Review: Starship Troopers: Extermination (Xbox)

There’s been a lot of interest from console-exclusive gamers in the past 12 months-or-so in seeing Offworld’s janky-but-fun Starship Troopers: Extermination make the leap from PC – where it’s been in early access since mid-2023. Now, with a full 1.0 release finally in the wild, we’ve got a chance to see how this multiplayer bug-hunt has fared in its transition to Xbox Series X|S.

And, well, it’s not particularly great. Let’s get that out of the way straight off the bat. There are some big, buggy issues here, and not the kinda ones that explode in a shower of green goo when you kick them in the backside (with a gun). No, there are currently a myriad of technical issues – hopefully quickly fixable – that are holding us back from enjoying a game that is actually quite addictive when it’s behaving itself.

There’s nothing too complex about what Starship Troopers: Extermination is trying to do, it’s a rough and ready affair that seeks to survive almost entirely by keeping it simple; giving you big scary hordes of bugs that explode in absolutely spectacular fashion, and guns that are beefy as bedamned to shoot them with. The guns in this game are immense, in fact. We love them. And it’s got us feeling as though, actually, the guns in shooters have become a bit crap of late. Why don’t they all feel this heavy? Sound this ferocious? Where’s my recoil, bro?!

The grenade impacts and explosions here warrant a mention too, because they are f***ing awesome. Offworld has nailed the gut-wrenching, disorientating, screen-shaking shock of being close to an impact, and watching huge alien bugs get blasted into a shower of neon giblets that rain down over everything, it’s hard not to feel like a proper badass trooper. The underlying tech at work that brings us a proper horde of aliens who relentlessly clamber over each other to reach you, is very impressive too, especially given this isn’t a AAA production by any means.

The sorties here are actually fairly scary at times as a result of how punchy all of this stuff is. OK, maybe not scary, but fairly intense. Sweaty moments abound when your squad is stuck in a tunnel that’s being pummelled by hundreds of tiny bugs and a handful of huge, armour-plated monstrosities. Offworld has also been clever in making the objectives – simple as they are – affairs that require a little bit of actual teamwork. Building and repairing, both of which play a big role in the base-defending endgame of most missions, are easy to get a grip on, too, although we’re still not convinced the building mode was really necessary. Perhaps that’s just a personal gripe, though.

We’re also big fans of the old-school nature of the six standard class roles (medic, sniper, heavy et al), they’re nice and easy to get your head around, as are the upgrade paths available in this one. It’s been a while since things were kept so pleasingly simple, and it feels great to earn your attachments, gear and better weapons by simply playing with the guns and getting good at rinsing your foes. Yes, there are crappy microtransactions for cosmetics, it is 2024 after all, but you can just ignore all that – seriously, it’s expensive and worthless.

Anyway, if the idea of shooting all of these Very Good Guns™ and exploding all these spectacularly explody aliens appeals to you – and especially if you enjoy doing it with a bunch of other players whilst completing Battlefront-style objectives across huge big maps – well then, there’s still plenty to recommend here, we reckon. It’s just that, when the enemy pathfinding is broken, when you’re being attacked by invisible foes, dropping through the floor of the extraction ship as it takes off, queuing to get into a game ad nauseum, crashing to your console’s home screen, or just plain old getting booted and losing all your XP repeatedly, it’s kinda hard to stick with it.

In terms of modes, you’ve got a Helldivers 2 sort of setup going on in Starship Troopers: Extermination, with your multiplayer efforts feeding into an overall % of bugs defeated worldwide. We’re currently only on the first chapter as things sit (chapter 2 may well be unlocked by the time this review goes live), but we do enjoy this sort of framing and, honestly, bugs aside, we’ll be sticking with it to see how it pans out over the long-term.

The single player offering of sorts, which sees your excursions framed within a very slight narrative starring Casper Van Diem, is total bust though, as far as we’re concerned. Here, the janky, low-budget nature of the game’s menus and general navigation systems is laid bare. It’s an experience that often feels as though it’s been put together with sticky tape when you’re not blasting bugs, and missions begin and end way too abruptly, often without any sense you’d done much. Again, we expect all this stuff is very fixable, so let’s hope they fix it!

For now though, what we’ve got is a fairly decent game underneath all the current jank, one in the same vein as the likes of Helldivers 2 and Earth Defence Force, but one that needs to sort its issues before it becomes as easy to recommend as we’d like. It’s not a patch on Helldivers 2, really, that game is just too damn slick and unique, but we reckon with enough TLC; get the servers sorted pronto, fix the AI and path-finding on enemies, keep regularly dropping new gear and missions and you could easily beat out EDF. We know there’s a roadmap and new content incoming, so our hopes are alive that it’ll evolve into a very worthwhile slice of pulpy online shooter action.

The core mechanics are good enough, the action is punchy and visceral enough, to keep us pummeling this vicious alien enemies well into the next couple of months if the right things happen. So, for now, a sort of disappointing score, especially as big fans of everything Starship Troopers, but we’re still very hopeful that the current issues will get addressed ASAP. We’ll even return to revise this score if and when they manage to sort out the constant connection issues and problems with getting booted mid-game. Fix these two things and you’ve instantly got another point from us.

Conclusion
Starship Troopers: Extermination is a pulpy, schlocky and suitably violent take on the Starship Troopers universe that gives you big beefy guns and a ton of exploding alien bugs to get busy decimating in online warfare. There are some big old hordes to take down, thanks to some impressive tech on display, and everything looks and feels properly great when you’re in the thick of the acid-spewing action. However, there are way too many technical bugs just now, this doesn’t feel like a game that just left a prolonged early access, and so for now it’s a janky-but-fun experience that, with a couple of patches and content drops, could become a great one.