starship troopers the movie game robert a heinlein

In short, the gameplay is fast, frantic, and relentless and does a good job of matching the crazed intensity you might recall from the movie, with the promising engine capable of displaying up to 300 creepy-crawlies on screen at once.

Dodging the wild slashes and the frightening charge of the Warrior Bugs, they're not the hardest creatures we've ever faced, but the appeal comes more from their staggering numbers. Moving from one group of gung-ho soldiers to the next, you're swiftly sent off up the hill to (pretty much) single-handedly secure a compound being overrun by insects. In the now-familiar FPS style, you're constantly surrounded by chattering NPCs who don't seem to mind too much that 40-foot high bugs are swarming all over the place and help provide a few one-liners on cue. The first of the trio of missions in our preview build, The Compound, wastes no time thrusting you straight into bullet-spraying action in an outdoor mission that takes place under the cover of darkness.

It's very much a case of following waypoints, picking up important objects, defending key personnel and shooting the gelatinous green gunk out of anything that feels the need to crawl menacingly into view. As you might expect in a game where you're fighting a seemingly never-ending war against some very ugly giant arachnids, plot isn't hugely important. Set five years after the events of the 1997 movie, the game puts you in the slightly anonymous shoes of a member of the mobile infantry who's under Johnny Rico's command. So, when a three-level playable demo emerged blinking into the daylight, we were keen to see how well it fared in the excitement stakes next to Aftermath and Prey. On the other hand, the competition in the FPS field is, to say the least, intense, and Starship Troopers will have to be something very special to avoid summary dismissal next to the likes of Halo and Half-Life.

With a broader scope for developer Strangelite to work with there's certainly hope that the team can come up with something better than Hasbro managed with its forgettable strategy effort five years ago. Oh, and the completely ignored movie sequel, but we'll gloss over that one and move swiftly on. Heinlein book that the film was based on, as well as the animated cartoon series.

Fortunately the signs are promising that this isn't just another generic game-of-the-movie exercise, with Empire Interactive having widened its scope to take in the entire franchise including the cult Robert A. Releasing a game adaptation of Starship Troopers some eight years after the movie might not seem like the smartest commercial decision ever, but as far as '90s sci-fi action goes, Paul Verhoeven's movie was definitely one of the most memorable of its time.

Starship troopers the movie game robert a heinlein