Starship Troopers: Extermination review

pcgamer.com:

What is? Cooperative multiplayer shooter based on Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film.
Release date October 11, 2024
Expect to pay $50/£40
Developer Offworld
Publisher Offworld
Reviewed on AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10
Steam Deck Unsupported
Link Official site

If you're thinking about comparing Starship Troopers: Extermination to Helldivers 2, stop right there. Sure, they're both cooperative multiplayer shooters that involve blasting thousands of alien bugs, each inspired by Paul Verhoeven's 1997 satirical sci-fi flick. But apart from that, they're totally different games. Helldivers 2 is a surgically precise slapstick comedy, its goofy sci-fi action driven by pristine physics, immaculate ballistics, and its phenomenally satisfying Stratagems. Extermination is a much broader, weirder, rougher affair, one that in many ways has loftier ambitions, yet only a fraction of the budget to execute with.

Often the results of this are fair to middling, while parts of Extermination are outright terrible. Yet when all of its ideas come together, its action is every bit as thrilling as Arrowhead's fascist farce.

Extermination's main event is its 16-player cooperative missions, in which four squads of four players work together to withstand the arachnid menace for the glory of the Federation. These missions vary slightly in their structure, but they tend to last between 30 minutes and one hour, and usually involve building, then defending, a base.

If the idea of building a base with fifteen strangers sounds either tedious or intimidating to you, in my experience with Extermination it is neither. Bases are fully kitted out within minutes, as players work efficiently together to erect walls, place reinforced bunkers, situate ammo dumps, and station manned and automated gun turrets. It's a neat thing to watch in motion, and as a new player, watching how the pros do it is generally a good idea. The base building controls aren't terrible, but they're not exactly