A Starship Troopers Game Came Out, Why Is Nobody Talking About It?

a few years ago a starship trooper's rts was announced a bit out of nowhere it was being made by the aristocrats a small studio that only made a single game before and was slated for release in 2020 after two years of delays a fairly boring gameplay reveal and learning that the game wouldn't have ranked play competitive play or even multiple factions i sort of just stopped following the project so when the game released i'd already written it off i didn't want to be disappointed is that a 9 out of 10 on steam oh i think i would like to know more the main menu is simple but i like it right now the game is just a campaign with a few standalone missions it doesn't pretend to be anything more the options could use some work you can't even play the game in windowed fullscreen mode being stuck minimizing if you want to tab out jumping into the tutorial shows exactly what you're getting into starship troopers is an action movie but it's also satire the voiceover character is not a helpful entity to give us information but is instead an in-universe propaganda piece designed to convince the citizens and civilians that this war is great for humanity and i really like it big k as cap troopers like to call it is an ugly planet a bug planet a planet hostile to life as we know it to assure the safety of human civilization the arachnid homeworld must be eliminated we're dropped into the middle of a firefight on klondothu the alien homeworld and taught how to control units my initial impressions are that kill speeds are decent but unit movement is a bit slow all the hotkeys use the grid setup which is a big plus making picking up new units and abilities very easy and intuitive this is important because every unit has multiple activated abilities making simplification important as we reach the end of the tutorial something i really like happens we're overwhelmed and forced to fall back with the objective being trying to make it back alive and as you reach the drop ships they pack up and leave abandoning the soldiers on the surface to certain death as the announcer simply states the battle is over this is a great opening not only does it set the stage narratively that this is a society that cares much more about optics of a fight than the lives of its troopers but as we'll see later it also ties directly into the macro mechanics of the game that literally don't care how many soldiers you lose starship troopers will repeatedly do a great job at mixing game mechanics and narrative which is important given that narrative mode is the only way to play the game right now so how good is this campaign the majority of the campaign is very micro management focused unit production is nearly instant and there are no worker type units that have to go recover resources the game instead uses two types of resources supply and war support supplies are earned from occasionally finding them on the map or more commonly when securing an outpost the resource works like food in other games each unit costs a certain number of supplies generally two or three and is refunded when the unit dies this is the only limit on your force size and because units arrive almost instantly when produced that means that you spend virtually zero time sitting around and building an army i'm not going to say that this is good or bad it's totally personal preference here instead of being able to produce well the skill and macro comes from being able to build a balanced composition between all of the available infantry rifle troopers are strong skirmishers against light bugs while snipers are needed to deal with high priority threats you probably need an operator to provide support and some rocket troopers to take down the biggest bugs and flamethrowers are actually good in this game which is really exciting for me because they mostly suck in rts you end up wanting to build a bunch of each unit but the supply is limited enough that you can't the production skill largely comes from knowing what you can afford to cut as i played through starship troopers i kept looking at the game mechanics and thinking wow the aristocrats really thought this through they did a good job at identifying many of the common problems in their game mechanics and fixing them in non-contrived ways one of the biggest problems in modern rts is deathballing modern pathing is so good that armies turn into insane blobs of doom that slaughter anything that comes close breaking up these armies to give combat more variants has been a big issue for modern games starship troopers tackles this problem with a line of fire system each squad has a crosshair that is either red yellow or green if you have a unit between the squad and its target it can't fire through your own guys and the reticle is red yellow means some of the squad can fire and green is good to go this means that to get larger groups firing it's important to keep forces fanned out so that all guns can be on their targets it's a simple solution to the deathball problem and it makes positioning so much more important normally i wouldn't actually like this sort of system in an rts because it's a ton of micromanagement all the time but when there's no intensive base management or production it works great what i do find to be too much work are the activated abilities every single unit in the game has an activated ability on a short cooldown the rifleman has a grenade that you target in an area to do damage the combat engineer has a grenade that you target in an area to do damage the rocket trooper has a rocket that you target in an area to do damage but there are some other abilities too like the mark ii troopers who have a fragmentation barrage that you target in an area to do damage this isn't actually a fair assessment every unit has a base ability and after fighting for a while levels up and gets to pick from two or more abilities so yeah everybody has a bit of area damage but there are also some more unique abilities like overcharging rifles to do extra damage but being unable to fire until it comes off of cooldown the problem is that it is so much busy work to use these skills each unit has to use them individually so my fights generally end up with me splitting my forces and then going q click tab cue click tab cue click tab over and over to activate everybody's specials by the time i get through them all the first guy is often done with his cooldown and here we go again it ends up being a spam fest i think it could be improved if the abilities had longer cooldowns but were higher impact so the player was rewarded more for tactical use of the abilities instead of being a grenade machine gun the second resource in the game is war support and it's fairly simple you start with some support and you can use it to create the buildings that unlock higher tier units if you need more support you can get it by completing main and bonus objectives i love this many rts really punish the player forever going out and trying to get things done until they have a perfectly sculpted army instead starship troopers sets you up so that you can get a couple tech unlocks initially but if you want to have that dream army you need to go do the bonus objectives and unlock some war support rewarding the player for choosing out to go and engage with the enemy instead of staying at home is always good in my opinion and once you have everything unlocked in a mission war support is still worth getting combat engineers can set up powerful turrets using war support to hold crucial areas why does grandma's support from back on earth let me build turrets i don't know but this rocket launcher is for you gram gram from a purely mechanical view the majority of the game's missions play out very similarly you create an army slowly advance through the waves of increasingly scary bugs destroy their hives and either hold or destroy an objective but really any game can be reduced down like that nobody reasonably criticizes doom for mechanically being shoot things the real importance comes from how things are spiced up over time unfortunately starship troopers could use a hit or two of sriracha most rts main objectives fit into a few standard categories attack a place defend or kill a specific objective the way that they tend to differentiate themselves is through bonus objectives and exploration starship trooper bonus objectives tend to be just play the game maybe clear some hives that you probably needed to clear anyway and sometimes the main objective is also clear hives others are stand next to a building for a bit or do things like capture ammo caches around the map i don't actually dislike any of this in theory being told hey there's some ammo around the map go find it so we can shoot gun more is a good prompt for exploration in my book but the game's exploration has one thing holding it back the mini-map you can literally see everything on the map for almost every mission as soon as you load into it outpost locations enemy hive locations and even all the supply pickups it's a shame because supplies are one of the biggest limiting resources in the game and would be a great incentive to go off and explore instead you can always look at the map see an exact path to wherever you need to go and walk straight there this also causes the minimap to be very cluttered at times some missions are clean but other missions are filled to the brim with icons personally i didn't have a huge issue with this but when i was streaming i found a bunch of confused viewers who were trying to piece it all together if you can't explore you're gonna end up spending most of the time fighting fortunately fighting is pretty fun the game starts out a bit lacking in terms of enemy variety but as the campaign goes on they start folding in the armored tiger bugs ranged scorpions artillery style grenadiers and the behemoth tanker bugs each requires a pretty dedicated response and keeps things interesting instead of spamming my abilities to create a giant area of effect death field in front of me i end up spamming them in fear of my imminent death which is a nice shakeup every time a new unit becomes available to the enemy during a mission the game gives an alert about it on lower difficulties i think this is fine players are looking for a calmer experience but it's weird playing on the highest difficulty and having the game hold my hand like this this is because the difficulty options were obviously not a big focus on development instead of different sized attack waves or higher tech enemies faster the game simply applies a damage modifier to all your attacks based on what difficulty you pick at 1 star you deal double damage at 3 stars you deal normal damage and at 5 stars your peashooters are shooting bean bags for half damage a year or two ago i would have been pretty annoyed with this system but now i'm much more involved with the starcraft modding scene and i'm willing to give it a pass i was recently speaking with a modder and was told that balancing a mission for difficulty can take up to three times as long as making the mission in the first place and i'm very glad that the aristocrats opted to spend their time making 20 missions instead of 5 with perfectly tuned balance on every setting the main problem with the system is that on the highest difficulties the missions go on forever i would often beat them on my first try but have to spend an hour or more grinding through the enemies i ended up dropping the difficulty from 5 stars to 4 stars just so the tempo would feel slightly better to me and i would honestly advise not picking the difficulty based on what you think makes you an uber league gamer but instead what just feels right so is it worth it should you buy starship troopers terran command the aristocrats went in with a very specific goal in mind and created exactly that no compromising with half-baked game modes and i have a lot of respect for it the biggest limiter here is the game's current lack of content 30 for 15 to 20 hours worth of playtime is a pretty big ask if you're really into these real-time tactics style games or want to support a small dev team who's trying to revitalize the indie rts scene then yeah i would absolutely recommend checking out starship troopers if 30 bucks isn't a big deal for you absolutely but if you're in the position where you need to be getting the biggest bang for your buck i cannot recommend the game right now i look at the many decisions the aristocrats have made and i have hope i think if they keep pushing out content then the game is going to become awesome as time goes on we're just in the early stages of that right now and finally i would like to end this with a message to the devs directly yo let me play a campaign as the bugs if you make a campaign where i can wash over these terran nerds with my arachnid forces while the news announcer has an increasingly difficult time spinning their crushing defeats into propaganda i will recommend this game to literally everybody it would be so sweet

