Starship Troopers
Would you like to know more? You won’t after this.
Tags: Starship Troopers Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Brad on Feb 10th, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Starship Troopers (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| First Person Shooter | No | ||
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One in a while a game comes along that makes reviewers’ eyes gleam: not the moist sort of gleam that comes with misty nostalgia; nor the keen, clean gleam of bewildered happiness reflecting the shine of a diamond in the rough; but a brief, fiery flash of red when, after hours on end of playing the most monotonous, tiresome, and boring game to cross your desk in months, your critic’s hand reaches past inkwell to dip dip dip the quill into the venom and sets to work. That sort of gleam – all the redder when the game is about a movie you quite liked.
Starship Troopers is a First Person Shooter by Strangelight and Empire Interactive, based off a 1997 movie by Paul Verhoeven, based off a book by Robert Heinlein. The license has spawned an animated cartoon series and a disastrous straight-to-video sequel that might as well be the twin brother of this video game when applied to testing the steel of the Starship Troopers fan.
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The boast of the game’s marketing is that it is capable of putting some three-hundred of Klendathu’s finest (see the teeming, swarming, pointy masses of bugs) on the screen at one time. This, of course, would be an impressive feat, were it ever to happen. From the game’s start, you might guess how this number might be achieved. As you, a new recruit to the Marauders marine squad make your way through the insultingly micromanaged tutorial (Move left! Good! Now let’s try moving to the right a bit before we go looking up and down. Wouldn’t want to get dizzy, would we?”), you’re met by the muppet-headed, flapping jaws of your brothers-in-arms.
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On one level, the modeling and animation of your fellow soldiers is comical and poor. On the other hand, you’ve got to stand back and admire just how much of it is going on. “Goodness!” you might think. “I’m used to walking around space ships in video games, and there are usually just a few people standing around poking buttons! There are troops everywhere! Doing lots of stuff! This game is teeming with life! I bet they really could put three hundred bugs on a screen at once!” Then, you might see that your ship mates bear a striking resemblance to Pac Man or Ernie from Sesame Street, their heads hinged at the back of the throat, heads flapping wildly in conversation. This might give you pause. But you’re here to fight bugs.
It takes a while before you’ll be facing down your first dozen bugs. Starship Troopers (the game) relies heavily on Starship Troopers (the movie) to make its points, splicing long cuts of the film between load screens, replaying certain bits, and making sure you know from whence this game came. Of course, these cutscenes are only video reels, so that dream you’ve never realized, of reaching out and clicking the “Would you like to know more?” button will remain still out of reach.
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Once finally on the planet’s surface, you take up a mission set five years in the movie’s future. Though you are said to be part of a crack squad of grinder-meat, you’ll be solo for this experience, with as much solitude as Master Chief behind your helmet and a strikingly-similar energy shield in front of it. To further set you apart, you might note that every other soldier appears to be wearing a track suit. Your commanders recognize the things that set you apart, and are more than willing to send you off on missions on your lonesome while noting in your earpiece that this really is a suicide mission and a squad would be better off.
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Let’s be frank. You will see bugs. Lots of bugs. Though it would be difficult to tally them in the hundreds, there are a bunch of them. Most of them are of the pointy Soldier-variety you see on every poster and box. Others might be colored variations of the same, but the Soldiers are the important ones. They’ll rush at you in straight lines, maybe a dozen or so at a time, and will be mowed down by your machine guns. This will happen again and again for the duration of this game. You will advance your line of troops (comprised of a few NPC marines who are scripted to stand there and be ineffectual at everything) a few steps towards the seething throng of bugs who are standing just out of combat range (perhaps milling about some Klendathu water cooler), fight off a few more Soldier bugs, fall back when the next wave comes or your gun overheats, then try to re-take the same six feet of ground. Again and again. Finally, you might notice that the crowd of bugs milling about has thinned or lost interest and you are permitted to move forward toward your goal.
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This might not be so maddening a chore if the gunplay was at all interesting. Your stock weapons are all variations on the same machine gun, some with a grenade or shotgun attachment, all playing into about the same strategy: retreat backwards while firing, get jumped from behind, run around a little bit while reloading, do it all again. As bugs leap at your face, all tension that you might expect to feel, particularly after watching the gorier bits of the movie, drains away as you reflect on just how ineffectual the bugs really are and just how many times you’ve done this already. Add to that a rocket launcher that might as well be spitting wadded paper at your foe instead of mini-nukes, and you’ll begin to understand the sameness of your arsenal.
Fine, but how about the other bugs? There are the artillery type and the flying type, and the sort who breathes fire… what about brain bugs? Yes, they’re there, and enter the fray from time to time, but more in the boss-fight capacity and none particularly exciting. Further frustration comes from somewhat floaty controls. Simple tasks like running up ramps and climbing ladders are foiled by the slightest jar or jostle to your person.
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Once a mission is finally done, the game unlocks a few interesting items in its menus for you to peruse. These tend to be mostly information screens about the bugs and weapons and people of the Starship Troopers universe, but also include more clips from the movie and interviews with the likes of actor Casper Van Dien, who reached far and wide across his network of Hollywood contacts and rounded up his wife and kids to provide voiceovers for the game. He was really jazzed to step back into the boots of now-General “Johnny” John Rico. Be warned, however, that the game lacks an autosave function, so if you want to check out the new features it crows about, you’ll have to save the game first or risk replaying the same mission. You don’t want that.
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At least the political satire of the book and movie were spared the exposure here. Departing from the over-the-top, so-bad-it’s-good dialogue, the game just settles on bad and cousins itself to the movie’s sequel in that respect. The moral ambiguity and mockery of the nationalist military machine that was shoved right down your throat with comical effect in the first film is absent here, lost to the poorly cut film sequences and shooting gallery gameplay. That satire is better off for it’s exclusion. It allows us to be as superficial as the game is.
Normally, a reviewer might fill some space talking about the technical aspects of a game’s graphic engine, the lighting and bump-mapping and shaders and soforth. But that would be akin to speaking on the color of the candy coating around a tablet of Rohypnol. Let’s be brief and blunt and just leave it at this: this game is a bore.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| + It's Starship Troopers! | 4.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- What did they do to Starship Troopers? - Repetitive, bland, boring. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Leave the shrinkwrap on. | |
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Tags: Starship Troopers
Posted by Brad on Feb 10th, 2006 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
