Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War PC review — Too short to be the ultimate anything

When I saw that the developers of Boltgun were making a single-player Starship Troopers game, it immediately became glued to my radar like an insect stuck to a windshield. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War‘s chunky visual aesthetic is very welcome, as is the feel of chaotically blasting bugs on the battlefield. The issue is that the game is so short that it doesn’t do nearly as much as it could, as the main campaign shockingly only lasts a few hours. Coupled with the generic feel of the missions that don’t feel all that different from Starship Troopers: Exterminations and the repetitive, unimaginative bug missions, this one is absolutely not nearly as noteworthy as it should have been.

One of the first things that really surprised me about Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War was that it features live-action cutscenes, some of which feature Casper Van Diem, the star of the original movie. These are cheesy and mostly entertaining, although some of the acting (especially that of the actor playing the game’s lead character) misses the mark. In the end, I was mostly surprised that they even bothered to shoot these at all when it feels like there’s half a game here at best. There’s a disconnected narrative about the game being an in-universe recruitment tool, but not much is really done with this.

All-in-all, there are really only seven missions in Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War, not counting the game’s tutorial. The others all take between 20 and 25 minutes meaning that, if you don’t die, you can pretty much clear the campaign in under three hours. Granted, each mission has secrets to find and four difficulty levels, so there’s more you can squeeze out of it. However, there’s truly a paltry amount of content here, which makes the obvious effort put into the gameplay and maps seem somewhat wasted. Plus, of those three hours of gameplay, you’ll simply be spending much of it going from point A to point B as you run across large maps.

Each mission in Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War follows a similar formula. You usually watch as your ship touches down on a planet while the main character and her squad chat about the mission. Once you’re on-foot, there are three objectives that task you with running to the point, where you’ll activate a switch, destroy some targets, or hold off enemy attacks for a certain amount of time. Once you finish all three objectives, there’s usually a fourth one that has you do something similar. Afterward, the mission is over and you can move onto the next one. I was expecting something more akin to your average level-based boomer shooter and this just isn’t nearly as compelling as that.

You typically start missions with a rifle that has a shotgun mode, but you can pick up more weapons either in the levels themselves or by calling for some supplies. Supply pods seem to give you some random weapons, which are all mostly fun to shoot. As you defeat enemies, your supply pod charge fills up which allows you to summon another. This charge fills quickly, so you’ll be able to basically call in more health and ammo whenever you need it, diminishing much of the challenge that the game could offer. Most of it just doesn’t make for a very cohesive experience.

The shooting is one of the few things other than the presentation that hits the mark. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War does a good job of making you feel like you’re fighting series bugs and there’s a surprisingly varied amount of weapons considering how brief the campaign is. Similarly, there’s an acceptable variety to the bugs themselves. You’ll mainly be fighting the default warrior bug, but there’s an archer bug, a couple of smaller bugs, a more powerful warrior variant, a tank-esque bug, and more. Some of them have unique weakspots too.

Aside from the campaign, there are also five bug missions that take place in the same maps, but you play as an assassin bug. These play out with a similar structure to the human missions, albeit even simpler. There are three bases on the map that you need to cause havoc in by being destructive and killing enemies. Once you destroy all three, a fourth one shows up and the mission is over. The assassin bug plays decently and has three different forms to swap between; default, flying, and tank form. The last one uses a morph that functions similarly to calling a supply pod in the main campaign.

Each of these missions takes about ten minutes, which might add another hour of playtime. Between everything, playing each mission once might take you around four hours. I wish some of the budget allotted to filming the sequences with live-action actors had been spent on making a full game, but it is what it is. What remains feels like more of a tech demo and it doesn’t help that the objectives in the main campaign don’t feel any different than ones you’d see in any team co-op shooter. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War is simply a missed opportunity that’s a bit of a waste of the assets and gameplay that the devs put together, even if it’s a decent time while it lasts.

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