Starship Troopers: Extermination review

Our VerdictStarship Troopers: Extermination’s cooperative battles are mechanically innovative and can be enormous fun, but a general lack of polish and a slapdash single-player hold it back from greatness.

Our Verdict

Starship Troopers: Extermination’s cooperative battles are mechanically innovative and can be enormous fun, but a general lack of polish and a slapdash single-player hold it back from greatness.

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Need to knowWhat is?Cooperative multiplayer shooter based on Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film.Release dateOctober 11, 2024Expect to pay$50/£40DeveloperOffworldPublisherOffworldReviewed onAMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10Steam DeckUnsupportedLinkOfficial site

Need to know

What is?Cooperative multiplayer shooter based on Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film.Release dateOctober 11, 2024Expect to pay$50/£40DeveloperOffworldPublisherOffworldReviewed onAMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10Steam DeckUnsupportedLinkOfficial site

Often the results of this are fair to middling, while parts of Extermination are outright terrible. Yet when all of its ideas come together, its action is every bit as thrilling as Arrowhead’s fascist farce.

(Image credit: Offworld)

Starship Troopers Extermination

Extermination’s main event is its 16-player cooperative missions, in which four squads of four players work together to withstand the arachnid menace for the glory of the Federation. These missions vary slightly in their structure, but they tend to last between 30 minutes and one hour, and usually involve building, then defending, a base.

If the idea of building a base with fifteen strangers sounds either tedious or intimidating to you, in my experience with Extermination it is neither. Bases are fully kitted out within minutes, as players work efficiently together to erect walls, place reinforced bunkers, situate ammo dumps, and station manned and automated gun turrets. It’s a neat thing to watch in motion, and as a new player, watching how the pros do it is generally a good idea. The base building controls aren’t terrible, but they’re not exactly intuitive either, so learning how to effectively place the right pieces in the right places will likely take you a couple of rounds.

Once the base is constructed (or in some missions,whilethe base is under construction) the arachnids will start attacking. Combat is slower and less refined than most modern FPS games, but it still feels great to fill an encroaching arachnid with lead, especially if you find a class you jive with. Players can assume the role of snipers, grenadiers, and flamethrower-toting engineers, each of which have their own weapons and abilities. Personally, I found myself partial to the Guardian, who comes equipped with a heavy assault rifle with a large magazine as standard, and can deploy a metal ring-fortification around themselves at will. Not only does this provide cover from projectile-shooting bugs, it also temporarily stops arachnids in their tracks, which is extremely handy when trying to hold a position.

(Image credit: Offworld)

Starship Troopers Extermination

Extermination’s most distinctive feature, however, is its corpse-permanence. Every arachnid that you kill will remain in situ on the battlefield. If you killanotherarachnid in the same spot, it will lie on top of the previous one. Given the number of enemies the game vomits forth, you soon end up with huge piles of dead alien insects scattered across the battlefield.

This has a couple of implications, the first of which is practical. Corpses can pile up to the point where they obscure your line of sight, or even create a ramp for other bugs to scale your defences. Hence, it’s prudent to clear these biological obstacles using explosives, adding another tactical twist to base management alongside making repairs and reloading turrets between attacks.

Corpses can pile up to the point where they obscure your line of sight, or even create a ramp for other bugs to scale your defences

The other effect is that it makes the battlefield look rad as hell. Between the corpse permanence and the constant construction and destruction of its bases, Extermination has the most dynamic battlefields I’ve experienced in a multiplayer FPS for a while. There are times when you’ll look out and see a vast sea of dead bugs, other players clambering over them to get to some distant objective. It’s a sight that would go well with Adagio for Strings.

(Image credit: Offworld)

Starship Troopers Extermination

The scale Extermination plays also means your experience of a mission can be highly personal. You can spend the entire mission defending one corner of a base, or venture off to try and complete randomly appearing side missions. In a frantic last stand on the desert planet Valaka, I spent the whole latter half of the mission ferrying ammo to automated turrets as dozens of bugs battered the walls.

