Starship Troopers: Extermination Review

Starship Troopers: Extermination is a co-op first-person shooter game developed by Offworld Industries. Taking part in the ‘elite force’ of Deep Space Vanguard, we, the players, fight against hordes of bugs that stay in between humanity and their glorious victory. There are too many bugs out there, and players must utilize their resources to overcome the challenges the game offers.

I have had the chance to try the game out after full release which marks the end of its early access phase. I will be sharing my thoughts and opinions on the game with you. Please note that I did not have experience with the game during early access and I won’t be making a comparison between the full release and the early access version.

Delivers as Promised at its Core.

Fundamentally, the game is about destroying bugs to accomplish missions. The fight against these bugs during missions is intense and although we can go as 16 players on a mission, the game will not hesitate to remind us that we need to work together to succeed. It is difficult and crowded, and it features a lot of action during waves of bug hordes.

I found myself spraying bullets on hordes of bugs that felt as if they were endless in some moments and the intensity of battles made it harder to have a clear vision of what was going on as the remains of dead bugs would block the player’s vision. It’s possible to get rid of the bug remnants that block your view but during active fighting, I couldn’t get the chance to do that. In my experience, after I cleared a wave with my teammates in a multiplayer match, I observed that many players quickly started using their knives to clear their view with the limited time they had before the next wave of bugs.

The feeling of fighting and shooting using your weapon felt responsive. The knockback of some weapons, in particular, forced me to change my approach in battles, as sometimes it became very difficult to control the spray of that weapon. As I have said, at its core, the game delivers at fighting off the hordes of bugs and offering a difficult challenge.

The Game Requires Team Coordination, but it is not Easy to do so with Random Players.

Missions in Starship Troopers: Extermination are difficult, so they mostly require the cooperation of all 16 players in the field. There are various classes to choose from, and utilizing the advantages of each class is vital to surviving during missions, ultimately helping the players complete the orders.

I have frequently used the class “Guardian” as I felt like I could bring a decent amount of firepower to the team. Building defenses and bases is an important part of the game, so I also prioritized helping others build during short breaks that occur between hordes of bugs in specific game modes. As I joined the game by myself, playing with random users has shown its effects as there wasn’t too much coordination between players. Some knew what they were doing, of course, but it wasn’t always enough, so there would be times when the mission was a failure.

It Gets Repetitive.

Fighting difficult battles against the bugs is fun at the beginning with the game allowing you to level up in the class you play as, giving the player a feeling of accomplishment and progress. New weapons, perks, and utilities that you unlock as you level up add depth to the gameplay, increasing the number of possibilities you can choose to adopt a playstyle, but after a while, I felt as if the game became too repetitive.

Looking for more content, I tried out the single-player campaign which was also a type of tutorial for new players. The campaign consists of 25 missions, each with its own goal that the player must achieve. The experience was calmer compared to multiplayer missions and AI companions follow the player as they advance. Unfortunately, these missions got boring pretty fast for me, and I stopped around halfway through the missions. Although every mission has a different goal, all the ones I have tried have been short, boring, and felt like it was just about killing all the bugs in the level after all. The AI was not very good either, they accompany you but don’t do much. There was one time when I was bleeding and the companions must have helped my character get up, instead, they have watched my character die.

Performance Issues…

The game’s visuals are okay, nothing special, and it doesn’t appear to be something that the game puts weight on, but despite this, during multiplayer missions, my fps dropped a lot as if the game was constantly freezing. The issue with FPS drops was immersion breaking and switching most graphics settings to low did not completely fix the problem. I did not face too many FPS issues during the single-player campaign, but that’s probably because there were less crowded fights. Honestly, I think the game is intended to be played in multiplayer mode.

As I have said, I did not find the visuals of the game exceptional or too beautiful, so I did not expect to have these performance issues in the game. Unfortunately, the fps drops were not possible to be ignored, so it affected my experience while gaming.

Final Thoughts

My experience with Starship Troopers: Extermination has left me with mixed feelings about the game. You get to take part in a squad to fight against hordes of bugs and in that regard, it’s a fun game. Unfortunately, though, the lack of content and technical issues did not make it easier to ease the feeling of repetition.

At its core, it’s a good game that you can play with your friends and have a lot of fun, but I feel there must have been more to it. In my opinion, the game needs more polishing and content, because when I played it, I couldn’t help but think that this game lacks that one thing that makes it unique in its own way.

Starship Troopers: Extermination was reviewed using the Steam key provided by game.press.