What The Hell Happened To Starship Troopers: Extermination?

Ironic, isn't it? That a videogame whose primary focus is the encouragement of the eradication of Bugs is in fact otherwise riddled with them! — and I am not just talking about the Arachnid menace that one mows down by the hundreds during gameplay. The whole software composition is compromised, and Starship Troopers: Extermination is now a far cry away from the slick and simple shooter it debuted as.

Now, I'll be honest with you: I stole that little observation from a friend. However, he's certainly not wrong; it's rather astute, in fact. This game is borderline busted, now not only containing an overabundance of unnecessary gameplay additions and alterations, but also a persistent and truly irksome connectivity issue, which makes even joining matches a pipe dream. On PC at least, the game is a damn mess, and it's a damn shame.

To give Offworld (the developers) some credit, though, I can see what they were going for concerning some of the gameplay changes. They clearly came from a place of love, and the development team have shown a genuine appreciation for Paul Verhoeven’s satirical take on the source material. However, I just do not think that some of those nods to the science fiction classic translate well into gameplay features, especially when those same features undermine original gameplay mechanics still present in the game. The armoured Arachnids update, which asks players to “aim for the nerve stem” (thanks, Neil Patrick Harris), was annoying on its own; but the game's biggest offence is how Bug corpses now stack up atop one another — again, just like in the movie! It's a lovely bit of acknowledgement, but it's also an egregious, frustrating change that renders the base building element somewhat pointless. Make as many walls as you like, eventually the Arachnids will just use their fallen kin to climb up and over your defences. Gone are the days when the Arachnids actually had to smash their way in, and where the engineers would despatch themselves to do repairs in between swarms.

I also do not enjoy the changes that have been made to the class system since launch; the original three classes may have benefited from small tweaks but were largely fine as implemented. These newer classes, designed to fill more niches, just feel unnecessary. And not a single one of them even has the film’s infamous portable nuke launcher to hand. Unfortunately, the same can be said of the variety of available Arachnids: loads of wonky designs that loosely connect the game to the franchise's other ventures, and yet we still don't have the iconic flying Arachnids nor the sinister Control Bugs implemented.

Opinions on gameplay changes, though, can often be chalked up to personal preference. It's not that they don't work at all, I just think that they don't work particularly well. Regardless of how movie-accurate they may be. However, kinks in the connectivity area should've been ironed out by now. Truth be told, the game has always had iffy matchmaking, but it's actually grown worse! I put the game down for several months because of it — the near-endless cycle of jumping into matches with friends only to hit a lag wall, and then more than likely a server boot. But when I picked it up recently to play a few games with a friend, we ended up only managing one match in our limited free time, due to the aforementioned matchmaking problems.

The whole thing really is a shame because the game had real promise when it arrived. Finally, we had a solid, little shooter based on a massively underappreciated and underrepresented franchise. It was direct and simple, and easy to pick up and put down as you wished. Now it feels bloated with unnecessary gameplay elements, and even still remains plagued by matchmaking issues. (I couldn't even get in a game to gather screenshots!) As such (and it pains me deeply to say), I couldn't recommend that you pick this one up. Nor could I honestly recommend that any of you veterans of the Mobile Infantry out there jump back in. As it stands, there are plenty of other multiplayer games that better deserve your finite time.

Hopefully, in time, Offworld will wrangle the game into something more digestible and fun to play. But based on the game's trajectory from launch up until now, I do not hold a great deal of hope…