Starship Troopers Review

Overall Rating

It's just so cool!
Hundreds of bugs at a time to fight through.

Models aren't detailed by today's standards
Sub-par AI
No shadows (unless you want lag and frame rate drops)
Only showcases 3 of the game's weapons

When I downloaded the Starship Troopers demo and played it for the first time, I was severely underwhelmed. There was movement lag, mouse lag, and I could probably render each frame faster than my GPU was (and I have a pretty decent rig). After a Google search or 2, I found that other people had the same problems, so I followed their advice and turned all shadows off. The game ran perfectly after that.

For those of you who are familiar with the film, and loved the huge battle scenes with hundreds of bugs on screen, you will love this demo. It starts out with a small raid by bugs on your outpost. Probably only 30 or so bugs (not very impressive).

After fighting them off, you are sent out to find some mines and batteries (alone as per usual). A few bug carcasses later, and you find what you are looking for in a crashed transporter. That's when it all goes F.U.B.A.R.

About 50 bugs attack you at the crash site, and it's all you can do to kill them and stay alive (with the help of a shotgun you find in the wreckage of course).

Making your way back to base, there are a few more skirmishes with 5-10 bugs a piece, then you get back to the base.

No sooner have you gone through the door, than there is a rumble and literally hundreds of bugs appear on the horizon. Fighting them from the battlements and watching comrades get snatched is amazingly good fun, and just when it seems help is on the way with your ticket out of the base, a tanker appears and crashes through the wall!!!

Anyway enough of that, and onto the review bit...

The graphics are decent but nothing special. The models for the bugs are pretty good, but the human models are a little low on detail by today's standards. Obviously you can't use shadows on the demo (as I have said earlier) but this will hopefully be fixed in the full release.

The frame rate stays in the realms of playability, even with hundreds of enemies on my machine (Athlon64 3500, Radeon x700pro, 1 gig RAM), so it should be OK for any mid-range gaming PC.

The A.I. is unfortunately terrible, but this is forgivable. I mean they are like big ants really, not the SAS. The only beef I have with the A.I. is that bugs don't seem to notice you if you are far away (even if you are shooting them), so with a little patience you can pick them off from afar.

One thing I really hate about this game is that you get infinite ammo for your starting weapon. It just spoils the believability a bit in my opinion.

All in all this is a good release from a small developer, and it captures the atmosphere of the film quite well. The models let it down a bit, but that's a compromise for the huge number of onscreen enemies (you can't have your cake and eat it), and it isn't really noticeable.

For under £20, I am probably going to buy the full release!