematic since the game is no longer in early access.

Gideon’s Bias	Starship Troopers: Extermination Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Offworld
Hours Played: 10+	Type: Full Game
Reviewed On: Xbox Series X	Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: First-Person Co-op Shooter
Mode Played: All	Price: $49.99

Doing Your Part

The meat of the game centers around multiplayer missions. There is a solo campaign, but it really only serves as an overly long tutorial. It’s also about as entertaining as scrubbing the bug guts off your car’s windshield with a toothbrush. You simply waddle down repetitive underground tunnels with brain-dead AI squadmates while occasionally shooting a wave of bugs.

The solo campaign is dull and completely unrepresentative of what the game actually is. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Starship Troopers would be better without it, because anyone who starts their enlistment by playing the solo mode is going to come off with a very poor first impression.

The real juice is squeezed out of the variety of multiplayer mission types that range from a squad of four planting charges on underground nests to the bigger 16-player horde and objective-based missions. These missions rotate on a timer and can take place on different planets, difficulties, and modifiers.

You take on these missions as one of 6 highly customizable classes. You can unlock new weapons, perks, and gadgets for these classes just by playing. The variety impressed me, not just the amount of stuff available, but how each weapon, class, and perk felt impactful and offered really varying playstyles.

An engineer with a flamethrower and enhanced build tool feels different than one toting a shotgun. Furthermore, the usefulness of each class is really showcased during the actual missions, everyone has a place on the team. Snipers are excellent at taking out dangerous targets like Gunner Bugs and Bombardier Beetles.

The demo is great at crowd control and clearing out corpses. Engineers and Medics are the lifeblood of the team. One keeps the soldiers alive, while the other keeps the team’s structures in one piece. The weapons themselves have some serious kick in regards to recoil but feel very nice to use and make the Arachnids explode and burst in satisfying ways.

Every new gadget, attachment, and weapon is exciting to unlock. Each one gives you new ways to play with side-grade choices rather than straight upgrades. It’s also really refreshing to just be able to play, like an old-school game. No battle passes, daily quests, or premium currency. You play as a class, you gain XP as that class, and you unlock cool stuff. It’s that simple.

RTS in Your FPS

One of the most unique elements of Starship Troopers: Extermination is that it kinda feels like a light hybrid of an RTS game. In most modes, you can pull out a build tool to construct various structures including walls, gates, towers, bunkers, turrets, and more. You can only build in designated areas, but engineers can build a few specific structures outside of those zones.

Building structures consumes ore, and in some missions, players even have to go harvest and bring back that ore themselves. This isn’t just a gimmick, but a core part of the game. In most modes you will be working out of and defending a base, that base will always be player-made. You and you’re teammates make the walls, the towers, the ammo boxes and even the spotlights.

I love this mechanism, at least conceptually. It adds another element of gameplay that dictates your success beyond your ability to aim a gun and that’s really cool. The entire team gets to have a sense of ownership over the base they are defending, and it’s a really interesting dimension to add to a horde shooting game.

Each structure has its own purpose too. You can build a variety of walls, some of which have ramps for easy access. You can make gates, auto-turrets, and manned turrets, both of which have to be reloaded by a player carrying special ammo boxes to them. Spotlights help the entire team actually see what they are shooting at and bunkers give really defensible positions for players to use.

The idea is an amazing concept, but its execution leaves much to be desired. All 16 players can build, and they all share the same resource pool. The end result is similar to throwing a barrel of monkeys into a room filled with hammers and nails and hoping they come out with something coherent.

The entire team often dashes to build whatever they think is effective with no regard for coordination or teamwork. It becomes a game of who can Fortnite the fastest as you struggle to lay down what you want to build before someone else does or all the resources get used up. Then someone else will be frustrated and start taking down walls to regain some resources, and someone else will use them again before that angry player has a chance.

It got to the point that I stopped engaging with the build system altogether, except to build spotlights when I was an engineer. I’d rather let the monkeys ram the boards into each other’s faces and see what they come up with, for better or worse, rather than try sticking my hand in a flurry of swinging hammers.

Half the time it’s chaos. The team inevitably leaves a part of the base exposed, the bugs flood in, we all die, game over. The other half of the time a kind of unwritten meta happens. The maps are preset, so players who have played long enough get a communal sense of, walls go here, bunker goes here, tower goes there. It’s functional, but static, and somewhat devalues the whole system, as there is no room for experimentation.

It’s simply a matter of having too many chefs in the kitchen. The build system would probably have worked better if it was limited to the engineer class rather than all 16 players. As it stands, it’s a core part of the game that is at best functional when the monkeys manage to make something that resembles a military base. At its worse, it’s an instant mission failure because the monkeys started throwing poop at each other.

Corpse Clumps

In most games, you shoot an enemy, they die, they go poof, and you never think about them again. In Starship Troopers: Extermination. They don’t go away, and that small change alters the entire way you might think about a horde shooter.

As Arachnids die, their corpses litter the battlefield becoming a literal obstacle that can obstruct your movement, a wall that can block your gunfire and line of sight, and serves as a morbid ladder for the bugs to climb up your walls. Piles of bugs stack higher and higher making a ramp for the other bugs to climb, so corpse clearing becomes an actual game mechanism that at least a few players on the team will need to handle.

