Starship Troopers: Terran Command Review
The new Starship Troopers RTS captures the atmosphere of the movie, but doesn't accomplish much else.
My first exposure to Starship Troopers (1997) was via, of all things, Roblox. This was before Roblox was whatever it is today, c. 2009, when it was a piece of shit web app with less than zero functionality which no one but a few weirdo kids knew about. My friends and I would play on a cool sci-fi server with custom mods wherein waves of bugs would attack a desert outpost and you, Robloman, would drop down on ships to fend them off. I ended up joining the clan that ran this server; they called themselves the Mobile Infantry, and for a few months I went to all their roleplay events.
It was months before I learned that the "Mobile Infantry" were from a movie and that all this lore hadn't been made up by sixth graders.
So somehow or another I got my hands on Starship Troopers and, immediately, fell in love. I thought it was awesome. The satire wasn't lost on me, either; even as a kid I found it very funny, as a parody of militarism--but of course it wasn't hard to look past that, to focus in on how fucking badass it is to kill bugs.
Fast forward to 2022 and I still love the film. Verhoeven is one of my favorite directors. I've also since read the book, although it bears no relevance whatsoever on this conversation. So I was delighted when Starship Troopers: Terran Command was announced last year: a bug-killing RTS in the style of Dawn of War 2 where the player takes control of Verhoeven's Mobile Infantry and clears the planet of Kwalasha of Arachnid forces.
There have been multiple video game adaptations of Starship Troopers over the years, few of which are well-regarded today. I have not personally played any of them so I will refrain from commenting any further. What I will say is that the Zulu-esq blasting of bugs at sci-fi Rorke's Drift, what Aliens: Fireteam Elite goes for, makes more sense in this franchise than with xenomorphs, which are much too badass to be gunned down en masse like Arachnids.
Terran Command
Terran Command is a real-time strategy game with a focus on unit control. Base management is minimal to altogether absent in many missions, mostly concerning which units the player would like to requisition in what order. 'Supplies' for purchasing new squads of soldiers are rewarded by exploring the map or through completing story objectives. They are also dedicated to units, rather than spent, so that once a squad is killed its 'cost' is refunded and another can be called down in its place.
This can be done instantly, but each unit is given value through persistence by an experience system. The more bugs your soldiers kill, the more veteraned they become. At level three they earn a new ability and receive increased combat capabilities.
There's decent variety among the units: basic Mobile Infantry for mid-to-close range, Engineers with flamethrowers, Mk. 2 soldiers with more firepower but who are vulnerable in melee, Snipers, Officers who can give buffs, Radio Operators for calling down dropships, high powered Plasma Gun Dudes, and by the end power armored Apesuits and Marauder mechs. Most missions will involve leading some combination of these soldiers through cave systems, canyons, ravaged MI bases, or the open deserts of Kwalasha as Archie is driven from the lands.
When Terran Command is at its strongest the player is forced to defend a single point. He will arrange lines of fire based on the terrain and the varying range and weapon types of his units and wait for the bugs to come.
Watch on and smile as fire pours from the muzzle of each MI's rifle and destruction rains onto the enemy. The death animations for each Arachnid are supremely satisfying and do a phenomenal job capturing the spirit of Verhoeven's film. When an infantry squad blows apart an encroaching Warrior, it looks just like the movie.
When it comes to moving from static defenses, however, Terran Command cracks. Its systems of micromanagement is unrefined. For example your soldiers won't fire while moving unless you use Attack Move. However, if you do use Attack Move, they will continue to move to their destination regardless of whether or not there are hostiles present, marching right into melee range, where they will be promptly eviscerated.
This is a game where most of the enemy is melee, while all of the MI is ranged.
There's never any reason to not shoot at the bugs while moving, but the logic of the control schemes doesn't reflect this. The one exception is the Marauder mechs: they do stop moving at range when they come into contact with an enemy during A-Move, which is the exact opposite of what you want, because the Marauder mechs have melee range flamethrowers (and are also invulnerable, more or less).
If Arachnids so much as touch your units in melee they're toast. Replacing casualties is easy, but regardless of difficulty a single brush with a Tiger is lights out for your level three Mk. 2 squad. Since bugs have a tendency to erupt spontaneously from 'bug tunnels,' and to flank you from strange places, the often awkward and inelegant controls can and will lead to immense frustration. I found it impossible to keep Radio Operators alive, ever, because they would either march to the front and die instantly or get caught in the back by flanking units and die instantly. It should also be mentioned that every unit has at least one active ability to start with; good luck remembering to use it while babysitting pathfinding and target priority during a fight.
Early on in the game, when Arachnid unit types are limited and the player controls nothing more than squads of Snipers, Officers, and basic MIs, these problems are minor. But as the story progresses and things become more complicated, Terran Command becomes seriously frustrating.
