Starship Troopers: Extermination Review

ign.com:

As luck would have it, 2024 turned out to be a rough year to release a co-op multiplayer game featuring a satirical fascistic military force battling hordes and hordes of monstrous, bug-like alien creatures. Ironically, of the three major games that fit this description that hit PCs and consoles this year, Starship Troopers: Extermination is the least effective at pulling off the mighty few versus the endless enemy motif. Of course, even if it doesn’t match the high bar set by Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, you can have a decent amount of fun with its unique features, like larger teams and clever base-building sections, before the swarm becomes too monotonous.

Before diving into the main multiplayer event, Starship Troopers: Extermination offers up an extremely skippable single-player campaign where you can learn the ropes without letting your team down. You play a nameless soldier in the Special Operations Group, hand picked by General Johnny Rico, portrayed by Casper Van Dien in a less-than-enthusiastic performance. There really is no plot here, as this mode serves more as a tutorial removed from the chaos of the online environment than a fully fledged story with a beginning, middle, and climactic end. I’m not a green recruit, as I put more than 15 hours into the early access version earlier this year, but I can’t imagine that a true beginner would get anything out of this experience that they couldn’t pick up in a far less boring fashion in the field.

These 25 missions consist of all the normal things you would do in multiplayer but with none of the spontaneous fun of playing with other people. Also, a focused campaign should have been a prime opportunity to inject some actual satire into a game dressed up like one of the most iconic spoofs in film history, but Extermination completely misses it. This first chapter, “Answering The Call,” threatens to be the first of several in a broader campaign, but if what follows is anything like this I think