Rate top gamesStarship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War!
About
Lock and load into the Starship Troopers universe and join the Mobile Infantry in the most realistic depiction of war ever made! Experience an original story in this action-packed, first-person retro shooter. Would you like to know more?
System requirements for PC
Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! reviews and comments
📜𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐠𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐦𝐞
Despite my initial skepticism about the multitasking "Warhammer Boltgun" devs, they really have gained experience and are quite effective in doing side hustle with another license: As a reminder, the Starship Troopers franchise is owned by Sony Pictures, and over the past 30 years, projects in this series have ranged from complete garbage to playably mediocre, against this background, "Ultimate Bug War!" really stands out. The chosen retro format may be off-putting to mainstream gamers, but it offers a modern engine-based toolset that will impress PS1-era fans, and in the details of the game you can even feel notes of fan love for the original film by Paul Verhoeven, but the ideas of the creators from 𝐀𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐡 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 were “cut off” halfway, resulting in the game's final levels becoming indistinguishable from the formula of the first levels within the 3-hour story campaign.
ell, okay, let's first talk about the game's solid foundation: Firstly, there's no classic linear level structure at all. The landing of the boots occurs at a certain point, but then head wherever you like in the semi-open spaces of those "very" bug planets (with names like "Planet P"), where you can freely choose the order of your objectives. You can turn right and help "hold" an outpost, or head straight to the other end of the map, where you'll need to rescue a crashed "private", or run back and forth to plant explosives on the enemy's living blue air defense, while along the way you can throw grenades at the "spawn holes" or summon a friendly squad of 2D sprite dummies, changing the balance of power on the horizon. You don't have to "clear" everything, and that's impossible, the map lives its own life, with constant clashes between "meat assaults"; the game will immediately remind you of 𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐨, only adapted for the primitive boomer-shooter`s AI of the enemies, only here with the addition of elements of tower-defense strategy: the more carefully and methodically you deal with the near threat, the easier it will be to survive in the main arena, which is always equipped with machine guns, protective barriers, and supply boxes, a kind of survive several waves mode. Moreover, the game doesn't repeat the mistake of the 2005 game, adding more to the bestiary, in addition to the usual beetles (requiring a third of a clip to be discharged into the central nerve), dragonflies constantly scurrying in the sky, as well as airborne assassin beetles, several "tank" types, moreover, capable of igniting the game arena with a dangerous stream, and several spitting ordinary acid bubbles, in one of which you will immediately recognize a reuse of the "frog" model from WH40K:Boltgun; All enemies have clearly defined pressure points.. well, literally a huge glowing cucumber sticking out of the body, for example.. Which makes the overall gunplay of the game, unfortunately, still rather primitive; Add to this an arsenal that's varied in quantity, but not in quality, consisting essentially of 𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐥𝐭 𝐫𝐢𝐟𝐥𝐞𝐬: a sniper rifle, a plasma rifle, a heavy assault rifle (slowing down), and even a rapid-fire shotgun! Micro-differences in burst fire, in the use of the underbarrel grenade launcher, and the classically rare flamethrower and rocket launcher, which, by the way, literally causes a nuclear mushroom cloud💥, and the accompanying shockwave on the map (so the probability of a self-frag from using weapons is quite high, but all this can be justified by the context of the film; after all, this is not Serious Sam. And to still feel like a super soldier, despite the fact that health doesn't regenerate, you can call a "rechargeable" capsule with healing and supplies on number 4, and on number 5 you can throw consumables like calling in an "airstrike" or an area-of-effect cluster bombardment; And if you get bored of stomping on the ground with your boots, the command can drop you an exoskeleton with a saw and a machine gun, though its "action" is limited to about two minutes.
There are a lot of details in the game that the developers could have done without, but I took it as a kind of 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬, besides the obvious portion of SFM videos, with that very actor from the film! In fact, their total duration is quite short, but enough for a couple of interesting jokes in the genre of satire on 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚 (Yes, Helldivers with its "delivery of democracy" borrowed this from Starship Troopers, what did you think), especially the final video, essentially the end of the game, ending with a ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶f̶o̶g̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ survey – it's simply wonderful 👮, in my opinion.