SWATing Bugs
Like the MI the Arachnids have a number of 'special' units: Plasma Bugs for artillery, Tigers for heavy infantry, Spitters for long range, and worst of all the dreaded Scorpion, which I'll get to momentarily. These special Arachnids, especially the ranged variety, force you to leave your fortifications and break your lines of fire. This then forces you to engage with the game's awkward micromanagement schemes and often dysfunctional pathfinding programming, which then makes you grapple with the strange systems of targeting oncoming units, which often leads to all of your units becoming stuck on each other and not shooting anything while they let themselves get slaughtered.
This would be less pronounced of an issue were it not for the design of the special Arachnids themselves. They do tremendous damage to the player's units, often at vast ranges, and for some reason these long-range bugs also have the best armor, and by far the most HP.
Consider the Scorpion.
These boyos shoot plasma from their tails. They're also nigh invulnerable and have a habit of attacking in groups of sixty or seventy thousand. A single blast from a Scorpion will annihilate a unit of MI troopers. It'll also nearly kill a Marauder mech (which are otherwise almost completely invulnerable, as above).
It will do this from vast far range.
There is no way to kill Scorpions except with Rocket squads. Your Rocket squads will also never target Scorpions on their own if some other target is closer by because there is no AI for target prioritization whatsoever; all must be done manually. Even on Easy, which I reduced myself down to from Normal after becoming frustrated around mission ten, there were several levels that became absolute miserable slogs because of idiotic Scorpions. The balance is way off. They do way too much damage and are way too hard to kill.
But as I said, the real problem with ranged Arachnids is one of design principles. At its core, Terran Command is about, and at its strongest, when defending fortifications or fending off waves of melee Warriors and Tigers. Being forced to move from fortifications by bugs that outrange you neither adheres to the fantasy of Starship Troopers as a film nor makes sense from a gameplay perspective, because moving around these troops is clunky, awkward, and miserable.
Although I liked the game at first, I was ready to be done by the halfway point. Marauder and Apesuit spam trivializes the final missions, and while it's fun to send in the mechs to slaughter hordes of Arachnids by the thousand, it gets old fast. Any large scale combined arms operation in Terran Command is severely soured by the awkwardness of the controls and the poor enemy balance. I would have preferred sticking to defending my forts.
Verhoeven's Legacy
As for the story, it's what one might expect from a game trying to ape the tone of Verhoeven's film. The Federation is a comically militaristic and oppressive space empire which treats its citizens poorly and has no regard for the lives of its soldiers. One of the better missions is about recovering an escaped insurrectionist, bringing him back to a fort, and fending off the bugs while his execution is televised across the galaxy. Silly, but apropos. What the story tries to do is simple and mostly low-brow, but it works, and I even smiled a few times.
Yet I found the overall thrust of the story to be very weak. Each mission is disjointed from the last. We have the bugs on the run! Oh no, there are more bugs! Fend off the bugs! Ah, we're losing! We've regained our foothold! We have to clear out the caves! Once last battle to defeat the bugs! Wait, I guess there were more after all! Etc.
There's some kind of through line to the narrative of retaking Kwalasha, but it's exceptionally weak. The levels do not flow into each other in a logical way. This is one consequence of the way characters are handled: there are only three (the Major, the Colonel, and the Psychic), and they're never physically present on the map. They can never die and never fight alongside your units. Yet despite this they'll rather strangely make comments such as, "Whew! It stinks down here!" which will lead to you wondering if, maybe, they are supposed to be present somewhere after all.
Really these three characters are nothing more than narrators. They tell you what to do and that's about it. Outside a few moments they rarely matter and I can't assign any real qualities to any of them, beyond the fact that they feel right for this world and they're passably written. There is one nice moment at the end that does a lot to bring the story together, but it's not enough to prop up the whole game. I wish they had done more to construct a single cohesive plot.
What I wish they had done less of is stupid annoying cutscenes. There are tons of them in this game, all of which interrupt the flow of the missions. While I like being narrated at by the Major and the Colonel, I cannot stand it when control is taken away from me and I'm forced to look at some place in particular. That is a recipe for my neighbors to overhear me shouting at my monitor at 2am.
Conclusions
Starship Troopers: Terran Command is short. It took me about ten hours to beat. It has no multiplayer, no custom games, no co-op, and beyond its 20-mission main campaign, only two additional scenarios to play. It's also cheap, at $30. As an imitation of the tone of the 1997 film it can be considered a success both in narrative and gameplay, and at times it's a unique and enjoyable RTS. More usually, though, it's a clunky, cheap, and awkward game to play, with poorly designed enemy types and terrible unit controls.
For fans of Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (and RTS games), I'd recommend it, maybe at a discount. For those who don't care about the franchise and just want a new RTS, I advise you stay far away. Because Terran Command isn't very good. It's mediocre and often frustrating. The final six missions are an awful slog, and if you're like me you'll be wanting the game to end long before the credits roll. Even at $30 I'm not sure it's worth it. I almost didn't have the will to beat it myself, and I love this franchise.
Terran Command is available on Steam here.