default header

Games

PC Starship Troopers: Extermination

Moderator: JC Denton

PC Starship Troopers: Extermination

Unread postby icycalm » 25 May 2023 12:25

https://starshiptroopersextermination.com

Early Access Launch Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDdRjfwOLoM

Image

It sounds like a decent game, but it's hard to get excited for a mere wave shooter in 2023, even if it goes up to 16 players. If I could get 16 players online at the same time, I'd much rather be playing Rust, Atlas, et al. than a wave shooter, and of course above all Star Citizen.

If, on the other hand, I only had 3-4 people to play with—like pretty much everyone who'll play this game—I'd MUCH rather play a campaign game, like World War Z for example. Wave shooters are really a bottom-of-the-barrel design concept, the 3D equivalent to '70s arcade games like Asteroids that lacked level design because it hadn't been invented yet. This on top of the fact that Starship Troopers is a garbage movie, so that if this game had a campaign with a story it would annoy me even more than without one.

And with all this whingeing out of the way, have some positive impressions on the game. It's certainly more attractive than that stupid dwarf game everyone's playing, I can tell you that. If I wasn't spending 100+ hours a month playing/preparing/developing Battlegrounds, I'd play it for a bit.

https://steamcommunity.com/id/IamDankJe ... ed/1268750

Dank Williams Jr. wrote:The base of this game is solid. It's everything I've ever wanted from a Starship Troopers shooter.

The concept is simple. "Here's a gun, there's some bugs... Kill 'em all!"

The weapons and armor are accurate, the arachnids look great and most importantly, it's an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ from start to finish for each mission. The randomized objectives seem to keep things fresh, though in the long term, I think they'll have to add more, varying objectives to keep the players engaged, but for now, in early access it seems to fit really well. Each mission really feels like the battle scenes from the movies, where troopers are doing their damnedest to hold the line and stay together while giant alien bugs just throw themselves at you and your squad, trying to split everyone up. It's chaos in the best way possible and they've nailed the feel of what it's like to be a rough neck slugging it out on some god forsaken rock in the galactic boondocks.

The 16-player count on each server does wonders for the experience. Most co-op games cap it at 4 or 8 players if they're feeling frisky, but OWI decided to just go for the glory here and gave us a player-count of 16 Troopers. This may seem like a small thing, but the choice adds a lot of options for people with big groups of friends. On top of it, it adds to the cinematic chaos that is so iconic for the franchise. The game on normal and harder difficulties can really be a struggle at times, and it should be. The movies and lore make even the most basic, Arachnid enemies appear extremely dangerous, and while one or two won't give you much of a problem, if you get mobbed by 10 or more, you'd better be looking for an exit strategy, or hope to god that the cavalry is coming to save your sorry, ape ass from the ♥♥♥♥. But, even if you've planned poorly and your team is too far away, OWI made it fairly easy to get saved by a team member, who can resurrect you, and anyone can do this regardless of what class you choose or what squad you're in. It pushes the concept of teamwork without forcing it as, in my experience, everyone's looking to save someone at any point in time, even at great risk to their own lives. If you are unlucky enough to go down, and perish from your wounds, then you'll have the opportunity to respawn pretty quickly. You'll drop back in close to the action so you can immediately pick up where you left off at killing as many bugs as possible. The only exception to this is once the mission has finished, players must move to the extraction. At this point, respawns are disabled, which seems a little stressful, but as long as you stick with the group, you'll make it out just fine. If you do go down, your teammates can still pick you right back up, too as long as you don't die for realsies.

The base building is a bit clunky, and a bit unintuitive to start with, but it's simple enough that it's easy to figure out in just a couple of matches, and the construction portions of the missions really add some much needed complexity and variety to the experience. These sequences give players a breather and a chance to heal up, gather some ammo and figure out what role they want to play in the on-coming arachnid assault. Once the assault happens, players will have running around, fixing walls, finishing bunker construction and trying to keep each other alive. The tower defense aspect of the game is definitely a good addition, but I think it needs a few more things to round it out, like constructing manned turrets and traps for the bugs (other than the electrified walls). It's simple, but it gets the job done for now. If we're talking long term, post-release though, this feature is going to have to be improved in a few ways.

The only major concern I have with the game so far is the performance. I'm not sure if the game doesn't manage assets right, or if there's a memory leak someplace, but every round I start with 120+fps and by the end of it, I'll be lucky to stay above 40 FPS, even as bugs die and we move away from the constructed base assets, the FPS is just in the gutter. The performance in every single match degrades to a point where I doubt that the game will be playable for people on older rigs. I have a lot of friends that love Starship Troopers as much as I do, but don't have cutting edge hardware. If OWI can't get the performance issues reigned in quickly enough, I think it could hurt the overall experience once it's out of early access and will definitely cause people to not buy, or refund the game if it cannot run smoothly on mid-grade, older hardware.

All-in-all, OWI has a good thing going with Extermination so far. It would be cool to see a few other options added to the game as players level up, or even a few more classes. It would be really awesome to have something like a VIP objective, where a player plays a high-ranking official or psychic that has special abilities, but has to be protected from the swarm of baddies all trying to kill them. I'd also like to see a mission where teams can tactically nuke a brain bug, just like in the movies! I do see the current mission objectives becoming stale for players, even with the variable, randomized objectives, but if they continue to add stuff during and after Early Access, I can see this being one of my favorite group games to play with friends for at least the next year or more. Extermination nails what so many games based on films so often get wrong, it makes you feel like a Trooper and from all the people that I've played with yelling movie quotes and Role Playing as a grunt in the trenches, I'm here for all for it. There must be a lot of Starship Troopers fans over in OWI, because they seem to get what makes this experience so special.
User avatar
icycalm
Hyperborean
 
Joined: 28 Mar 2006 00:08
Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands

Return to Games

cron