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Loved the original Starship Troopers, but didn't realize they made four sequels until I saw Starship Troopers Traitor of Mars while plundering the high seas. Has anyone seen Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation and Starship Troopers 3: Marauder? Are they worth watching?
- Good bug, dead bug.
- Starship Troopers: Extermination - Early Access Screenshots
- Are you a fan of the Starship Troopers movies?
- Verdict
- Starship Troopers: Extermination Early Access Review
- More Reviews by Jarrett Green
- IGN Recommends
By Jarrett Green
Updated: Jun 2, 2023 4:40 am
Posted: Jun 1, 2023 11:43 pm
If you are a hardcore Starship Troopers fan, chances are I’ve already served with you on the front lines of Valaka in the early days of Starship Troopers: Extermination’s early access launch. For those of us who know who Casper Van Dien is, the long grind, very limited objectives and mission types, and old-school shooting were never going to deter us from doing our part, because working together as a team to blast enormous waves of bugs while building a base and then high-tailing it to safety has a powerful draw. But for those who don’t, there may not be much reason to drop in just yet.
I think maybe the biggest letdown out of the gate for Extermination is that even though it very much looks like the 1997 movie, it lacks any of the satirical substance. There are plenty of references to the movie, from the soldiers’ kits to the news bulletins that blare in front of every new round to the soundtrack, but all resemblance is mostly skin deep. One could argue that the old-school shooter feel (it lacks the auto health regeneration and dash happy movement of modern shooters) and mandatory friendly fire could be seen as an attempt at satire, but that seems like a stretch.
Without any story to speak of you literally are just showing up to shoot bugs over and over again, with no attempt to subvert the “head empty” grind inherent in these sorts of team shooters in the way the movie did for war films. This is likely fine for superfans of the Starship Trooper series, but for a brand so associated with holding genre cliches up as a mirror for critique, it feels like a glaring missed opportunity.
My team would frequently stand around one refinery twiddling our thumbs.
“
There are two mission types available at the early access launch. The first is Attack and Secure (AAS), which gives your squad a faster, more mobile set of objectives where you must take and hold various points at different parts of the map. I found these to be lighter, quicker battles but also prone to bizarre bugs (apart from the kind trying to kill you). For instance, a common objective is to activate and guard ore refineries that produce a tank you then have to escort back to base every 30 seconds. Any one processor can do this a handful of times before needing to cool down for a few minutes. That’s not a problem if you have multiple processors active at once, but frequently I would find the entire team standing around one refinery twiddling our thumbs because it's the only one that spawned. The saying is “do you want to live forever?” not “do you want to wait forever?”
The second mission type, ARC, keeps the primary objective in one place while you refine resources from around the map to keep it powered. It requires much more coordination, and you engage with both the combat and building mechanics far more frequently. That said, it's locked behind an account level that took me around an hour and a half of game time to grind to unlock, which seems like way too much for what amounts to half of the content available.
Yes, I've seen them all!
I've seen the first one
No, I haven't seen any of them
I had never even heard of it
Both available mission types end with your team protecting an asset from egregiously bland waves of bug invaders by building a base around it. There are five types of bugs so far, but three of them are effectively just the same type of melee warrior as far as how you deal with them. The gunner and grenadier are relatively uncommon and shake the formula up a bit, though, as their long-distance threats are always priorities on the field.
Besides the same menu of bugs, both mission types also share most of the same limited amount of sub-objectives, meaning you’ll be doing the same things largely the same way in either mode. I preferred AAS mode largely because of this – any added tactical element that ARC mode brings only serves to expose how shallow the list of things to do during any given moment in Extinction is.
Starship Troopers: Extermination’s early access version is pretty light on content, but already does a decent job of pitting a large group of marines against an overwhelming force of alien bugs, and building fortifications gives you something to coordinate on as you hold out long enough for a thrilling extraction. That said, my recommendation to th...
Review scoring
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Starship Troopers: Extermination could become the premier bug-stomping romp for big teams, but in its current early state, mobile infantry can do the dying without you.
Jarrett Green
- Jarrett Green
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The Starship Troopers franchise began with the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein, which was adapted into the 1997 cult-classic film directed by Paul Verhoeven. The movie is a satirical take on militarism, fascism, and war, following Johnny Rico and his journey through the Mobile Infantry as they battle an insect-like alien race called the Arachnids. Over time, the franchise expanded into ...
