Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! Is A PS2 Fever Dream For Helldivers Fans

Starship Troopers has flirted with games before, but Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! might be the first time the series has really leaned into what made Paul Verhoeven’s film so sticky in people’s brains. It is not trying to compete with Helldivers 2 on spectacle or with modern Starship Troopers: Extermination on scale. Instead, Dotemu and Auroch Digital are building a “new retro FPS” that looks like someone unearthed a lost PS2 shooter, slapped a fake in-universe publisher logo on the box, and told the Mobile Infantry it was the hottest training sim on the market.

This is a hands-off preview based on the reveal materials, early details from Dotemu and Auroch Digital, and platform coverage. But even from the outside, Ultimate Bug War! already has a very specific pitch: what if Helldivers-style bug cleansing had been made in the early 2000s, then sold to you as government propaganda?

A PS2-era fever dream in 2026

Auroch Digital made a name for itself with Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, one of the better modern takes on the so‑called boomer shooter. Ultimate Bug War! pushes that idea further into console nostalgia. The presentation lands somewhere between late PS1 shooters and early PS2 sci fi: chunky geometry, simple lighting, bold color blocking and big, noisy texture work that reads clearly even when the screen is filled with chitin and muzzle flashes.

Screens and footage show wide-open battlefields broken up by stark industrial bases, canyon walls and angular Federation structures. Environments are busy but not cluttered, with just enough detail to sell places like Klendathu and Planet P while leaving plenty of space for swarms of arachnids to pour over ridges and out of bug holes. Ground is mottled with large, repeating textures that look just a bit too clean and contrasty, like they were painted for CRTs rather than 4K panels.

Enemies and marines share the same slightly exaggerated, low-poly silhouette treatment. Limbs are blocky, armors are made of big flat plates, and the iconic Morita rifle has the thickness of a toy gun scaled up several times. It is stylized but not parodic, the kind of art that can sell explosions and dismemberment without ever looking outright realistic.

Importantly for a Starship Troopers game, the gore is there, just filtered through the retro lens. Bugs come apart in sprays of neon ichor and chunky sprites, and dismemberment reads more like a 2002 PC shooter than anything photo real. It fits the satirical tone perfectly: violent, loud, but just distant enough to feel like a piece of state-approved entertainment.

FMV Johnny Rico and the return of propaganda TV

The smartest hook Ultimate Bug War! has is its embrace of full-motion video. Dotemu and Auroch Digital have literally brought back Casper Van Dien to play General Johnny Rico in newly shot FMV sequences, wrapping the game in the same recruitment-ad packaging as the original film.

In-universe, the game is positioned as an official product from “FedDev,” the state-sponsored software arm of the United Citizen Federation. General Rico and new Federation hero Major Samantha “Sammy” Dietz appear on-screen to hype up the latest version of the Mobile Infantry’s favorite combat simulator. The FMV beats riff on the film’s newsbreaks and propaganda spots, with Rico barking calls to enlist, praising the player’s performance and dangling that eternal carrot: “Service guarantees citizenship.”

The tone is important here. Where a lot of licensed shooters would treat these clips as simple briefing videos, Ultimate Bug War! uses them as part of the satire. Rico is a smiling, battle-scarred salesman for endless war, gleefully walking you through new ways to vaporize bugs. Dietz plays the straight soldier, narrating war stories and tactical pointers that the Federation then repackages as chewable infotainment.

For players who grew up swapping FMV-heavy discs on PS1 and early PS2, there is a double nostalgia hit. On one level, you are getting the return of Johnny Rico in live action. On another, you are getting that specific weirdness of mid-budget games that used real actors to paper over what the hardware could not do.

A solo campaign framed as “the ultimate training tool”

Where Helldivers is all about shared failure and co-op chaos, Ultimate Bug War! is laser-focused on a single player campaign. You are not the nameless grunt this time. You step into the boots of Major Samantha Dietz, a war veteran whose memories form the backbone of the story.

