Game intel
Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War
Lock and load into the Starship Troopers universe and join the Mobile Infantry in the most realistic depiction of war ever made ! Experience an original story…
I booted up Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War on PS5 half-expecting a throwaway nostalgia trip – a quick, campy cash-in to ride the renewed interest in the franchise. Thirty minutes later I was grinning like an idiot, knee-deep in green bug guts, while a smarmy recruitment ad yelled at me about “doing my part” between missions. It felt like someone had dug a lost late-’90s FPS out of a time capsule and wired it straight into Paul Verhoeven’s brain.
Over roughly six hours on Soldier (normal) difficulty – plus a couple more replaying missions and poking at higher difficulties – I realized something: Ultimate Bug War doesn’t try to be the biggest, longest, or most feature-packed shooter. It tries to be a very specific thing: a tight, arcade-style bug massacre that completely understands what made the original 1997 film so weirdly special. And on that front, it absolutely hits its target.
It’s also short, a bit repetitive, and missing the obvious co-op mode that screams out from every mission. But while it lasts, it’s a gloriously stupid-smart good time.
The quickest tell that Auroch Digital and Dotemu “get” Starship Troopers is how Ultimate Bug War frames its story. You’re not just playing missions; you’re essentially playing a piece of in-universe propaganda software, created by a Federation department called FedDev to train future cannon fodder. The whole campaign is pitched as patriotic conditioning, and it never lets you forget it.
You step into the boots of Samantha “Sammy” Dietz, who’s recounting her life in the Mobile Infantry. She’s chatting with none other than Johnny Rico himself – now a grizzled Federation general with an eye patch, played in FMV by Casper Van Dien. Yes, they dragged Rico out of retirement to yell at you between missions, and it’s exactly as delightfully cheesy as it sounds.
The cutscenes are pure FedNet: recruitment ads, victory reports, smiling kids holding rifles while voiceovers explain that “service guarantees citizenship.” The tone is razor-sharp: bombastic, patriotic and so aggressively pro-Federation that it loops right back around into satire. If you’ve seen Verhoeven’s film, you’ll recognize that same “are we the baddies?” energy threaded all the way through.
The actual plot is simple: follow Sammy from bright-eyed recruit to seasoned commander as humanity pushes deeper into Arachnid territory, from training grounds to Klendathu itself. The game never really dwells on why this war is happening or who’s at fault. It just treats the bugs as a problem to be solved with high explosives – and trusts you to pick up on the irony.
It’s not some deep character study. Dialogue is functional, and the story mostly exists as a bridge between missions. But the format – a “training game” inside the Federation – gives everything a meta edge that kept me engaged. Every loading screen headline, every voiceover, feels like part of a big, smirking joke about militaristic propaganda. I found myself watching every FMV instead of skipping, which almost never happens with this kind of retro shooter.
The moment-to-moment shooting is where Ultimate Bug War really clicked for me. It’s not a Twitch-reflex arena shooter like Quake, and it’s not as slick and modern as Doom Eternal. It sits in that early-2000s pocket where guns feel heavy, enemies come in waves, and levels are big but readable.
Most of the game is spent in “human” missions as Sammy. Each operation drops you into a large, mostly open map with several objectives: blow up nests, escort convoys, hold choke points long enough for evac ships to arrive. You can tackle objectives in different orders, but you’re not getting immersive sim levels of freedom here – it’s more like a bunch of classic FPS arenas stitched together into a big bug-ridden playground.
The objectives are very straightforward: plant charges, defend a beacon, purge all enemies in an area. On paper that sounds repetitive, and over time you do feel the repetition. But in the middle of a mission, when everything’s on fire and fifty Arachnids are climbing over each other to get at you, the simplicity works. You’re not lost in checklists or side quests; you’re just desperately trying not to get turned into red mist.
The arsenal does a lot of heavy lifting. You get all the iconic toys you’d expect: the Morita rifle with its under-barrel shotgun, a brutal combat shotgun, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, plasma weapons. Everything kicks, everything sounds punchy, and every bullet makes bugs explode into huge showers of green goo. On PS5 with headphones, the mix is glorious chaos – the rattle of Moritas, the shrieks of Warrior bugs, the thump of artillery.
My favourite addition is the M7 Razorback: a hulking bipedal war machine you can call in after racking up enough points. The first time I triggered it, I’d backed myself into a canyon choke point and watched the radar fill with red dots. I popped the Razorback, climbed in, and spent the next thirty seconds mowing down an endless flood of Warriors with a minigun while a chainsaw arm carved through anything that got too close. It’s pure power fantasy – and then its fuel runs out, self-destructs, and you’re suddenly squishy and mortal again. Perfect.