And in order not to contradict the plot lore (or just for fun), the creators decided to use the 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 "𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞", i.e. literally "Ultimate Bug War!" - a video game created by "Federal Development" for citizens of the federation (including the little ones), with the "MOST REALISTIC PORTRAY" of war! Where brave soldiers with passion and fun carry out all the tasks of a special operation! Moreover, in the level settings you can turn on "developer comments", which will not be such, but will continue this line with the video game with some purely comedic lines - Useless, but unexpected; The "swarm system" can also be added to this topic - where hundreds of low-poly sprites amusingly swarm outside the game zone, creating the illusion of endless enemies. This has no gameplay functionality, it's just a fun visual detail that possibly parodies the recent Space Marine 2, and which I haven't seen in boomer shooters before;
📼I'll also mention the first tutorial level with "basic training," which seems to have been created solely for the laser tag reference from the movie. You know what else you can do there? Start killing your own soldiers, which, of course, will quickly lead to an automatic "loss," but a little shooting was fun, as was hanging from the "pillory." Why did the developers add all this? Just to make game more interesting. At the same time, the game lacks tutorials or hints about its mechanics: For example, you can reload more effectively by pressing R at the right time of the slider, but I somehow noticed this on my own, oh well.
🐛And also, just for variety, they added a whole CAMPAIGN FOR BEETLES. Yes, it's a reuse of the same locations, but no one forces you to play it. Essentially, they turn the same formula in reverse: you play as a flying "tank", but you are far from omnipotent, so you strategically target turrets, generators, tactically retreat and activate holes with allies, then deal with barracks and regular soldiers (and they yell "aaah, why did I just want to kill the beetles"), quite an impressive gameplay in the style of "smash all", changing the perspective, and the plot explains this by simulation for studying the enemy! But as I wrote above, all this lacks the development of ideas into something more, 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧`𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐨𝐟:
❌ Infrastructural diversity in the locations; the local terrain-slope gets boring pretty quickly, although the 𝐙𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐚 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 location from the demo is awesome, well, apparently all the effort went into it. Visually, the game uses the standard similair to 𝐀𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐢𝐜 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫r, but only with colorful blood hell.
❌ The mechanic of managing your squad, the most obvious, and I hope they left it for the sequel, I only remember the indie shooter 𝐀𝗪𝐎𝐋, which tried to do something similar.
❌ No side quests, all tasks are mandatory, and they repeat themselves ad nauseam: destroy, clear, activate, take the task from the last level - it will repeat the same one from the very first.
🏆 The end result is a solid boomer shooter, and overall a step in the right direction for the genre, which will further delight fans of the franchise, which had the potential to break all the templatess, and the authors were really "on fire" and could have gone deeper in gameplay, but drowned in their own template, fulfilling a request for a short, nostalgic game (Publisher 𝐃𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐌𝐔 always does this).
😊 𝗦𝘂𝗯 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝘆 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺`𝘀 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿`𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41977550/
Despite my initial skepticism about the multitasking "Warhammer Boltgun" devs, they really have gained experience and are quite effective in doing side hustle with another license: As a reminder, the Starship Troopers franchise is owned by Sony Pictures, and over the past 30 years, projects in this series have ranged from complete garbage to playably mediocre, against this background, "Ultimate Bug War!" really stands out. The chosen retro format may be off-putting to mainstream gamers, but it offers a modern engine-based toolset that will impress PS1-era fans, and in the details of the game you can even feel notes of fan love for the original film by Paul Verhoeven, but the ideas of the creators from 𝐀𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐡 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 were “cut off” halfway, resulting in the game's final levels becoming indistinguishable from the formula of the first levels within the 3-hour story campaign.
ell, okay, let's first talk about the game's solid foundation: Firstly, there's no classic linear level structure at all. The landing of the boots occurs at a certain point, but then head wherever you like in the semi-open spaces of those "very" bug planets (with names like "Planet P"), where you can freely choose the order of your objectives. You can turn right and help "hold" an outpost, or head straight to the other end of the map, where you'll need to rescue a crashed "private", or run back and forth to plant explosives on the enemy's living blue air defense, while along the way you can throw grenades at the "spawn holes" or summon a friendly squad of 2D sprite dummies, changing the balance of power on the horizon. You don't have to "clear" everything, and that's impossible, the map lives its own life, with constant clashes between "meat assaults"; the game will immediately remind you of 𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐨, only adapted for the primitive boomer-shooter`s AI of the enemies, only here with the addition of elements of tower-defense strategy: the more carefully and methodically you deal with the near threat, the easier it will be to survive in the main arena, which is always equipped with machine guns, protective barriers, and supply boxes, a kind of survive several waves mode. Moreover, the game doesn't repeat the mistake of the 2005 game, adding more to the bestiary, in addition to the usual beetles (requiring a third of a clip to be discharged into the central nerve), dragonflies constantly scurrying in the sky, as well as airborne assassin beetles, several "tank" types, moreover, capable of igniting the game arena with a dangerous stream, and several spitting ordinary acid bubbles, in one of which you will immediately recognize a reuse of the "frog" model from WH40K:Boltgun; All enemies have clearly defined pressure points.. well, literally a huge glowing cucumber sticking out of the body, for example.. Which makes the overall gunplay of the game, unfortunately, still rather primitive; Add to this an arsenal that's varied in quantity, but not in quality, consisting essentially of 𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐥𝐭 𝐫𝐢𝐟𝐥𝐞𝐬: a sniper rifle, a plasma rifle, a heavy assault rifle (slowing down), and even a rapid-fire shotgun! Micro-differences in burst fire, in the use of the underbarrel grenade launcher, and the classically rare flamethrower and rocket launcher, which, by the way, literally causes a nuclear mushroom cloud💥, and the accompanying shockwave on the map (so the probability of a self-frag from using weapons is quite high, but all this can be justified by the context of the film; after all, this is not Serious Sam. And to still feel like a super soldier, despite the fact that health doesn't regenerate, you can call a "rechargeable" capsule with healing and supplies on number 4, and on number 5 you can throw consumables like calling in an "airstrike" or an area-of-effect cluster bombardment; And if you get bored of stomping on the ground with your boots, the command can drop you an exoskeleton with a saw and a machine gun, though its "action" is limited to about two minutes.