Often, Extermination feels less like Helldivers 2 and more like Planetside 2, insofar as how you feel like a small part of a much larger battle. This is particularly the case in missions that aren’t straightforward tower defences, like ‘AAS’ mission, where you need to capture territory for your basebeforeyou build it, or ‘ARC’ missions, where you must venture out from a central point to gather resources for the base. The way these missions can split off into little adventures that ultimately feed back into the main event is quite novel and interesting.

(Image credit: Offworld)

Starship Troopers Extermination

Outside of the impressive corpse tech, the presentation is largely staid, while the texturing is muddy and often unsightly

Continuing the subject of style, although Extermination replicates the iconography of Starship Troopers well enough, it doesn’t really embrace the tone of Verhoeven’s film. There are a couple of nice flourishes, such as the music and how every mission starts with a faux news report. But it’s all very superficial, with no meaningful effort to capture the film’s satirical essence, and certainly no attempt to elaborate upon it. Extermination focuses squarely on evoking the action scenes of Starship Troopers, and to its credit it does this pretty well.

(Image credit: Offworld)

Starship Troopers Extermination

It’s a wasted opportunity, and the way Extermination calls it a “tutorial” campaign feels like a cop-out, since the game already includes a basic tutorial. I’d much prefer a shorter, more bespoke campaign that properly integrated Rico into the experience, rather than just having him voice mission briefings and objective updates.

(Image credit: Offworld)

Starship Troopers Extermination

This isn’t the only tacked-on feeling feature Extermination has added recently. Also new is the Galactic Front, a live-service style campaign with community objectives and its own evolving story. To participate, you need to be part of a Company (basically a guild) which can then create and complete its own missions that will contribute to the objective.

The Verdict66Read our review policyStarship Troopers: ExterminationStarship Troopers: Extermination’s cooperative battles are mechanically innovative and can be enormous fun, but a general lack of polish and a slapdash single-player hold it back from greatness.

The Verdict

66Read our review policyStarship Troopers: ExterminationStarship Troopers: Extermination’s cooperative battles are mechanically innovative and can be enormous fun, but a general lack of polish and a slapdash single-player hold it back from greatness.

66Read our review policy

Starship Troopers: ExterminationStarship Troopers: Extermination’s cooperative battles are mechanically innovative and can be enormous fun, but a general lack of polish and a slapdash single-player hold it back from greatness.

Starship Troopers: Extermination

Starship Troopers: Extermination’s cooperative battles are mechanically innovative and can be enormous fun, but a general lack of polish and a slapdash single-player hold it back from greatness.

More about starship troopers exterminationStarship Troopers: Extermination brings its chaotic 16-person bug fights to a 1.0 releaseCasper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but finds it mind-boggling some still take it at face value: ‘My grandfather fought against the Nazis, and it’s not a pro-war film—Everybody f***ing dies!‘LatestSorry everyone, Minecraft 2 is cancelled, and it might be our faultSee more latest►

More about starship troopers extermination

Starship Troopers: Extermination brings its chaotic 16-person bug fights to a 1.0 releaseCasper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but finds it mind-boggling some still take it at face value: ‘My grandfather fought against the Nazis, and it’s not a pro-war film—Everybody f***ing dies!’

A starship trooper points into the camera while being attacked by bugs on all sides.

Starship Troopers: Extermination brings its chaotic 16-person bug fights to a 1.0 release

Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers

Casper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but finds it mind-boggling some still take it at face value: ‘My grandfather fought against the Nazis, and it’s not a pro-war film—Everybody f***ing dies!’

LatestSorry everyone, Minecraft 2 is cancelled, and it might be our faultSee more latest►

Latest

Sorry everyone, Minecraft 2 is cancelled, and it might be our fault

Herobrine standing in front of a foggy forest

Sorry everyone, Minecraft 2 is cancelled, and it might be our fault

See more latest►

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Our Verdict#

Our Verdict