Ultimate Bug War leans heavily into arcade scoring. Kills, destroyed nests, and quick objective clears all feed a score meter that in turn unlocks support drops: health and armor, heavy weapons, and the real showstoppers – orbital bombardments, napalm storms, and other “press button to delete everything” toys. Chaining these together to keep a defense line barely standing is where I had the most fun.
Underneath all that flair, the fundamentals are aggressively old-school in a way I appreciated: separate health and armor bars, no regenerating HP, ammo and medkits scattered around the map. You’re constantly making risk/reward calls – do you dash out through a wave of bugs for that health pack, or call down a supply drop and hope it lands before you’re torn apart?
One thing that didn’t impress me much was friendly AI. You can recruit fellow troopers mid-mission, but most of the time they felt like noisy, slightly mobile turrets. They’ll help thin the herd, sure, but they also stand in your line of fire, get stuck on geometry, and generally exist to pad out the feeling of a larger battle. This isn’t a squad tactics game; it’s you and your gun, full stop.
Between human missions, you can jump into separate “bug missions,” where you control a horrifying Arachnid “assassin” instead of a trooper. On paper, this is genius: flip the script, let players experience the Federation as a bunch of fleshy targets, and add mechanical variety to break up the rifle spam.
In practice, these bug missions feel more like a chunky bonus mode than a full second campaign. You’re playing through a simulation built by the Federation to study Arachnids, and each mission is effectively a base-razing rampage: tear down barricades, smash generators, destroy tents, slaughter as many humans as you can until the command post falls.
The assassin bug has three forms: a standard ground form that bites and slashes, a flying variant for crossing gaps and dropping into outposts, and a tank form that belches fire and shrugs off small-arms fire. Swapping between them mid-mission and watching structures crumble is genuinely satisfying. There’s also a light bit of “summon the swarm” management, where you can spawn lesser bugs from nests to overwhelm defenses.
The problem is that objectives don’t really evolve. After a few bug missions, I felt like I’d seen most of what they had to offer. Destroying human camps never quite matches the sweaty, desperate tension of holding a flimsy Federation outpost as waves of Warriors flood in. The power fantasy is cool – there’s a special joy in crashing through walls and watching humans ragdoll – but I always found myself itching to get back to Sammy and her Morita.
Still, as palette cleansers between human ops, they do their job. They also reinforce the meta conceit nicely: even when you’re playing the “enemy,” you’re doing it in a Federation training sim designed to understand and exterminate them better. The satire doesn’t blink.
Ultimate Bug War wears its old-school roots most proudly in its difficulty options. There are four: Recruit, Soldier, Veteran, and Citizen. I ran the full campaign on Soldier in about 5–6 hours, including a few deaths and some backtracking when I got cocky and pushed too far into a swarm.
On Soldier, the game is challenging enough to keep you alert but rarely unfair. If you’re paying attention to your minimap, using support drops, and not wasting ammo, you’ll be fine. Most of my deaths came from greed – trying to squeeze in one more nest before falling back, or ignoring a flanking route because I was too busy admiring the carnage.
Crank things up to Veteran or Citizen and the tone shifts. Ammo crates and medkits become much rarer, score thresholds for support calls jump, and your margin for error narrows. Even on mid difficulty there were moments in later missions where a single missed reload or late retreat turned into a full team wipe. On higher settings, those moments become the norm instead of the exception.
In bug missions, the danger flips: you’re theoretically a walking tank, but concentrated turret fire and explosives will shred you fast if you charge in brainlessly. Healing by retreating to nests is key, and there’s a strong push-pull rhythm of smashing a front line, falling back to recover, and spawning more allies to keep the pressure on.
There are no side quests or branching story routes. Replayability comes from two things: chasing higher scores on each mission, and hunting down secrets. There are 17 secrets hidden across the game’s maps, some tucked behind collapsible walls, others in off-the-path nooks. They’re not just collectibles – some tweak the presentation, trigger developer-style commentary, or unlock extra-gory “massacre” modes that crank the violence up to hilarious extremes.
If you’re the kind of player who replays boomer shooters to master levels and squeeze every last point out of them, Ultimate Bug War has enough there to keep you busy for around 8–10 hours total. If you treat it as a one-and-done story romp on normal, you’ll be closer to that initial 5–6 hour mark.
