Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! - Totally Bugged

Barely Magic Mike
Mar 16
7 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBI6Lai4wE4

Most other reviews you see of Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War will probably be focused on the Starship Troopers property itself and how much fans of both it and first-person boomer shooters will get on with this indie entry. That's not how this review is going to go, fair warning, and for some of you, that might be a good thing.

My upbringing in an immigrant family that knew little to nothing of American movies places a vast majority of my cinematic tastes past the turn of the millennium, and accordingly, Starship Troopers got lost in the fray. I've never seen any of the movies, so the perspective you're getting here is from someone who has no attachment whatsoever to this franchise, but does like himself a good ole boomer shooter. So, with that housekeeping out of the way, let's talk about Ultimate Bug War's value as a game with any potential nostalgia off the table.

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War opens with a solid-enough stab at an intentionally tongue-in-cheek vibe, with ham-fisted FMV recruiting videos laying the foundation for a fourth wall-breaking meta-narrative. Here, the game you're actually playing is a blatant recruitment tool aimed at enlisting you in the fight against alien bugs. It's neither bad by any means, nor as funny as it thinks it is. There's an unfortunate irony to that, since Helldivers 2, despite being inspired by Starship Troopers but not literally being it, manages to one-up the humor here in a significant way. Maybe you're here for the Starship Troopers franchise specifically, but given the very minor role plot plays here, you're probably more interested in its capabilities as a shooter.

Each core mission of Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War throws you into a variety of open battlefields full of objectives. You can often choose which order you want to tackle these objectives in, but this is ostensibly like choosing which corner of a lawn you'd rather start mowing from - a choice whose meaninglessness is matched only by its mundanity.

Most objectives you tackle in the boots of a soldier will feel exactly the same, often having you shoot space bugs, use C4 to destroy larger versions of space bugs, or flip a switch that, for some reason, attracts a massive horde of space bugs that you'll have to defend your position from. In each case, the lead character, Major Samantha Dietz, will jump back and forth in tone between genuine concern at her overwhelmed forces and overt excitement for more combat quickly enough that a therapy session should really be in order. Tonal whiplash aside, the mission design here is so lazy that it could've been randomly generated with nothing of value lost. This includes the design of the levels themselves, which like to make you take the long way to each objective to make sure you get your daily steps in. Am I having fun yet?

Every objective feels like a grindy fetch quest hanging by the brink of its meaningless life, and the sense of dread I got being bored of the first mission while knowing there were many more to come made me feel like the game was asking me to do long division while maintaining a boner. Do you want me to be excited or fall asleep? Pick a lane! If your first-person shooter is going to be this goddamn boring, there should at least be a cooperative component so you can be bored with your friends. Alas, Ultimate Bug War is a strictly single-player affair, an omission many will find understandably difficult to overlook.

Now, I could complain for ages about game design this mundane in a genre so crowded, but let's talk about the shooting itself. Starship Troopers Ultimate Bug War hands you a handful of shooter staples like machine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, and the occasional surprise like a punchy energy weapon. The energy weapon itself is less the surprise than the punchiness of it, because most of the other weapons tend to lack impact.

The game functions, the weapons shoot, and you're given a small variety of combat options between the handful of guns, grenades, the ability to call in air support, and a melee-focused combat knife. But none of it ever aspires to more than the absolute baseline set by the boomer shooter genre, which makes its myriad minor issues stand out all that much more. These issues include a clumsy weapon-switching mechanic, at least in controller mode, that requires you to tap Y to switch to one weapon and hold it to switch to another, which feels like an invention that the ubiquitous weapon wheel was long ago created to replace. The game also occasionally allows you to use a turret or a mech, but these amount to little more than the same old shooting with more power and have their own issues. For example, turrets are only useful if bugs aren't going to surround you from all angles, and their overwhelming forces often do exactly that. And mechs, while providing a decent feeling of power, have a bizarre feature where they self-destruct once they run out of fuel, a contrived and pointless mechanic as I've ever seen.

The biggest issue, other than the game being a boring, basic slog from beginning to end of course (stay with me now!), is that missions frequently snagged their pacing on the same proverbial hook - right as I was nearing the end of a level, I would seemingly ALWAYS run out of ammo, leading me to run around like a moron looking for ammo crates and usually dying in the process. Then I would revive at the last checkpoint with just enough health to usually die in one hit (this is on the standard "Trooper" difficulty, by the way), leading to irritating end-of-level difficulty spikes where half the challenge was finding a way to finish without settling for a ludicrously inefficient bug-stabbing spree.

What I've neglected to mention so far is that Ultimate Bug War technically has two types of missions: One where you play as humans and another where you play as the bugs! In theory, this adds variety. In practice, it's in the same way getting acute appendicitis during a bout of food poisoning adds variety to your medical care. I’m not sure if these were intended to be an olive branch to the player for neglecting to include a cooperative mode, but let me put it bluntly - the most generous course of action for me to take in this review would be to pretend the bug missions don't exist. But alas, they do, and that is unfortunate for them and for me and, if you play them, for you. The plot justification for these missions is that they train you to think like the enemy or... something. And in fairness, their core gameplay is completely different from the bulk of the game, placing you in the third-person perspective of a giant bug that can morph into a few different forms to take out human targets. These include a ground-based form that can charge and melee attack enemies, a flying form that can dive-bomb targets from the sky, and a sort of tanky form that can shoot fire.

In theory? Not a bad idea! In practice, controlling your bug feels like trying to drive a tank with a stick shift. They never move the way you want or expect them to, the limited number of attacks gets repetitive immediately, and zero effort was put in to make good on what should theoretically be a big, dumb, silly power fantasy. A giant bug charging into a human enemy shouldn't stop short upon hitting him like a speeding car into a brick wall.

And yet, there are seemingly no proper physics applied to anything, so this is what you get. Similarly, while the idea of healing and spawning other bugs at nests could have potential, this too is squandered by the fact that your minion bugs constantly get in your way, making the already rigid controls put up even more of a fight. Ultimately, these bug missions, while optional and taking up a smaller chunk of the game than the core shooting campaign, are technically functional but at every other level, abysmal. Every moment I've spent talking about them is another moment of my life and yours that they've wasted. Let's cut it off here.

But hey, at least the visuals in the game are... fine. By boomer shooter standards, there's a decent variety in environments and everything looks appropriately pixelated and chunky. You probably already know if you're a fan of this sort of style, and this game’s often bland, minimal viable product version of that style will do nothing whatsoever to change your mind. It does manage a comfortable 60 fps on the Steam Deck though, which is nice if you enjoy being bored on the go. Sound design, from voice acting to music to effects, is (surprise!) competent but completely unremarkable, like settling for an expired Keurig pod when you're in the mood for fresh coffee. Enough said.

In case my point somehow needs repeating to be understood, let me gently emphasize it - Starship Trooper Ultimate Bug War is SO BORING. It is unflavored instant oatmeal that needs to be microwaved a little longer. It is a straight-to-DVD movie played on a phone screen you have to hold up at an awkward angle while riding a noisy Greyhound bus. It is a bag of plain potato chips that you open to realize there was a hole in it and all of the chips went stale. It is born as mediocrity incarnate, then dragged so far enough below baseline by a cocktail of minor to major design issues that it's often simply bad. And, fan of Starship Troopers or not, it's hard to see a reason why anybody should play it.

BROKEN LAMP/ BELOW AVERAGE