Starship Troopers
December 7,2005 - Tricky coves, the worst game ever. What makes a game so bad that it sits atop any other title for sheer badness? Does it require choresome, repetitive bug-mowing gameplay?  Does it require the title of Starship Troopers? Oh, that would help. Calling Strangelite’s tear-inducing shooter the worst PC game ever is a little out-of-order. No, it isn’t quite that dreadful. And while labeling the 10 level monstrosity as the worst game of 2005 is closer to a tick, it’s still…Well, it could be argued that it’s better than Crime Life, for instance. Third time lucky, then. Starship Trooper is just about the worst PC shooter of 2005. Yes, that warrants a thumb up.

Poor Verhoeven must be cringing in his sixteen-story villa. The game manages to entirely miss the point of the movie, while delivering a shooting experienced saturated in maddening annoyances.

The fact that the game is accompanied by shots from the movie further compounds its inability to understand the satirical origins of the 1997 film. Verhoeven is pointing a humorous paw at the exploits of the American military in the movie. If only Strangelite had caught onto this and created something of a satirical gaming equivalent. It might have been interesting.

Many will doubtlessly point out the obvious: "It's only a game". Well, yes. And it's not a good one at that.

Think endless trawls through bug-infested soils (with the pun intended). Think of a never-ending tirade of the spineless, four-legged blood-hungry things. Think of the joyless practice of actually shooting the damned things. You have Starship Troopers. It's no fun at all. Ever. Sure, some of the weapons feel moderately powerful, but if King Kong made a case for immersing you within a gameworld, Starship Troopers makes a case for interesting foes to shoot. Because that's the thing: Shooting bugs...Endless bugs, is an absolutely joyless experience.

Oh, take the Plasma Mountain mission. You have a Rocket Launcher, but it still takes twenty minutes to destroy the mother beast. Twenty minutes of tedious shooting. It's enough to cause permanent damage, and an uncharacteristic desire to stab needles into your arm.

Gameplay mechanics are resolutely old-fashioned too. We have a weapon that never runs out of bullets. Why? It has an internal generator; Strangelite's excuse for implementing a weapon that'll negate the need for tactical play.

Heck, worse than this is the fact that crouching doesn't even increase the accuracy of your shot. Remember Deus Ex? That 2000 RPG? It was one of the first to implement such a feature, but five years down the line, Starship Troopers is saddling up, forgetting many of the much staples of the genre, with the poorest, shoddiest visuals imaginable and piss-poor AI routines.

You're made to work for all the wrong reasons (frustration, for instance). Bugs give you no second thought as they rush into the whizzing bullets, and even your teammates are as mindless as a dizzy lab-rat.

If the visuals had been top-tier, the utter drecksome gameplay would be somewhat forgivable. But like a bad story that keeps getting worse, Strangelite's very own SWARM engine manages to render their bug-squashing shooter as age-old in looks as the original Half-Life. Just take a look at the faces of your comrades. Then start laughing. Did Strangelite really forget that you might ACTUALLY look at these helmet-clad fools? Or did they spend so long developing an engine that could accommodate endless, repetitive looking stick-like creatures that they couldn’t be bothered to create characters that looked...Well, half real. Either this, or by this point, they had entered too high into the realms of technological whizzery and didn't have the means of creating faces that resembled anything other than paper.

What's a game as ugly as Starship Troopers demanding as good as system as it does? You might need to upgrade if you're booting a PC with anything less than a 3GHZ processor and 1024 megabytes of RAM. And for what? To get a game that looks bad, no matter the visual settings? There are numerous graphical glitches too, with clipping problems, and a lighting bug we encountered that meant that some areas wouldn't illuminate correctly.

The movie had a lot going for it, not least of which was its ultra-intensive violence. In comparison, the game is child's play. Strangelite place the odd dismembered arm in plain view, but its implementation is so lame you're not affected. We're asking for Soldier of Fortune 2 gratuitousness, since the game fails at every fundamental gameplay practice, and seeing lots of blood and gore is a good cop-out. But we've already spoiled the surprise: Starship Troopers fails here too.

Oh wait; we nearly forgot to mention the visual effects that accompany pain. When you're hit by a bug, the screen goes blue (or red, depending on whether you have any armor remaining) and…It flashes somewhat. If our description is decidedly amateur, it's nothing to what it actually looks like. Laughable really.

Starship Troopers is plagued by numerous problems. There's really no satisfaction in killing the bugs, and without any trump cards, it's just one big failure. The engine does a reasonable job of accommodating numerous bugs at once, but frustration will ultimately set in as you stand still and stab the left-mouse button with setting fatigue.

There's no reason to buy this game. It doesn’t look good and it barely sounds any better. Standing still watching an incomprehensible mass of bodies shifting forwards as they work against the constraints of the engine is no fun. Taking another step into the realms of First-Person shootery and actually firing is inept solace. We could blame Verhoeven. We could blame Halo (the game sports a rechargeable shield system, for instance) but neither the director, nor the game need take criticism. It's Strangelite's fault. And having endured an hour of this staid, tired shooter, you'll likely go back to Halo with open arms anyway.

Fan of the film or not, we cannot put it more vocally: Don't buy this game.

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