Starship Troopers: Extermination, Byte-Size PS5 Review

Starship Troopers: Extermination was in early access on PC in 2023 and was officially released to console and PC in Oct 2024. This 2024 release however resulted in it being sent into the wild with a fatal weakness.

That being, the very similar Helldivers 2 arrived 6mths earlier, and Helldivers is better than Starship Troopers in every single imaginable way. So, a tough place to start from.

In a surreal way, Helldivers 2 kind of out Starship Troopered, Starship Troopers. 

It is well known that the developers of Helldivers have drawn on the I.P of Starship Troopers for inspiration. The 1997 Starship Troopers movie is rich ground, with all of its political satire, outlandish combat against bugs and irreverent tone. And much of it has been lifted straight into Helldivers, to great effect. The game is fun and hilarious.

So, 6mths later, an actual Starship Troopers game comes out and it doesn’t nail the tenants of its own I.P!? Not to mention the gameplay is far less refined than the wannabe upstart! Starship Troopers graphics also looks very poor and a stable framerate it does not have. Even though it’s been made in the new UE5. And most serious of all, the online only mission structure and combat contained there-in, is an unrefined co-op FPS experience.

I did not have fun playing this chaotic mess.

There is a single player mode, with missions to be completed which are just repurposed missions from the main PvE element of the game. In the main PvE mode, the idea is that once a class is chosen, players work together in squads as part of a larger fighting force of up to 16 other players. Objectives must be completed and bugs killed, before making it to extraction. Just like Helldivers but without the clever design.

The carnage is real though. With hundreds of bug corpses remaining on the map during missions…I mean like piles and piles of dead bugs. Just like the movie. 

It was always a tough hill to climb

I really feel for the developer Offworld, as they have developed and published this title themselves. I suspect it may have captured the imaginations of gamers if played in isolation. But with Helldivers 2 being so very similar and frankly so damn good, Starship Troopers: Extermination just never stood a chance.

The steam numbers tell the story. The current 30-day average for daily players for Helldivers 2 is 33,000 people. Starship Troopers: Extermination is…. a mere 500 players globally.

In this particular case, the numbers don’t lie…