Starship Troopers: Extermination is a multiplayer cooperative PvE experience with up to sixteen other players. The main goal of the game is to kill giant space bugs whilst completing seemingly unrelated side objectives such as harvesting gas.
The core of the game is actually pretty fun. Even on normal difficulty, it’s very easy for things to go haywire and your team overwhelmed by the horde of seemingly never ending space bugs. There’s always action to be had and plenty of mindless shooting.
The finale of the game is especially fun. You build a gigantic base of operations with walls, turrets, etc. and then defend against never ending waves of space bugs for a set amount of time. It takes a lot of communication, coordination, and effort to get everyone out alive. There were many moments when the bugs broke through the walls and you feel completely overwhelmed by the hectic mess surrounding you. If you manage to clear the incoming wave of bugs and manage to repair your base, you do get a sense of satisfactory accomplishment.
Interspersed between the profuse dispensing of ammunition are slightly quieter moments where you are completing side objectives before building the final base. These currently range from tasks such as collecting gas, repairing structures, and defending an area. As a side note the game is in early access as of this writing and the developers do have more maps and modes on the roadmap so the game should be seeing more variety in the future.
The side objectives are really nothing to write home about. They can be difficult to achieve without some coordination however. For example, for gas harvesting missions there are usually multiple extractor locations and each extractor can only fill one canister of gas at a time. Each extractor can hold three canisters at a time. It’s usually the best strategy to wait for the extractor to fully extract all three canisters and then run them back together as a squad as bugs are constantly spawning during this process. The gas canisters are very heavy and you can’t hold a gun while carrying them unless you are a support class. You are completely defenseless carrying a canister if you are going alone. As expected, this can end very poorly.
Thankfully the game has the option to turn on microphone access for the entire team of sixteen players, or for your own squad of four if desired, so you can communicate and coordinate tasks. For the few hours I’ve played the community seems to be lighthearted as of now with some enthusiastic individuals role playing boisterous space marines. It honestly does add to the enjoyment and atmosphere of the game.
As for replay value, the game does have three classes, each with their own progression track. It doesn’t take too long to unlock everything as you can unlock a new weapon, perk, or utility item every game or two. The three classes do feel different enough with the support class feeling the most different with the ability to automatically heal and revive fellow teammates using a flying drone.
To be honest, while the game is definitely entertaining, it still has some shortcomings that some people may mind. For starters, the game does not look or feel polished and understandably so being early access. It’s a bit laggy at times and some countries lack proper server support, forcing them to connect to less then ideal servers resulting in high latency. The amount of content in the game does run out fairly quickly and may feel repetitive to some. Most of these issues should be addressed according to the roadmap but I can only speak to the current state of the game as of this writing. Even with these shortcomings the game is genuinely fun to play, especially with friends and in short bursts.
I can only say, I’m doing my part.
Ducky Obrien 