For me, that length felt right for what the game is aiming at. This is a focused, arcade-style campaign, sold at a lower price point, that knows when to roll credits. I’d rather have six hours of tightly tuned bug slaughter than a bloated 20-hour campaign padded with samey objectives. That said, the lack of any kind of co-op or competitive mode is a real missed opportunity. The second you’re holding a line with AI troopers, you’ll be thinking about how much better it would be with a friend.
On PS5, Ultimate Bug War ran rock-solid for me. I stuck with the default performance-focused setting, and the framerate stayed high and stable even when the screen was absolutely swimming with sprites. I also briefly tested the PC version on a mid-range rig (RTX 3060, Ryzen 5) and saw similarly smooth performance with everything cranked up.
The art direction walks a fun line: 2D-style sprite enemies in 3D environments, chunky pixels, exaggerated gore, but wrapped in enough lighting and particle work that it doesn’t feel like a pure throwback. It’s more “how you remember 90s shooters looking” than how they really looked.
Bugs come in a bunch of familiar variants: Warrior swarms, leaping units that overshoot and hang in the air just long enough to line up a shot, lumbering tanks that spit fire, and nastier elites that act as bullet sponges. They’re all immediately readable at a glance. Even during chaotic swarms, I could quickly pick out the real threats and prioritize them.
Environments are mostly functional military outposts, rocky canyons, and bug-infested valleys. There’s enough variety to keep missions from blurring together, but you’re not getting the wild visual experimentation of something like a Dusk or Amid Evil. This is consciously grounded in the film’s aesthetic: lots of metal, sand, and trenches, with splashes of lurid green bug gore when things go south.
The FMV segments deserve a special shoutout. They’re grainy in just the right way, leaning into that late-90s “newsreel propaganda” feel. Casper Van Dien clearly understands the assignment; his Rico has big “tired hero who believes his own propaganda because it’s all he has left” energy, and it slots perfectly into the game’s tone.
Audio is equally on point. The score leans on martial drums and bombastic brass when you’re pushing forward, then shifts to tense, almost horror-tinged tracks when the radar fills with red dots. The bugs sound disgusting. The guns sound right. And the Federation announcer’s smug cheerfulness never stops being funny, even as you’re watching dozens of troopers get torn apart.
For all the things Ultimate Bug War nails, there are a few areas where the budget and design scope show their limits.
The biggest is mission variety. Structurally, you’re doing riffs on the same handful of objectives for the entire campaign. The big set-piece moments – desperate holds, last-second evac runs, multi-front defenses – sell the fantasy so well that I didn’t mind much on my first playthrough. But by the time I went back on higher difficulty, I could definitely feel the repetition creeping in.
The lack of any sort of multiplayer stings too. The game is very obviously built around the fantasy of being one grunt in a larger war. You can see it in the level design, the support calls, the way dropships swoop in and out. Having even a two-player co-op mode would have transformed the replayability. As it stands, once you’ve beaten the campaign a couple of times and grabbed the secrets, there’s not much left to do.
Bug missions, as mentioned, are a neat idea that never fully matures. They’re fun in short bursts, and I’m glad they exist, but they don’t have the same mechanical depth or escalating challenge curve as the human campaign. I’d love to see a sequel go harder on that angle, maybe with more varied bug abilities and more complex human defenses.
Finally, if you’re coming to this expecting a modern narrative FPS with lots of character development, subplots, and twists, you’re going to bounce off it. Ultimate Bug War is blunt by design. It has a sharp brain behind its satire, but moment to moment it’s all about the rush of shredding hundreds of enemies, not the quiet beat between firefights.
If any of the following descriptions fit you, Ultimate Bug War is very likely worth your time:
If, on the other hand, you need your shooters to have deep progression systems, robust multiplayer, live-service hooks, or cutting-edge graphics, this is probably going to feel like a fun weekend snack rather than a new obsession. Which, honestly, is exactly the lane it’s trying to occupy.
Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War feels like the game 12-year-old me dreamed about after sneaking a VHS copy of the movie past my parents. It’s loud, gory, politically messed up in a very deliberate way, and laser-focused on the joys of turning hostile alien life into a fine mist.
It’s not the most ambitious shooter on the market. It doesn’t try to be. But the things it does set out to do – nail the film’s dark satire, deliver crunchy retro gunplay, and give you a chance to stomp around as a giant murder-bug – it does with confidence and clarity.
I walked away wanting more, but not because what’s here felt lacking – more because I’d happily play another six to eight hours of this with new mission types, more enemy variants, and proper co-op. As it stands, this is a lean, no-filler bug hunt that left me satisfied and a little nostalgic for an era when shooters were allowed to just be weird, bloody, and pointedly stupid on purpose.
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