Starship Troopers Ultimate Bug War! Review – Swarms, Satire, and Classic FPS Fun

Starship Troopers Ultimate Bug War! Review

Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Veorhoven, is a fantastic movie. Instead of depicting fascism from arm’s length, the movie completely immerses you in fictional military propaganda. The movie repeatedly thumbs its nose at autocracy by depicting stupid, shallow, and misled people having the time of their lives. A Starship Troopers videogame is always going to run the risk of ruining the joke – can you have a good time mowing down aliens, while also being sensitive to the satire? I am pleased to report that Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! is a fun first-person shooter that completely understands the themes of the 1997 film.

Pixel Swarms

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! is a new game from Auroch Digital. I first encountered Auroch with a similar title, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. There is a lot of shared DNA between the two games. Both are first-person shooters with major throwback vibes. The graphics are especially dated (complimentary). The pixelated models would look right at home in a Half-Life mod in 1999. 

The animations are especially basic (again, complimentary). In a fight, you will see other soldiers jerk through a few frames of a running animation, with no fluid grace whatsoever. It’s like watching stop motion sped up. Objectively, the team does a great job using older graphical technology. Subjectively, I played a lot of shooters in this era, and as someone who has checked out of the world of contemporary military FPS games, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! was exactly my speed.

Roach Spray

The game is called Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! and you will definitely fight bugs- a LOT of bugs. Despite the military trappings of the setting, there aren’t a lot of sophisticated tactics at play. You get a choice of guns, some grenades maybe, a few airstrikes, and then it is off to the chaos of the battlefield. Your enemy is, of course, the titular bugs, and those guys like to fight in swarms. So you will mow them down by the horde and feel like a heroic badass who will be made immortal in state propaganda.

There is a modern game running under the charmingly dated graphics. Where you hit the different bug enemies matters, and you can see them respond to how they got shot. Aurochs has perfectly calibrated where to make the game simple, and where the modern engine needs to drive the machine.

Superior Officer

What sets Ultimate Bug War apart from most other shooters is all the propaganda. The best part of Paul Verhoeven’s movies is all the in-universe media he makes. When you see a news story, or a commercial, or a talk show in a Verhoeven movie, it’s usually a cuttingly on-point satire. Ultimate Bug War! follows in that tradition by bringing back movie actor Casper Van Dien as war hero Johnny Rico.

Typically, this would be a red flag. When a game pushes a celebrity performance so hard, usually it disguises an inadequacy.  This game would not be the same without Dien. He appears, live action, between levels to deliver some propaganda. The writing and the performance are actually so on point that it was a little scary. There have been lots of sequels and video games adapting this singular story, but I’ve never felt another follow-up that so thoroughly understood the tone.

I suppose there is one enormous alien elephant in the room, and that is hit shooter Helldivers II. After all, Helldivers has often been called the best Starship Troopers game ever. Not only does it share that arch tone, it is also honestly, extremely funny and more specifically satirical of our current times. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! is not a Helldivers killer, but I think it has enough going for it to set it apart. The janky art. The movie cameos. Helldivers is slick, but does it have Johnny Rico?

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! does a few things, and it does those things very well. You may find other shooters out there with more bells and whistles, but if you have been waiting for the immersive fascist Starship Troopers experience, Ultimate Bug War! is that game.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***