As it happened, 2024 proved to be a challenging year for the launching of a cooperative multiplayer game that pitted a satirical fascist military force against countless numbers of hideous, insect-like extraterrestrial beings. Ironically, Starship Troopers: Extermination is the least successful at executing the mighty few versus the infinite enemy narrative out of the three big games that suit this description that was released on PCs and consoles this year. Nevertheless, you may still enjoy some of its special features, like larger squads and ingenious base-building parts, before the swarm gets too repetitive, even if it does not live up to the high standards set by Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2.
You may learn the ropes without disappointing your squad in Starship Troopers: Extermination’s highly skippable single-player campaign before entering the main multiplayer tournament. In a lackluster performance, Casper Van Dien portrays a nameless soldier in the Special Operations Group who was personally chosen by General Johnny Rico.
There is not a plot because this mode is more of a tutorial than a full-fledged story with a beginning, middle, and climactic end, set away from the craziness of the internet. I am not a green recruit because I spent over 15 hours on the early access edition earlier this year, but I can not see how a real novice could learn anything from this experience that they could not learn in the field in a much less dull way.
These 25 missions include all of the typical multiplayer activities, but they lack the impromptu enjoyment that comes from playing with other players. Additionally, Extermination fails miserably to incorporate some real satire into a game that is dressed up as one of the most famous spoofs in movie history, which should have been a good opportunity for a targeted campaign. Although the opening chapter, “Answering The Call,” seems to be the first of many in a larger campaign, I would much prefer to place my head between a fire warrior bug’s teeth if what comes next is anything like this.
Compared to its colleagues, extermination offers a lot more firepower in the battle against the insectoid threat.
Ignoring all of that and going straight to the good part: up to 16 players can be present on the battlefield at once. Compared to its colleagues, extermination offers a lot more firepower in the battle against the insectoid threat. Although you are split up into squads of up to four people, there may be a strong sense of camaraderie as everyone works together to accomplish goals and, ideally, leave the scene with as many people alive as possible.
However, because Extermination constantly sends waves of bugs to smash against your combat force, it does a fantastic job of making sure that 16 people never feel like enough. On-screen, dozens or even hundreds of bugs can be actively destroying you and your base at the same time. Even dead bugs, the only good variety, can cause persistent tactical issues because their corpses can stack up to serve as ramps for their companions to use to scale walls. Any big enemy can cut you or your teammates to shreds with one or two blows, and even simple warriors can rip you to pieces with a little more work, so it is a welcome but difficult task. It rapidly becomes frantic.
There are six playable army classes to pick from to combat the insect threat; each has particular skills and equipment that allow them to specialize in their tasks quite effectively. For example, despite having heavy armor, the Guardian and Demolisher are not to be confused because the former can quickly construct a fort to shield themselves from nearby insects and steady their cumbersome heavy weapons, while the latter primarily uses grenades and rockets to inflict damage and depends on teammates to cover them.
It is a significant commitment if you would like to learn more.
The choice to make character development primarily unique to each class can be either a great asset or a significant drawback, depending on your point of view. It takes a lot of grinding to unlock the skills and gear of all six classes, so anytime you wish to try something new, you will have to start over, but you will not run out of rewards to obtain for a very long time.
To Extermination’s credit, the starting gear package does a respectable job at outlining the abilities of each class, such as the Ranger’s low-cooldown sprints and the Engineer’s flamethrower and limited capacity to construct facilities outside of the specified zones. It is a big commitment, though, if you want to learn more.
Even weapons that are not large machine guns have significant recoil to account for, but all of them function as you might expect in a futuristic military shooter. You must be prepared to spend a good deal of spraying and praying because hit marks appear to be unreliable as well, occasionally not appearing at all when pointing down sights.
The inability to change your class in the middle of a mission, even after being slain and respawning, is another design choice that has both significant advantages and disadvantages. That certainly makes your decision crucial, but poorly designed teams can often result in quagmires when, for instance, a mission modification causes a large number of well-armored animals to spawn and your team lacks the alternatives necessary to effectively handle them. It can be annoying to rely on randoms to be cooperative and make intelligent selections unless you are rolling with fifteen of your best friends.
Variety may also be problematic. There are just nine different kinds of foes in Extermination, and half of them are the same kind of bitey quadruped soldier from the film, albeit in different sizes and colors. This is even though the game is always fast to unleash astonishing waves of hundreds of bugs at you and your fellow troopers at once. The other species are all ranged attackers: grenadiers that are red and blue death fluids like siege weapons, and gunners that aim directly at troops and bombardiers. It is puzzling that none of the more bizarre and fascinating creatures, such as the notorious brain bug or flying fighters, are absent from the source material, which contains such a wide range of fascinating creatures.
The Assault and Secure (AAS) missions are comparable to ARC, although they differ greatly in terms of how consistently fun they are. The trick here is that the order of events is inverted: you burrow down in a base to endure a lengthy series of bug waves after first fulfilling lesser tasks, such as securing a site or refining mining and gas, as you move across the map. Everything that needs to be done flows naturally toward the major issue since it is self-explanatory and takes very little encouragement until the very end. Overall, it is a far better experience than ARC because all team members are forced to cooperate on the small goals along the route.
All modes, however, suffer from being set on largely blank terrain, where the troops and bugs are the only real-life characters. Nothing can be seen or discovered that is not a designated objective waypoint on the map. When you are not actively pulling the trigger, it feels empty and dull in contrast to Helldivers II, which has all of its small areas of interest.
Additionally, Extermination lacks polish in general. Sometimes bugs just stand there, totally unaware of the battle going on. Sometimes skills do not activate at all or activate too frequently, which frequently causes me to shrug my final bewildered shrug when trying to drop a mine only to cling tightly to it as I am engulfed by the crowd. Performance is also a little erratic; to have a steady and fluid frame rate on my Intel Core i9-9000 and RTX 3070 GPU, I had to reduce the video settings to medium. I do not remember feeling the need to do that when I played in early access a year ago.
Verdict
Starship Troopers: Extermination adds a knife to a nuclear battle in the Space Imperialist vs. Alien battle for your consideration. With its challenging Horde mode and its straightforward yet distinct classes that help focus the overall large-scale bug-blasting vision, it is a shooter that you and your friends will enjoy. Even though it takes a while to unlock all the more intriguing equipment and skills those classes have in store, some of the multiplayer modes are clumsy, the single-player campaign is dreadfully awful, the few available maps feel dreary, and the bug swarm lacks biodiversity, you are still doing it. There are much more admirable causes to donate your virtual lives to in 2024 than this, even though it is a fight that can become heated in the heat.
