Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War review

There's a vision for combat in Ultimate Bug War that you can make out from a distance, but never comes into focus. Spray and pray weapons with what should be a stiflingly small ammunition capacity are often more than a match for Bug War's generally low enemy density. The iconic warrior bugs don't swarm with anywhere near the intensity seen in the film, and rarely do the other subspecies of arachnid work in tandem to overwhelm the player. There's a perfunctory reload mechanic a la Gears of War that allows one to cut down their reload time by half, but rarely did I find myself in a teeth-gritting, life or death situation.

It's a shame, as the gunplay is generally quite good, with a weighty, gas-fed ratchet to the iconic Morita assault rifle and its variants, each high caliber round impacting with a satisfying orange-blue sploosh when it penetrates bug chitin.

There's a perfunctory arsenal of airstrikes that rain down with a satisfying swoosh, deployed from a low-poly Federation jets that fly five abreast like the Blue Angels, but this torrent of hellfire never quite gels with the sandbox—there are rarely enough active bugs in combat to justify calling in an airstrike, and the long deployment time and ease with which you can blow yourself up further negate the Fleet's usefulness.

Of course, that's if you can find a bug. Ultimate Bug War largely consists of wandering around mostly empty maps devoid of significant enemy encounters and completing tedious scripted mission objectives, often recycled from mission to mission—this war is won by planting satchel charges on flak-bugs, defending besieged outposts, and clearing out the occasional bug nest.

These are occasionally broken up by a fine enough power armor romp or eye roll inducing turret-from-gunship-door section, but by and large, it's a lot of trundling around through empty maps and squashing the occasional bug. There's one notable exception to this, however: Klendathu.

Drop Site Massacre

Ultimate Bug War peaks with its first level, a low-poly rendition of the infamous Klendathu Drop—an open ended battlefield with multiple distinct objectives and hordes of bugs swarming from all angles. The dense winding canyons and trails of Klendathu, Warrior bugs surge forward from all angles, are an anomaly in a game that is by and large barren.

Visually, Ultimate Bug War loves to reuse that flat stainless steel look of the 1997 film, though rarely does that translate to a similar vibe despite the attention to detail—remember Outpost 29? Well, you can now visit the dozens of nearly identical outposts across the Federation's galactic holdings. The music is similarly dull, a banal MIDI-brass ensemble mimicking the soundcard soundfonts of old. There's very little of note, beyond the baffling absence of the original theme—it's bizarre hearing royalty free military brass in lieu of an iconic film score in a licensed tie-in game.

Ultimate Bug War also lets you play as an "Assassin Bug", introduced (and almost immediately forgotten) halfway through the Klendathu Massacre. This is billed as an equivalent mode to the Federation campaign, though my time hunting down the Federation's finest with acid and claw left me borderline catatonic.

The Assassin Bug has three attack modes you can shift between, but in the face of swarms of nearly identical infantry that all go down in one hit, it's never the case that you have to do anything more than mash left click to cut the Mobile Infantry to ribbons. Mission objectives consist of destroying small tents and generators, which is about as thrilling as it sounds. With no ambient dialogue, radio chatter, or mission-specific context, the Assassin Bug campaign feels decidedly tacked on, and is far and away the weakest element of a game that does little to distinguish itself.

G.I. blues

Similarly off is the game's commitment to recreating the propaganda lens of the film, with returning characters Johnny Rico and Sammy Dietz (played by their original actors) delivering suitably stilted, wooden dialogue in between-mission interviews, evoking the weirdness of Philips CD-i FMV games. Rarely does this set-dressing land, however. I think it's supposed to be a riff on America's Army, a now-ancient shooter series developed and published by the US Army in the early aughts with naked intentions to drive adolescent recruitment ahead of the Iraq War. Even still, the juxtaposition of bombastic patriotism covering for out and out fascism is hardly as biting nearly thirty years on from the original film, and is in fact far tamer than some of the propaganda X The Everything App's "For You" page will randomly show you over breakfast.

Moreover, and this is an especially minor point in the very unserious world of "Starship Troopers canon", but I was under the impression that the Federation lost the bug war seen in the film, and badly—that's why the final propaganda reel before the credits shows child soldiers fighting alongside nuclear weapon equipped Mobile Infantry. By no means am I asking for playable child soldiers (though the thought of that is significantly funnier than any attempt at humor Ultimate Bug War), but it's disappointing that we never get to see any indication of the Federation teetering on the verge of total collapse.

Ultimate Bug War doesn't even really seem to get what is going on in the Verhoeven film, which is riffing on the Heinlein novel's thesis that the Federation's soldier class and the Bug warrior caste are ultimately one and the same. What defines the relationship between the film and the book is a feeling of neural whiteout, a descending, brain numbing miasma a la Kafka's metamorphosis that is completely absent here. With only trace hints of Verhoeven's sardonic wit and none of Heinlein's moribund set dressing, Ultimate Bug War's satirical elements are way off-target, and land well short of screwball contemporaries Helldivers and Earth Defense Force.

Marred by oddball balance decisions, bad pacing, coma-inducing level design, and an eye-rolling adherence to a satirical playbook that would have been played-out in the first term of the Bush presidency, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War doesn't do proper justice to the Federation's finest.