Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War review – A Hollow Fight Against the Swarm

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War arrives as a licensed FPS based on Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic film, developed by Auroch Digital and published by Dotemu alongside Game Source Entertainment. While the game promises a chaotic battlefield experience, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War largely consists of wandering around mostly empty maps devoid of significant enemy encounters. Expect to pay $20/£15 for an experience that fails to capture the intensity of the source material, with reviews conducted on a Ryzen 7 7700, RX 7800 XT, and 64GB DDR5 RAM. The game does not support VR, and while it is available on Steam, it is not optimized for Steam Deck despite likely being playable.

The core vision of combat in Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War remains frustratingly out of focus. Players are given spray-and-pray weapons with a stiflingly small ammunition capacity that often feel insufficient against the game's generally low enemy density. Unlike the film, the iconic warrior bugs rarely swarm with anywhere near the required intensity, and other subspecies seldom work in tandem to overwhelm the player.

The Gunplay vs. The Empty Battlefield

Despite the lack of chaos, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War manages to deliver some satisfying gunplay mechanics when it matters. There is a perfunctory reload mechanic akin to Gears of War that allows players to cut their reload time in half, yet life-or-death situations are almost non-existent. The Morita assault rifle and its variants feature a weighty, gas-fed ratchet sound, with each high-caliber round impacting bug chitin with a satisfying orange-blue sploosh.

However, the weapon systems feel disconnected from the actual gameplay loop:

  • Airstrikes rain down with a satisfying swoosh from low-poly Federation jets flying five abreast like the Blue Angels.
  • Despite the visual flair, this torrent of hellfire rarely gels with the sandbox environment.
  • There are too few active bugs in combat to justify calling in an airstrike, and the long deployment time combined with high self-damage risk negates their usefulness.

Ultimately, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War is a game where you spend most of your time trundling around through empty maps to complete tedious scripted objectives. You will frequently plant satchel charges on flak-bugs, defend besieged outposts, or clear the occasional bug nest—missions that are often recycled from one level to the next.

Klendathu: The Only Real War Experience

The game finds its footing only during the "Drop Site Massacre" opening level, a low-poly rendition of the infamous Klendathu Drop. This open-ended battlefield features multiple distinct objectives and hordes of bugs swarming from all angles, creating an anomaly in an otherwise barren game. The dense winding canyons and trails see Warrior bugs surge forward relentlessly, offering the intensity fans expect.

Visually, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War loves to reuse that flat stainless steel look of the 1997 film, though it rarely translates to a similar vibe despite the attention to detail. Players will visit dozens of nearly identical outposts across the Federation's galactic holdings, which are all too much like the original Outpost 29. The music suffers similarly, featuring a banal MIDI-brass ensemble mimicking old soundcard soundfonts that fails to capture the film’s atmosphere.

The Assassin Bug and Propaganda Flaws

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War also lets you play as an "Assassin Bug," introduced halfway through the Klendathu Massacre, but this mode is almost immediately forgotten. Billed as an equivalent campaign to the Federation side, hunting down the Federation’s finest with acid and claw leaves players feeling bored rather than challenged. The Assassin Bug has three attack modes to shift between, yet against swarms of nearly identical infantry that go down in one hit, you only need to mash left click to cut them to ribbons.

Mission objectives for this campaign are as thrilling as destroying small tents and generators, lacking ambient dialogue or mission-specific context. Furthermore, the game’s commitment to recreating the propaganda lens of the film feels forced. Returning characters Johnny Rico and Sammy Dietz, played by their original actors, deliver suitably stilted, wooden dialogue in between-mission interviews that evoke the weirdness of Philips CD-i FMV games.

The intended riff on America's Army—an ancient shooter series developed to drive recruitment ahead of the Iraq War—fails to land with the same biting satire as Verhoeven’s original. The juxtaposition of bombastic patriotism covering out-and-out fascism feels far tamer thirty years later than it did in 1997.

A Missed Opportunity for Canon

There is a significant disconnect regarding the narrative outcome of the war depicted in Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War. I was under the impression that the Federation lost the bug war seen in the film, and badly—that’s why the final propaganda reel before the credits shows child soldiers fighting alongside nuclear weapon-equipped Mobile Infantry. While playable child soldiers are not requested (though that thought would be significantly funnier), it is disappointing to never see any indication of the Federation teetering on the verge of total collapse.

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War doesn't even seem to grasp the central thesis of Verhoeven’s film, which riffs on the Heinlein novel's idea that the Federation's soldier class and the Bug warrior caste are mirror images of each other. Without capturing this thematic depth or the desperation of a losing war, the game remains a hollow shell of its potential.