Game Review: Starship Troopers: Terran Command
“Come on, you apes, do you want to live forever?”
—Attributed to an unnamed US Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, 6 June 1918
By Patrick S. Baker
Starship Troopers: Terran Command is a fun and engrossing real-time tactics (RTT) game. The developers, The Aristocrats, are clearly fans of the 1997 Paul Verhoeven movie and have integrated that film’s “look and feel” without distracting from the actual game play.
Just like in the 1959 Robert A. Heinlein book and the film, humankind is fighting a genocidal war against the Bugs (called the Pseudo-Arachnids in the book), an alien race of giant insect-like creatures. As the player, you are put in charge of the campaign of 19 scenarios to secure the desert mining planet of Kwalasha from the Bugs.
At the start, you command a couple of basic Mobile Infantry (MI) platoons: the grunts with rifles. As you achieve various goals, like seizing key installations, constructing buildings, or defending a fort, your troops gain experience and special abilities. For example, the MI gets high-powered grenades, and in the later scenarios Marauder combat-suits. You also get control of support troops like snipers, Combat Engineers with flamethrowers, and rocket troops with missile launchers.
Your MI platoons won’t fire through friendly units and can’t fire on the run, which leaves you having to use good old bounding overwatch to maneuver. Sometimes called moving overwatch, or leapfrogging. Bounding overwatch requires one element (the overwatch) to take fixed positions with good fields of fire, while other elements move (or bound) to the next overwatch position. Advance a unit too far away from fire support and you’ll soon find said units chopped into Bug meat. Establishing a good kill zone with your units firing from multiple angles is vital to stopping the Bugs.
Speaking of the Bugs, the enemy Artificial Intelligence is not so bright. But it doesn’t have to be since the Bugs’ tactics are to overwhelm the humans with endless numbers of Warriors. Occasionally other types of Bugs show up to fire plasma balls or spit acid. So, while humans have a vast technological advantage, the Bugs have essentially infinite quantities, which makes the combat just the right kind of interesting and stressful.
While resource management is minimal, it is still important, especially to keep your units up to strength. Dotted around the map are supply caches that you must capture to keep your troops in bullets. You must also capture bases and build buildings so you can deploy those powerful and diverse specialists’ units. Further, you must hold your bases and the key terrain against Bug counterattacks, or you can’t replenish or reinforce.
The developers use the film’s aesthetics for the cut-scenes and much of the voice acting and music. The audio design is outstanding with solid voice acting (The commander is every grumpy, micromanaging boss you have ever had). The music is excellent, and the game has some nice weapon sound effects.
The cut-scenes, art, and voice direction encapsulate the verbose bravado and hysterical ridiculousness of the film series flawlessly. The satire of the film comes through in some of the scenarios as well, like when a platoon is assigned to escort a prisoner back to base for his execution, live and in color on TV. Then your commander grumbles that the prisoner will have to be rushed “through hair and makeup” thanks to you!
Some minor issues crop up in the game. Some players will find the pacing more than a bit slow, but such pacing does avoid the annoying “click-fest” that many RTT games devolve into. The mini-strategic map could use some work; the thing is difficult to use and pretty unintelligible, even when expanded to large size. This makes handling multiple units at the same time difficult. There are a couple of minor bugs (no pun), like units shuddering and trembling when they pass through one another, and one MI squad ended up trapped in a hive never to be used again.
Also, the earlier and easier scenarios can quickly develop a “wash, rinse, repeat” feel as you seem to move through very similar terrain and have very similar mission goals. The later scenarios have less of this problem as they are significantly larger and more difficult.
Summing up, Starship Troopers: Terran Command is a nicely done RTT game. While not particularly groundbreaking or innovative, it is an entertaining time-waster. So, if you’re a fan of the Starship Troopers franchise or a fan of solid shoot ’em-up RTTs you should give it a go.
This reviewer received a PC code for the purpose of this review.
Patrick S. Baker is a former US Army Field Artillery officer and retired Department of Defense employee. He has degrees in History, Political Science and Education. He has been writing history, game reviews, and science-fiction professionally since 2013. Some of his other works can found at Sirius Science Fiction, Sci-Phi Journal, Armchair General, and Historynet.com.