There are a lot of details in the game that the developers could have done without, but I took it as a kind of 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬, besides the obvious portion of SFM videos, with that very actor from the film! In fact, their total duration is quite short, but enough for a couple of interesting jokes in the genre of satire on 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚 (Yes, Helldivers with its "delivery of democracy" borrowed this from Starship Troopers, what did you think), especially the final video, essentially the end of the game, ending with a ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶f̶o̶g̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ survey – it's simply wonderful 👮, in my opinion.
And in order not to contradict the plot lore (or just for fun), the creators decided to use the 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 "𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞", i.e. literally "Ultimate Bug War!" - a video game created by "Federal Development" for citizens of the federation (including the little ones), with the "MOST REALISTIC PORTRAY" of war! Where brave soldiers with passion and fun carry out all the tasks of a special operation! Moreover, in the level settings you can turn on "developer comments", which will not be such, but will continue this line with the video game with some purely comedic lines - Useless, but unexpected; The "swarm system" can also be added to this topic - where hundreds of low-poly sprites amusingly swarm outside the game zone, creating the illusion of endless enemies. This has no gameplay functionality, it's just a fun visual detail that possibly parodies the recent Space Marine 2, and which I haven't seen in boomer shooters before;
📼I'll also mention the first tutorial level with "basic training," which seems to have been created solely for the laser tag reference from the movie. You know what else you can do there? Start killing your own soldiers, which, of course, will quickly lead to an automatic "loss," but a little shooting was fun, as was hanging from the "pillory." Why did the developers add all this? Just to make game more interesting. At the same time, the game lacks tutorials or hints about its mechanics: For example, you can reload more effectively by pressing R at the right time of the slider, but I somehow noticed this on my own, oh well.
🐛And also, just for variety, they added a whole CAMPAIGN FOR BEETLES. Yes, it's a reuse of the same locations, but no one forces you to play it. Essentially, they turn the same formula in reverse: you play as a flying "tank", but you are far from omnipotent, so you strategically target turrets, generators, tactically retreat and activate holes with allies, then deal with barracks and regular soldiers (and they yell "aaah, why did I just want to kill the beetles"), quite an impressive gameplay in the style of "smash all", changing the perspective, and the plot explains this by simulation for studying the enemy! But as I wrote above, all this lacks the development of ideas into something more, 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧`𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐨𝐟:
❌ Infrastructural diversity in the locations; the local terrain-slope gets boring pretty quickly, although the 𝐙𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐚 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 location from the demo is awesome, well, apparently all the effort went into it. Visually, the game uses the standard similair to 𝐀𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐢𝐜 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫r, but only with colorful blood hell.
❌ The mechanic of managing your squad, the most obvious, and I hope they left it for the sequel, I only remember the indie shooter 𝐀𝗪𝐎𝐋, which tried to do something similar.
❌ No side quests, all tasks are mandatory, and they repeat themselves ad nauseam: destroy, clear, activate, take the task from the last level - it will repeat the same one from the very first.
🏆 The end result is a solid boomer shooter, and overall a step in the right direction for the genre, which will further delight fans of the franchise, which had the potential to break all the templatess, and the authors were really "on fire" and could have gone deeper in gameplay, but drowned in their own template, fulfilling a request for a short, nostalgic game (Publisher 𝐃𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐌𝐔 always does this).
😊 𝗦𝘂𝗯 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝘆 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺`𝘀 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿`𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41977550/