Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War - Would You Like To Play More? (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- Mar 25
- 8 min read
Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War
Released: March 16th, 2026
Developer: Auroch Digital
Publisher: DotEmu
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S, Switch 2
Conceptually, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War is brilliant. Conceptually.
It’s one of the precious few Starship Troopers spin-offs to retain the spirit of the 1997 movie, sarcastically masquerading as pro-war propaganda. The game itself exists in-universe as a tool of the fascistic Federation, aimed at recruiting youngsters into its endless, absurdly pointless war against a race of insectoid aliens.
What a brilliant idea! I love media that’s supposed to exist within its own setting and I’ve longed for a satirical Starship Troopers game rather than a face value interpretation. Auroch is a natural fit for development, having already made a retro shooter about space fascists with Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. With Casper Van Dien reprising his film role as Johnny Rico, the components are in place for exactly my kind of game.
Ultimate Bug War, it pains me to say, does not live up to my hopeful expectations. It’s not bad by any stretch, offering as it does a solid first-person shooter with a quirky edge, but it suffers from some questionable design decision and a stark lack of flesh on the bones. As well as that, a dedicated 50% of the gameplay is a huge load of wasted potential.
There are missions for Trooper and Bug alike, the latter of which feels somewhat at odds with the Starship Troopers mythos. I struggle to believe Federation leadership would let the propagandized masses simulate the destruction of its glorious soldiers, even with the premise of “understanding” the enemy. This is a setting where schools teach kids to stomp on regular Bugs for the sake of mindless hatred, after all. Having said that, I acknowledge I’m being pedantic and other fans may even disagree with me, so it’s not a dealbreaker or anything.
The Trooper missions are as straightforward as you can get. They present as recreations of battles fought by Major Samantha Dietz, a Federation veteran who appears alongside Rico in a series of amusing live action cutscenes. Players inhabit Dietz’s digitized counterpart in a fundamentally solid retro shooter where gameplay consists entirely of killing stuff. There’s not much else getting in the way of Bug murdering besides physical space, as levels take place across relatively large open battlefields with multiple concurrent objectives.
This open approach lies at the heart of my main gripe with Ultimate Bug War - a big sparse environment is no substitute for proper level design, especially in a shooter with distinct old school sensibilities. My first time through the initial mission involved a lot of running around in circles, navigating terrain textured in such a way as to obscure navigable paths and inclines. I got on far better when I tried a second time, and the rest of the game isn’t anywhere near as bad, but notable landmarks are always in short supply, objective markers are borderline camouflaged, and the decision to provide neither a map screen nor a minimap defies game design convention - hell, it defies game design sense!
Bug War’s open level approach would be more agreeable if battlefields felt like actual battlefields. Instead, pockets of combat litter the arena with Bugs that resemble clusters more than true swarms. There are certain crescendo objectives intended to make you feel like a huge horde’s approaching, but it’s a transparent illusion - an animated wallpaper of stampeding Arachnids circles the combat area like the inside of a zoetrope, but active enemy numbers still remain comparatively reserved.
I understand this is not a big budget project, so having swarms on par with a Saber game aren’t feasible even via retro graphics, but that’s why creating the environment to fit the scope is so important - if you can’t field a Dynasty Warriors amount of combatants, don’t field them on a Dynasty Warriors amount of terrain.
When it comes to actually shooting the Arachnids, things feel good. Bullets hit their targets with a satisfying pop, battles are enjoyably hectic, and the enemies are tough enough to feel dangerous without the need for a horde. Dietz doesn’t have access to a wide arsenal, but the guns she does have are all enjoyable to wield. There are plenty of turrets and Razorback mechs to commandeer throughout the battlefield, as well as special weapons that can be used until they’re emptied - these are all great while they last, packing an absolute wallop.
While there’s not a wide selection of firearms, Dietz has some interesting options for tactical support. They come in the form of single-use beacons that provide a variety of effects, such as calling in an air strike, spawning an NPC with a mech, or planting a soundwave spike that stuns nearby enemies. You always have a rechargeable supply drop which sometimes includes special weapons or more tactical support as a freebie. It naturally makes one think of Helldivers, which is fitting considering how much that game owes Starship Troopers.
Some terrific ideas are on display with support weapons but many of them are much better in theory than practice. Air strikes operate on too long of a delay to be effective against an army of mostly fast-moving melee attackers. Warping to a helicopter turret is a fun proposition but it’s fucking useless if enemies aren’t polite enough to stay in the uncontrollable line of sight. The only support I find dramatically useful is anything that radiates an AoE from a fixed spot, otherwise it’s a total crapshoot with a lot more crap than shoot.
Speaking of crap, let’s talk about the Bug campaign.
Bug missions don’t offer much of anything at all, consisting entirely of flitting between human bases and holding down a murder button to destroy anything with hit points. I only call it a campaign in a colloquial sense since there’s neither a story tying missions together nor any other measure of progress. It’s a series of disparate levels that you unlock via the Trooper campaign and every single one of them is the same.
