Starship Troopers
- November 22, 2000 00:00 AM PST
My name is Johnny Rico, and I am from Buenos Aires. Avenge my family. Play my RTS game.
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Starship Troopers for the PC puts you in control of a small squadron of Mobil Infantry consisting of up to 18 units pulled from a pool of up to 35 loyal troopers. Your job is to guide your units, RTS style, through various maps and missions, cleaning out bug-infested territory, capturing arachnid specimens, and rescuing troopers who've gone MIA. The game employs the standard select-and-deploy method of RTS gameplay, complete with most of the handy shortcuts. You can group entire units into one platoon, set up waypoints and patrols.
Each of your units can carry a nice array of power armor and weapons, and surviving units gain experience points, enabling them to fight better and use better equipment the longer they can last. Your squads can take a number of "attitudes" ranging from stealthy (creep by undetected, disturb nothing) to berserk (disobey any further keyboard input, you suicidal bastard). Plus, each type of arachnid enemy also harbors some sort of weapon weakness, so what weapons you choose to equip your men with will have an impact on how efficient you are as a killing machine.
Unfortunately, a truly heinous camera system renders all of these nifty features virtually useless. Instead of being able to freely search around the map, Starship Troopers' camera locks around the unit that was last selected, meaning that if that unit goes north, you're going with it whether you like it or not. All you really can do is swing around the unit by holding down the right mouse button. While it may not sound all that obnoxious, being denied the freedom of full camera control makes for rough sailing. Any attempt to break up your squad beyond one giant mass will only serve to frustrate. Sure, you've got weapons and weaknesses and armor and experience points and all that nice stuff - but thanks to the limitations of the camera, the game basically boils down to "mass of a dozen guys wanders map and opens fire on anything that moves," effectively schlucking the strategy out of real-time strategy. My guess is they made this camera design choice in order to simulate a Trooper's limited "field of vision" - and in that respect, it's successful at generating some tension. You often have no idea if a bug or a hive is lying just around the corner; but it sure makes playing the game a chore.
The graphics in the game are about par for a 3D-accelerated planet-scarring romp. Despite the fact that the programmers didn't bother to use anything beyond the low-polygon count cookie-cutter 3D bag of lighting and terrain tricks, the folks at Blue Tongue have managed to satisfyingly recreate the look of the movie's rocky planetoid battle scenes. Still, the game looks basically the same no matter where you end up fighting� generic, rolling video game terrain, too-similar enemies, and a squad of indistinguishable guys dressed in green holding guns standing in the middle of it all.
The game's music is pretty passive and barely noticeable, the voice acting has none of the goofy camp charm of the movie (here, it's just plain "bad" instead of "sort of intentionally bad, I think"), but a good mix of gunfire-and-explosion sound effects helps keep things lively.
While the prospect of running around, blowing the hell out of space arachnids starts off as a blast, a lack of variety, the fact that you can't save your games mid-mission, and a camera that actually serves as a One Ring-sized gameplay burden ensure that the fun won't last for long. So much for Buenos Aires - you deserve a more fitting memorial than this.
