Starship Troopers: Extermination Review

As luck would have it, 2024 turned out to be a rough year to release a co-op multiplayer game featuring a satirical fascistic military force battling hordes and hordes of monstrous, bug-like alien creatures. Ironically, of the three major games that fit this description that hit PCs and consoles this year, Starship Troopers: Extermination is the least effective at pulling off the mighty few versus the endless enemy motif. Of course, even if it doesn’t match the high bar set by Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, you can have a decent amount of fun with its unique features, like larger teams and clever base-building sections, before the swarm becomes too monotonous.

Before diving into the main multiplayer event, Starship Troopers: Extermination offers up an extremely skippable single-player campaign where you can learn the ropes without letting your team down. You play a nameless soldier in the Special Operations Group, hand picked by General Johnny Rico, portrayed by Casper Van Dien in a less-than-enthusiastic performance. There really is no plot here, as this mode serves more as a tutorial removed from the chaos of the online environment than a fully fledged story with a beginning, middle, and climactic end. I’m not a green recruit, as I put more than 15 hours into the early access version earlier this year, but I can’t imagine that a true beginner would get anything out of this experience that they couldn’t pick up in a far less boring fashion in the field.

These 25 missions consist of all the normal things you would do in multiplayer but with none of the spontaneous fun of playing with other people. Also, a focused campaign should have been a prime opportunity to inject some actual satire into a game dressed up like one of the most iconic spoofs in film history, but Extermination completely misses it. This first chapter, “Answering The Call,” threatens to be the first of several in a broader campaign, but if what follows is anything like this I think I’d rather put my head between the jaws of a fire warrior bug.

Skipping ahead of all that to where it gets good: with up to 16 players on the battlefield at a time Extermination brings far more firepower to the fight against the insectoid menace than its peers. You’re divided into squads of up to four, but there can be a good sense of teamwork as everyone coordinates to complete objectives and hopefully extract from the scene with as many of their lives intact as possible.

Extermination does a great job of making sure 16 players never feels like enough, though, as it sends endless and relentless waves of bugs to crash against your fighting force nonstop. Dozens and dozens of bugs can be actively tearing you and your base apart on screen at a time, and even dead bugs – the only good kind – can become lingering tactical problems as their corpses can stack up to become ramps for their friends to scale walls with. It’s a welcome, but stiff challenge, as any large enemy can turn you or your squadmates into ribbons with just one or two attacks, and even basic warriors can shred you without much more effort. It gets hectic quickly.

To counter the bug threat there are six playable soldier classes to choose from, each with unique ability and equipment options that specialize their roles pretty well. For instance, though they are both heavy armored, the Guardian and Demolisher would never be confused with one another, as the former can build a personal fort on the fly to protect themselves from surrounding bugs and stabilize their unwieldy heavy guns, while the latter deals damage almost exclusively by blowing things up with grenades and rockets and relies on teammates to cover them.

Depending on how you look at it, the decision to make character progression mostly individual to each class is either welcome content or a major drag. Unlocking all six classes’ abilities and equipment takes some significant grinding, which means you’re back to square one when you decide to branch out and try something new – but you’re also not going to run out of rewards to earn for a long, long time. To Extermination’s credit, the starting gear package does a decent job at summarizing what each class can do, like the Engineer’s flamethrower and ability to build a limited amount of structures outside of the designated zones, or the Ranger’s quick-moving, low-cooldown dashes. But if you’d like to know more, it’s a huge commitment.

Every weapon performs as you would assume it would in a futuristic military shooter, but even those that aren’t big machine guns have intense amounts of recoil to take into account. Hit markers seem unreliable as well, sometimes not showing at all when aiming down sights, so you have to be ready to do a fair amount of spraying and praying.

Another design decision with some major pros and cons is that you can’t swap your class mid-mission, even after you get killed and respawn. That makes your choice important, for sure, but bad team compositions occasionally lead to quagmires when, for example, a mission modifier makes bugs start spawning lots of heavily armored creatures and your team doesn’t have nearly enough options to deal with them efficiently. Unless you roll with a group of 15 of your closest friends, relying on randoms to be team players and pick wisely can be frustrating.

Variety can also be an issue. Though Extermination is always quick to throw impressive waves of hundreds of bugs at you and your trooper brethren at a time, there are only nine different types of enemies among them, and half of them are the same type of bitey quadruped soldier from the movie in different sizes and colors. The remaining species are all ranged attackers: Gunners who shoot straight at troopers and bombardiers and grenadiers that arc blue and red death juices like siege weapons. With source material that includes such a variety of interesting critters, it's baffling that none of the weirder and more interesting ones, like the infamous brain bug or flying fighters, are nowhere to be found.