A strategy element is hinted at but I can only describe it as fetal. There are homeopathic amounts of something that hasn’t been developed past an embryonic state. Scattered throughout the map are Bug nests which gradually heal you and spawn a few Arachnids to march upon predetermined targets. Nominally you can command these Bugs, but combat’s such a mindless mess it’s neither apparent nor important that they ever listen to you.
I can see the exact experience they had in their heads when conceiving this mode. What we have in theory is an insectoid version of the old Codemasters game Overlord (otherwise known as Edgy Pikmin). Ultimate Bug War coughs up skeletal fragments of a game in which you summon small armies of Arachnids, leading them to enemy strongholds where you’ll break down the walls and let your Bugs pour through the breach. What an amazing fucking game that would have been.
The reality is a rudimentary echo of a dream I’m sure was dreamt. There certainly are Arachnids that are nominally under your command, but they perform as little more than wandering diversions while you steer your incredibly slidey Bug around and hold a button to watch it mindlessly attack.
The worst part is that you don’t actually get to play as the Bug, not as far as I’m concerned. Sure, you’re controlling an Arachnid, but it’s not the Bug literally everybody envisions when they think of Starship Troopers.
If you promise a Starship Troopers fan they can "be the Bug," there is literally no other mental image you're conjuring in their head besides a big, yellow, skittering Warrior. Ultimate Bug War’s bespoke Assassin Bug could have at least been an offshoot species like the already established Tiger variant, but instead we’re given a deranged prawn woodlouse. It has three forms named after familiar Arachnids but they don’t evoke the Warrior, Hopper, or Tanker in any appreciable way. It’s like if Aliens vs. Predator replaced the playable Xenomorph with something more akin to Kenner’s Killer Crab Alien, except the Killer Crab Alien would at least be hilarious.
To say the Assassin Bug has three “forms” is an overstatement of olympic proportions. The Assassin can switch between barely different flavors of the same prawn woodlouse, and by my estimation there isn’t a single full moveset between them.
Warrior form’s actions consist of a brief scuttle rush and a melee attack that you just hold the trigger for. The Hopper doesn’t do anything but very clumsily fly, though you’re able to divebomb by landing on targets at speed if you can wrestle the awkward controls into compliance. The Tanker is a temporary super mode, healing you and granting invincibility alongside a powerful flamethrower at the cost of almost all your speed and maneuverability. Each option is specific to a fault, possessing the barest minimum of abilities needed to perform one job.
Bug missions are clumsy and rather boring. They might as well not even be separate missions, since every single one is the exact same experience with different scenery. There’s no way the final product is what Auroch envisioned for it. The opportunity is so evidently missed, falls so utterly short of its potential, that I honestly think they’d have been better off scrapping this side of the game entirely. That, or picking a level - it literally doesn’t matter which one - and leaving it at one.
I rarely go after a game for rolling credits sooner than its contemporaries. Great games and lengthy games aren’t mutually exclusive concepts, but occasionally there comes a title of such surprising brevity it warrants a mention. Ultimate Bug War is one such title, leaving me in legitimate disbelief at just how little of it there is. It’s like someone heard me when I said Boltgun ran a bit too long and decided to take the total piss.
Unless you go hunting for optional secrets, you’ll be hard pressed to squeeze more than a handful of hours from either campaign, and even combined they conclude sooner than anybody might reasonably expect. When you consider how regurgitative the Bug side is and the Trooper side’s limited variety in terms of guns, enemy types, or objectives, the Ultimate Bug War’s value prospect doesn’t exactly favor the player, certainly not when the best thing about it is something you could just watch online - probably via official channels before too long.
The FMV material between levels is easily the star of the show. It’s a delight to see Casper Van Dien not only wearing a Fed uniform again but clearly having a lot of fun in the process. He plays the silliness as straight as ever, shimmying toward performative excess without crossing the line. Charlotta Mohlin is outstanding as Major Dietz, delivering her more militant lines with a steel-eyed intensity that could be terrifying in any other context.
Rico and Dietz serve up some hot indoctrination as they chat about the playable missions, remind audiences how great citizenship is, and generally hammer home the satire with a mallet. Other bits of live action worldbuilding occur as well, sometimes really fun, sometimes going for laughs a bit too obviously. For the most part, it’s what I’ve always wanted to see from a Starship Troopers game, something made by developers who get the joke and follow it through.
This is why it pains me to say so many negative things about it. I fucking adore Starship Troopers and I failed to temper my excitement when I saw how much Auroch had committed to the bit. Sadly, there’s very little going on beyond the bit, certainly not enough to constitute anything worthy of such a brilliant concept.
Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War shows incredible promise for an Early Access game so it’s a shame Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War is not an Early Access game. The fact it’s very short is just one part of an overall problem - it feels like a lot is missing, and whatever made the cut falls far short of its potential. This one truly hurts because I had such high hopes, but I must bitterly continue to wait for the Starship Troopers game I’ve always wanted.
6/10