Channel: GiantGrantGames

Views: 558,873

Keywords:

Id: 86_uJXllpoU

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/StrikeMarine]

As a big RTS fan, the core game is nice but overall there's just not a lot of game to talk about. After I got past the nostalgia of the movie I realized there just wasn't much interesting to think/talk about. The campaign was competent but that's about it.

[u/VALIS666]

It's got 5K ratings with an overall Very Positive on Steam and 100-200K owners if SteamSpy is to be believed. That seems rather good for an RTS for a 25 year old movie and 60+ year old book.

[u/Leyalin]

If it had some sort of skirmish mode, or map/scenario editor it would probably be talked about much more. Beyond the campaign there’s nothing else. I would love to have and endless defense mode or something similar.

[u/SgtWaffleSound]

Hmm a PC only, niche genre game based on an IP that hasn't been in the public eye for a good 15 years. Gee I wonder.

[u/Sirisian]

That mechanic where squad types have abilities sounds similar to Iron Harvest. I stopped playing partly because of that repetitive micromanagement of abilities. It's weird because I played a ton of Warcraft 3 and it had abilities also, but managed to not annoy me.

The squad positioning sounds clever. Iron Harvest had a cover system and it was super brutal for units not in cover which caused a similar spreading out of units. The Starship Troopers system sounds more forgiving.

[u/theycallmegregarious]

Remember that FPS Starship Trooper game? Killing hordes of bugs on an alien planet was pretty fun. If they made another game like that using current gen graphics, I'd buy it.

[u/whatdoinamemyself]

Because its around a 10 hour game thats pretty mediocre? Finished it off that weekend it came out, mostly disappointed in it.

[u/[deleted]]

"Is that a 9/10 on steam?!?"

Man, come on. Steam reviews go two ways

9/10 - game works

0/10 - game has bugs

Steam reviews are fucking useless.

[u/d3cmp]

The most interesting part is how the game forced you to have clear lines of fire to get the most of your units, the game is very reminiscent of an old classic Ground Control in which you had limited units to accomplish the missions