Come on you apes, you wanna live forever?! (Starship Troopers (PC))

Member Name: oodlenoodle9

Product:	Starship Troopers (PC)
Date:	24/06/08 (145 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, varied missions

Disadvantages: Dated graphics and clunky controls

"We're going in the first wave...means more bugs for us to kill. You smash the entire area, you kill anything with more than two legs! Do you get me?!"

"We get you sir!"

It's absolutely classic sci fi - fledgling human race is beginning to spread across new planets when BAM! they bump into voracious army of numberless and extremely aggressive aliens with huge claws and lots of people die and there's a big war with lots of space ships and laser guns.

And yet, somehow, for all the clichés that seem to appear in Starship Troopers it really is a fun story. I have to say I really enjoyed the film, and although I haven't read the books that the game is based more heavily upon, the game does have a pretty cool (if simplistic) story too. Interestingly I have just discovered on my Googley ramblings that there is to be a 3rd film out this year despite the apparently shockingly bad sequel, Starship Troopers 2. Anyway, I deviate.

The game is the first of two that have followed the gory combat of the MI - Mobile Infantry - in their struggle against the spiky arachnid menace. Admittedly it was released in 2000 (practically the dark ages when it comes to games) and it somewhat looks its age, but quite frankly it's about twenty times better than the pants FPS of 2005 that also derived itself from the book and film.


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Ain't much to look at after you scrape 'em off your boot.
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The general idea is to take command of a squad of infantry having just made it through "officer training" (which constitutes a slightly unbelievable and uninteresting series of tasks to teach you how to play the game) and then lead them to glory throughout the campaign against the bugs as you gradually gain experience and become the elite of the MI. Along the way you will gain access to some nifty gadgets like armoured suits with built-in jetpacks, upgraded weapons and so on, which, given the sheer size of the hordes you come up against some times, is fortunate. You will fight across about twenty different planets, from idyllic human settlements to blasted volcanic landscapes and frozen ice planets. You even get to re-enact one of the coolest bits of the film - the defence of Whiskey Outpost - which involves trying to hold the thin corrugated iron walls of the fort while about ten thousand bugs try to rip them to pieces and your extraction is nowhere to be seen.....

Ok, maybe it's a boy thing.

In any case, perhaps the best thing about the game is that the developers have tried to make it interesting - something they don't normally bother with, presumably because it's hassle for them. Rather than being given a clear mission plan and everything going according to it - "go here, shoot all these, press that button and you're done, hurrah" - it's more a case of - "ok lieutenant we don't really know what is gona happen, but try and get here and do that and...oh crap another team has got trapped, scrap that last objective and go help them. Good work. Hang on a sec. Sorry lieutenant, your extraction boat has just been blown to smithereens, you're gona have to hang tough there for a while...."

Something doesn't always go wrong, but there's often some random event that occurs to spice things up a little.


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I need a corporal. You're it, until you're dead or I find someone better.
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Command of your squad involves a lot of micromanagement - clicking around the terrain to tell your troopers where to go, telling them to get in formation for the zillionth time because after every fight they get messed up, commanding the missile troopers to blow something into its component atoms, and trying to locate the source of incessant attacks and shut them off. You get to choose from about ten different formations, all of which are pretty much useless, and give lots of commands like patrol and follow waypoint. These are also useless. On top of that your men are chosen in a grid that is clearly designed to create three squads, presumably so you can have them do more than one task at a time. This too, is useless. Splitting your men in half will almost without fail give both teams a gory death, not to mention the impossibility of commanding two units at one time.

The camera can be a bit tricky too, focusing on the wrong people and refusing to rotate upwards enough to see that huge flock of hoppers (flying green bugs with the obligatory huge spiky mandible things) flapping around above your head. This can occasionally lead to a squad member getting left behind, which either means death for that unfortunate person, or a complicated rescue operation - especially if you just left them in an area besieged by a horde of bugs that you just escaped from.

This problem, coupled with the fact that careless use of explosives can blow your entire squad to pieces, makes the irritation of only being able to save at the end of a mission all the greater. Because your squad slowly gains promotions and therefore better weapons and equipment, you become pretty attached to them, so them dying all over the place is kind of upsetting. And it's a fine line between your squad being perfectly fine and scything down opponents like wheat, and it all going horribly pear shaped. However, missions are not that long, and if you are careful it is not too difficult to fly through the campaign.

The only other downside, as I have already mentioned, is the dated graphics. Most of the time you will be zoomed out from your troops so it doesn't really matter, but they are blockish and unrealistic if you look close.


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Technical stuff
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I have found that some more modern computers have trouble running the game with glitches in the sound and sometimes even a total refusal to run the game, although it works pretty much fine on my laptop (crashes occasionally when you use the energy shields for some reason...).

The requirements are very low:

MINIMUM SPEC:

- Windows 95/98 (XP also seems to work, not sure about other systems)
- Pentium II 233
- 64 Mb RAM
- 300 Mb free hard disk space
- 8 x CDROM drive
- 3d Video card needed [Voodoo 2]
- Win 95/98 compatible sound card
- DirectX 7.0a included

RECOMMENDED SPEC:

- Win 95/98
- Pentium II 400
- 128 Mb RAM
- 800 Mb free
- 8 x CDROM drive
- 3d Video card needed [Matrox G400]
- Win 95/98 compatible sound card
- DirectX 7.0a included


Unfortunately the game is no longer in production, but you might get a copy second hand or, since it is generally considered abandonware, you might be able to find a copy for free by searching through a few websites. It's a good fun game if you can get it to run.

Summary: Service guarantees citizenship!