In general, building a base is a quick and seamless process of pulling out a special gun, pointing it at any place on a specified zone on the map, selecting an object, and placing its foundation. This only claims the spot as taken, though; If you want to erect that wall or activate that ammo supply station, you’ll need to repair it and make it real – as simple as switching modes on the build tool. It’s a little extra hassle at first, but in the likely event of its destruction, the foundation will remain so that a build section can just simply be repaired again – a clever way to let you rebuild good ideas quickly without having to lay everything out again.

There’s nothing that's truly surprising about how this works, but everything you can build – like tall walls with or without ramps to reach the tops, automated or mountable gun placements, bunkers that serve as relatively safe spaces for troopers to buckle down in against heavy bombardments – serves a clear and effective purpose, and in most rounds I saw a wide variety of pieces being used in base layouts.

For my money, Horde is the mode most worth playing in Extermination. Granted, aside from having so many people in play it’s not much different than any other horde mode in any other game we’ve seen since Gears of War popularized the idea: enemy waves spawn that your team must survive, in which case you'll get a break to reinforce your base in order to better survive the next, even larger wave. Here, though, the scramble between rounds is real: Resources go fast and the 45 seconds between waves is not much time to fix much of anything, so you have to choose wisely. I got used to tending my own little section of the fortifications – and hoping my teammates would do the same.

The trouble is that, unless a true team leader emerges, it’s very difficult to get a real macro-level plan together on such a large team. This narrowed my overall strategic options some, but I basically always found a wall to mount a heavy gun on and held my own – and that’s a pretty reliably good time. I also had to get used to just stealing from the shared pool of building ore to build my fortifications as soon as possible, and ask for forgiveness later. That gave me some memorable moments of fighting and building alongside others, but all this disorganization made me long for someone in old-school Battlefield or PlanetSide’s commander role, where one player’s full-time job is coordinating others.

If you prefer a more intimate team experience, Hive Hunt is a complete change of pace from the rest of Extermination because you only have to staff one squad of four troopers to trundle through caves in search of bug eggs to blow up. It’s a tougher mode, due in part to the lack of bodies on my side and absolutely no lack of carapaces on theirs, but also with no opportunities to build fortifications at all there's nothing to put between you and the many dangerous and strong enemies that will bombard you in these tighter spaces. You really start to miss those huge walls when tiger bugs lock you in a death loop because they can easily one-shot you with almost zero repercussions. Without the tactical element of base building, the steady but unremarkable gunplay really comes into the fore.

My least favorite mode is ARC, which asks full teams to build and maintain a base around the eponymous device while also venturing out into the map to refineries to produce and escort resources back to power it. Coordination is key, but of course it’s completely absent most of the time when playing with mostly random people. Base-building with limited resources means that any fortifications are first come, first built, with no quick way to communicate ideas outside of barking into voice chat and hoping everybody hears you over the rest of the chatter. With few exceptions, most of my ARC rounds end in long, losing wars of attrition, where my teammates quit one by one (without so much as a bot replacement or the ability for new players to join mid-match) and those of us sticking around are forced to cower behind walls that we must constantly repair until we either run out of respawns or the ARC gets destroyed.

In comparison to ARC, the Assault and Secure (AAS) missions are similar but a night-and-day difference in how consistently enjoyable they are. The key here is that the order of operations is reversed: first you travel across the map completing smaller objectives, like securing a location or refining ore and gas, and then you hunker down into a base to survive a long series of bug waves. What needs to be done is self explanatory and requires very little coaxing until the very end, so everything flows towards the big standoff organically. Everyone on the team has no choice but to work together on the little objectives on the way, so it’s overall a much better experience than ARC.

However, every mode suffers from being staged on mostly empty maps, with the only real life or personality on them being the troopers and bugs. There’s nothing to see or find that isn’t an objective waypoint marked clearly on the map. Compared to Helldivers II with all of its little points of interest, it feels barren and uninteresting when you’re not actively pulling the trigger.

There’s a general lack of polish all over Extermination as well. Bugs sometimes just stand around, completely oblivious to the fight at hand. Skills occasionally activate too many times or don’t go off at all, often leaving me to shrug my last confused shrug when attempting to drop a mine only to hold on tight to it instead as I get consumed by the mob. Performance is also a bit shaky – I had to lower the video settings to medium so that I could get a smooth and consistent frame rate on my Intel Core i9-9000 and RTX 3070 GPU, and that’s something I don’t recall feeling I had to do when I played in early access a year ago.