Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! Review (NS2)

Gameplay

Graphics

Audio

Narrative

Summary: A smartly presented retro tinged shooter that fans of the franchise will love

4

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Auroch Digital, the brilliant minds behind the bombastic Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, are back with Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War!

The leap from the grim darkness of the 41st millennium to the barren wastes of Klendathu isn’t as big as you think, especially considering how much influence Paul Verhoeven’s movie adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel has had on 40k. The Mobile Infantry are Cadians, the Arachnids are Tyranids, and the value placed on human life in either is zero – they’re just meat for the grinder.

Once again, Auroch has done a splendid job of creating a period‑appropriate aesthetic that a mid‑range movie tie‑in released in 1997 would have had. The graphical stylings sit somewhere between Duke Nukem and Half‑Life, presentation‑wise. The bugs are fully polygonal models, and your fellow Mobile Infantry use the same faux spritework that Boltgun did.

But the best part by far is the cutscenes, which see Casper Van Dien reprise his role as Johnny Rico (now a general), along with Charlotta Mohlin as Major Samantha “Sammy” Dietz, another veteran who recounts her role in the Arachnid war (aka events that happened in tandem with the first movie).

In‑universe, Ultimate Bug War is propaganda to convince the player to join the Mobile Infantry and become a citizen: a hero of the Federation, mowing down scores of bugs and raining fire down on the Arachnids while pushing back the Arachnid menace with the help of your fellow infantrymen.

On a meta level, it’s a very clever piece of world-building and design that lets Auroch effectively tell their own tale, with a new protagonist, that directly ties into and expands on the events of the first movie, without stepping on its toes.

The game itself, though, does a marvelous job of recreating what life is like serving in the Mobile Infantry. The problem is that it’s a living hell, where your squad is constantly outgunned and overwhelmed. Whether you survive half the time is more a matter of luck than judgment.

This is in no small part due to your fellow recruits being absolutely useless most of the time. Sometimes, they’ll pull it together and help you keep back the Arachnid horde, though this is a rare and beautiful moment; most of the time, they’ll either wander around in circles waiting to get eaten or walk in your line of fire just as you’re about to finish one of the bastards off and then complain that you shot them.

You can’t rely on them at all, even if the game encourages you to round up as many troops as possible, because unlike Boltgun, where you’re an eight‑foot‑tall angel of death with the armour plating and arsenal of a small tank, in Ultimate Bug War you’re a soft, squishy human with armour that might as well be made out of cardboard at times, and, to be fair, decent enough weapons like shotguns, assault rifles, and a rather nifty railgun.

You also have two invaluable tricks up your sleeve: the ability to call for supplies like more ammo, health, and weapons once you’ve filled up the bug‑murder meter, and airstrikes that unleash the kind of ordnance you usually hear about at the Hague, from poison gas and white phosphorus to a nuke that obliterates everything it touches under a huge mushroom cloud.

You’ll also spend plenty of time stomping around in a lovely autoloader mech‑type thing (that coincidentally has a very similar loadout to a Cadian scout sentinel). It’s a nifty way to run across the fairly large, distinct maps that make up each of the game’s eight main missions, though admittedly they’re not as hardy as I would have liked. They also self‑destruct when you run out of armour, which makes for some fun opportunities to give the finger to whatever lumbering beast took you out.

Each mission takes about half an hour to get through, a little more if you hunt down the pair of secrets contained within each stage, with the bulk of your time spent running from one disaster to the next, holding off waves of warriors, destroying infrastructure to halt the arachnid advance, taking out massive super bugs, and flipping a lot of switches.

If you want to get into the mind of the enemy (to better understand how to stop them, of course), there are also five bug missions where you play as the dreaded assassin bug. Capable of mutating on a whim to either grow a pair of wings and take to the skies or thicken its hide and spew superheated plasma, as well as gathering dozens of other bugs to its side by summoning them from their nests, the assassin bug is a formidable foe, but even more fun to control.

Though each mission plays out the same, with the assassin bug trashing human bases by raising the terror level by killing humans and tearing apart their defenses with its big, scything talons and corralling warrior bugs to help eventually topple the main base, it’s still a fun little diversion. The cut scenes that bookend each mission, which have you conduct vital “research,” are a nice chucklesome touch.

The only downside to Ultimate Bug War, on Switch 2 at least, is the occasional technical issue that spoils the fun. When things get hectic, the frame rate can go through the floor – I had one moment when it was practically a slideshow. There are also some irritating audio glitches to contend with; it crashed a couple of times early on, and I fell through the floor at one point.

None of these are an absolute dealbreaker, but they’re definitely worth mentioning if you’re weighing up which platform to opt for.

Final Thoughts

Aside from a few technical bugbears and difficulty spikes, I had a great time with Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! It’s a smartly presented slice of satire that does justice to the movie while expanding on the story in clever ways. It’s a solid shooter that uses the Boltgun blueprint to create a fierce and surprisingly tactical retro‑tinged boomer shooter where everyone fights, no one quits.

About the Author

Gareth Newnham

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! Review (NS2)