Corpses can be cleared by meleeing them and certain weapons, such as demolition charges are tailor-made to clear corpse piles. It’s a strange and seemingly small thing that has a pretty big impact on the game. The enemies you kill evolve the literal geography of the battlefield and it honestly works really well. It’s one of the stand-out features of Starship Troopers and lends itself nicely to both the gameplay and atmosphere.

Coordinating Nightmare

The build system isn’t the only thing suffering from expecting a room of monkeys to make magic. The whole game reeks of bananas and wet fur. Starship Troopers: Extermination expects a level of coordination from 16 players that is never going to happen because it barely makes any attempt to facilitate that coordination. You can skirt by on lower-difficulty missions, but higher-level, more interesting missions are a total coin flip.

I’ll use the ARC missions as an example because they really serve to showcase everything that the game can be. First, you have to secure the base location, then go build an ore refinery, transport said ore to the base in order to build defenses, then go build a gas refinery and haul gas to the base. Finally, you have to protect the ARC while it does its thing. The entire time this is happening, the base and refineries will be under attack and you will be given random side objectives. However, you also still need a few players to continue doing ore runs for more building resources.

16 players have to figure out, who is building, defending, hauling ore, hauling gas, protecting carriers, and doing objectives. And that’s just from a top-down perspective. On a more personal level, engineers need to make spotlights and keep the base repaired, snipers need to take out ranged threats, someone has to keep the turrets reloaded, demos need to clear the corpse piles, and medics have to revive the fallen.

The only tools that Starship Troopers offers to facilitate this teamwork is a squad system and a rudimentary ping mechanic. There’s no global commander role, or even squad leaders. At first, I thought you could at least work with your squad. Your squadmates are highlighted in yellow and you can switch between team and local chat. I assumed the team chat meant your squad. Nope, it means the entire team.

You may as well not even have squads then. 12 out of 16 players aren’t highlighted in yellow, There is no way I can tell which white-named player is actually talking and where they are in order to work with them. When three of 16 people say they need help or a wall is being attacked, I don’t know where that is.

Any attempt to talk to my own squad broadcasts me to the entire team, causing confusion, unless we all happen to be close enough to use the local proximity chat.

It’s a mess, a complete and utter mess. What ends up happening is everyone drops in, chooses a class, and does the task they want to do. Sometimes everyone chooses enough separate tasks that the gears line up beautifully and the mission ends up being a complete blast to play.

Other times, everything is on fire, one lone person went to get ore and is bleeding out three miles from the base. No one can see anything because the teams one engineer dosen’t know what a spotlight is. The base was made by tilting over a box of lego and someone left the gate open so the bugs invited their entire extended family over for dinner.

Those matches don’t feel good because they are utter failures that don’t feel within your power to do anything about. If you want 16 strangers to work together, even a little bit. You have to provide ample tools and structure to facilitate that. Starship Troopers just throws everyone in the fire with a pat on the back, and that’s it.

Unfinished

Despite the fact that Starship Troopers: Extermination just launched its 1.0 update, the game feels rough and unfinished. Shadows are laughably dark, too dark to be intentional and the lighting system in general seems strange. If someone is using a flamethrower for example, I hope you enjoy looking at a black screen because they and everyone near them is going to be blind.

I crashed several times, and if you look around at any given time, you’re likely to spot several arachnids bugging out, stuck in the terrain, or simply not moving at all. However, the biggest sign that the game needed more time in the oven, is the company system. Companies launched with the 1.0 update and with it, an ongoing galactic war with the Arachnids.

Companies are essentially clans or guilds that you join and earn points for, then your company leader can spend those points on special missions that help progress the entire community in the war. The problem? You can’t invite people to your company, and at first, you couldn’t even search for a company. That functionality was only added a day before I wrote this review. The only way to join a friend’s company prior to that was hoping it showed up on your company feed.

The game has a clan system revolving around an ongoing live service-style war, and the clan system is barely functional. That’s not fully released game behavior, or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Verdict

Starship Troopers: Extermination is a game I put in the same place as something like Smite or League of Legends. That may seem like an odd comparison but hear me out. I actually love Smite, but I never play it, because I’m only going to have a good time 50% of the time. If a teammate ruins the match for me, there’s nothing I can do. Starship Troopers is like that.

My enjoyment of the game is based on the actions of 15 other people, and the thing is, it’s not their fault. The game expects a lot of coordination, without giving you realistically viable ways to coordinate with a room full of people you just met five seconds ago. Half of them probably have audio communication completely muted anyway.

Sometimes, it works out, other times it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, the game isn’t fun. Failing is fun, as long as we played the game “correctly“, so to speak. Failing because no one built a wall on the south corner of the base, or because only two people went to get ore, or too many people chose the sniper class, is much less thrilling.

Imagine an American football team with no game plan, so the entire defensive line scatters in random directions letting the quarterback get sacked. However, the quarterback is just a lone football on the ground because no one knew whose job it was to be the quarterback in the first place.

I have no idea if that metaphor even works because I don’t know anything about Football! Yet, that fact works as an even better metaphor for the “what the hell is going on” feeling you get when playing a match of Starship Troopers: Extermination.

It’s frustrating because Starship Troopers: Extermination has a lot of cool ideas and some matches are blood-pumping spectacles that feel fantastic. Yet, the lack of structure dictating the coordination of 16 random strangers and the unfinished feel of the game brings the experience down far too often. These issues can certainly be addressed, but whether or not the game’s player base will sustain it long enough to see any meaningful updates is completely uncertain.