Starship Troopers: Terran Command Review

ign.com:

The 1997 film adaptation of Starship Troopers featured a lot of space soldiers dying terribly to show how having an entire society based on enlisting in the military to go fight aliens is… pretty bad, really. So it's odd that for at least half of the 19-mission campaign of Starship Troopers: Terran Command, I rarely lost a soldier. That's not a brag. These bugs are just that forgiving early on. When this simple but competent RTS does eventually turn up the heat and provide a pretty exciting single-player experience in the back half, though, it's a lot of fun to watch the carnage.

I promise I'm not going to spend this entire review making jokes about how "buggy" it is. Because in the technical sense, it's actually not bad. The one exception is the unit pathfinding, where posting squads too close to obstacles or too close together causes this intense jittering, like they got way too hopped up on stim packs. Move orders can be unreliable, especially if a squad has to go around an obstacle and make a U-turn. Sometimes if you give a unit a direct attack order and they can't get a line of sight to the target, they'll just go to sleep and let the swarm tear them apart. I mostly avoided even using the big, stompy Marauder mechs because it takes so much micro to maneuver them effectively that they're more of a liability than an asset sometimes.

Once I got the hang of working around these quirks though, I found there's some surprisingly satisfying tactical action to dig into. Terran Command is all about maximizing lines of fire to the enemy, since the Mobile Infantry generally outrange and outgun the bugs – but the chittering hordes, in turn, have a major advantage in mobility, numbers, and melee combat. Most squads can't fire