Digital Trends

Starship Troopers

Okay, I confess, I never read the Heinlein book Starship Troopers. Outside of the classics that I read in high school and college, the only books I read are written by Stephen King and Dean Koontz. A couple of friends and I did go see the movie and, although they didn't like it, I did. I loved the action, the special effects and the comic relief scattered throughout. So when I heard that a game was in production I had visions of a third person action title. However, little by little I realized that Starship Troopers was going to be a squad based RTS. Fine. Enough flashbacks, enough references to the book, the movie and everything else not related to the game at hand. Time to get down to the review. In Starship Troopers you take control of several MI as they try to take back different parts of their world from the Arachnid army. You must fight to survive the onslaught from bugs of all shapes, speeds and sizes. If you fail, your world will be overrun and your species will be obliverated. Graphics RTS games have gone through quite an overhaul in the past couple of years. Sacrifice and Ground Control are tributes to the new technology that is molding the genre. Starship Troopers doesn't quite get as 3D as those titles but still manages to shine in many areas. The visuals in ST are mostly done well. First, the level design definitely adds to the tension of the game. The hills and valleys are accented by very well done lighting effects and weather. While the cut-scenes sometimes use laughable aircraft models and animation the character and enemy models look great. Huge bugs will burrow out of the ground from bugholes which always freaks me out a little bit. The weapon effects also are nicely done. When you use a portable nuke on a bughole you see a large aftershock that wipes out anything in its path. Nice. The only gripe I have with the graphics is when you get up close. The zoomable and rotatable camera allows you to either look from afar or zoom in close. Zooming in close shows the lack of polys put into the MI. For those of you with lower end systems, don't worry. The engine is very customizable from lighting effects to texture depth and resolution, you can be sure that if the game is running a litting slowly you can always turn it down a notch. Sound Hardware accelerated sound is always a plus. In starship troopers the sound is very important. The reason behind this is because if a bug is going to attack you can be sure they will let up a shreik beforehand. Little things like this really add to the overall atmosphere. The background music is one of the definate highlights in this game. Either keeping you in the action or some tunes that add to the sneaking around missions. The voice acting is good too with mission objectives and updates during the game and in the menus. Control Deep breath in... I don't know if you understand how upsetting it is to get really far on a level with no saves making sure none of your precious little soldiers dies just to get to the final part of the level and have your only medic do something you don't want him to do such as having him seperate from the pack just to run out in front of a handful of big bad bugs to die and leave the rest of my platoon bleeding indefinately! Sorry In the games defense, for the most part the controls were good. The camera, while it takes some getting used to, is really well done. The squad based movement and collection is good and the formations and actions do well. But there seems to be a few bugs in the control that can really hinder gameplay. For instance, if I set two different groups and set one in arrow formation and the other in line formation, hitting the currently selected groups number will cause their formation to reset. Annoying. On the other hand, albeit a few little bugs, the control is fine. Since it uses the same basic scheme of most other RTS on the market it is really hard to complain. Gameplay ST offers many levels that are located on vastly different worlds. While one level may be on a Earth-like beach another may drop you on an alien desert. Each level has different landscapes which can help or hinder you mission plans. The plans vary quite a bit so not to get boring too quickly. The missions will have you try to accomplish a mission but halfway throughout you can be sure that the mission will change or at least me extended. You may be escorting a caravan or rescuing fellow humans for one second then defending a base or collecting a specimen the next. This means that when you get your first objective you won't want to sneak around the whole time because the creatures you leave around will be there for you later. However, some times you must sneak around certain levels so you won't be bombarded by bugs. And I almost forgot, you better be prepared to go through the levels a couple of times before you complete it because there is no in-game save feature. Thats right, don't expect to save unless you have previously completed a mission. But for incentive, each soldier you have survive through a misssion gaines experience and medels. With the points you receive you can recive new weapons and upgrades. Another great reason to try to keep your men alive is their accuracy and rating go up as their experience does. Overall Starship troopers might not be in-depth enough for hardcore RTS fans. I sometimes found that I threw strategy out the window and just clumped my guys together. I would set their agression to normal and they would fire whenever a bug was in firing range. This worked even better then hard thought out strategy sometimes. But for those of you who want some strategy and action and not too in-depth in either, ST is for you.
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