Starship Troopers Review

5.8

Format PC

Developer Strangelite

Publisher Empire Interactive

Genre First Person Shooter

Starship Troopers is a game that I really feel I should like. It's made by a plucky British outfit, it's based on a film that's not only brilliantly satirical but also full of nasty violence and wazzo pairs of jugs, and it involves shooting lots and lots of gooey aliens.

So let's start off nice. First, Starship Troopers manages to get an impressive amount of bugs and blokes on-screen at any one time - the hustle, bustle and background banter of the first training/ spaceship level is really quite atmospheric, and later insect assaults certainly provide a sense of attacks that come from every which way but loose. Second, the game begins with the intimation that you've just had some pretty powerful sex with your pilot (female). Third, some of the enemies are really, really big and make the screen go blue when you kill them.

You may have noticed that I'm struggling for good points, and this is because they're well and truly outnumbered by the inconsistency of the game proper - which at its best is average and at its worst as much fun as eating a packet of wire-wool. The graphics for example, for use of an easy target, may be able to create a lot of fuzzy, jagged-looking bugs, but certainly don't go as far as having allies who look like they're in a game from any point within the last three years.

REACH FOR THE RAID
What's more, developer Strangelite may have fixed the balancing issues so glaringly obvious in the demo level, but the game forever teeters on a precipice between deadening ease and an endless, unfair parade of quickloads brought on by fuzzy objectives and AI that I simply fail to understand. As a human being, I'm probably not expected to understand the motivation of an alien insect commanded by a psychic bag of goo - but the motions of the enemy are so haphazard that they quickly stop being fun, and get even less fun as you trudge through similar arrays of claws and spikes level after level. What's more, the handling of your character is sluggish, the guns patchy and the jump so redundantly useless that your spacebar will weep.

When the game uses its source material well (the opening, the excellent smiley grenades that sweetly count down the seconds left until their destruction, a few of the bigger boss creatures), then this is a passable game, and one that people who were stupid enough to buy the film's rubbish DVD spin-off sequels might be interested to play. There are redeeming features, a few nice touches of scripting here and a cool boss there, but generally the fabled shitty-stick of non-touching is going to have to make another one of his increasingly common appearances. If you buy this game, then I'm sorry to say you'll be disappointed. Do you want to know more?

PC Zone Staff