Set about 25 years after the events of the original movie, the game has Dietz recount her hunt for the Assassin Bug, a new arachnid threat that emerges during the First Bug War. Missions are framed as combat vignettes pulled from her service record. The Federation, naturally, has turned those memories into a glossy training program and slapped a price tag on it.

Structurally, that gives Auroch Digital room to build a brisk, level-based campaign rather than a sprawling live service loop. Expect distinct operations stationed across Klendathu, Planet P and new frontlines, each built around a specific scenario or escalation. One mission might have you trench-running with a squad of Mobile Infantry as waves of warriors crash into your line. Another could shift tone, sending you into bug-infested caverns with limited visibility and pressure on ammo.

The tone is very much “greatest hits of the war” rather than an earnest attempt at a grounded military arc. Dietz’s narration lets the writing lean into tall tales and selective memory. When you succeed spectacularly, it is because the training tape edits out all the messy bits. When you fail, well, that footage was never meant for public consumption.

Boomer shooter fundamentals with Helldivers-style spice

Purely on mechanics, Ultimate Bug War! is being pitched as a fast, punchy shooter for the boomer audience that grew up on Quake, Red Faction and TimeSplitters. Movement has a snappy pace and gun handling is exaggerated, with big muzzle flashes, loud screen shake and swarms of enemies that demand quick target prioritization.

Your arsenal covers 14 weapons, headlined by the Morita rifle. Early descriptions suggest a mix of familiar archetypes: assault rifles with thudding recoil, shotguns that turn chitin into mist at close range, heavier ordnance for clearing tunnel mouths and bug clusters. The retro aesthetic makes each weapon visually distinct, with strong silhouettes and big texture work that holds up at a glance.

On top of that foundation sits a layer of Tactical Supports, 11 in total, that act as the game’s nod to Helldivers-style stratagems. These are the flashy call-ins and special abilities that turn a losing fight into an overwhelming victory. Think orbital bombardments that carve trenches into Klendathu’s surface, supply drops that scatter the field with extra ammo and heavy weaponry, or turret deployments that hold a chokepoint while you reposition.

The difference is tempo. In Helldivers, call-ins are the center of the experience and come with input mini-games and co-op coordination. In Ultimate Bug War!, they look more like power plays within a classic single player level. You push to an objective, clear a nest, then pop a support to survive the counter attack. It is a layer of modern design grafted onto a very traditional shooter skeleton.

To top it off, Auroch is also letting players climb into Federation mechs. Piloting a mech turns you into a one-person bug grinder, trading agility for a huge jump in firepower and survivability. In an era where most retro shooters keep you on foot, having these armored segments feels like a deliberate nod to the PS2 tradition of mixing infantry levels with short, overpowered vehicle runs.

Playing both sides in “anti-bug combat training”

One of the more intriguing wrinkles in Ultimate Bug War! is its so-called anti-bug combat training mode. In keeping with the propaganda framing, the Federation has deemed it useful for troopers to understand how the enemy thinks. In practical terms, that means there are sequences where you control the bugs.

Details on the structure of this mode are still thin, but the premise is appealing. Temporarily inhabiting an arachnid perspective and attacking human positions lets the game explore its own AI and encounter design from an inverted angle. It also gives Auroch room to amp up the satire: the notion of human soldiers being asked to role-play as the enemy to become better killers is very on brand for Starship Troopers.

From a genre standpoint, this is where the game diverges from both Helldivers and most boomer shooters. The retro FPS revival has largely stuck to tightly controlled player power fantasies. Letting you spend even part of the experience as the swarm hints at experimentation under the throwback aesthetic.

Capturing the film’s satire for modern audiences

Plenty of games have borrowed the superficial cool of Starship Troopers: power armor, bug splatter, shouted slogans. Fewer have really tried to engage with its satire about militarism and media. Ultimate Bug War! has an opportunity here because its entire wrapper is in-universe fiction.

By presenting itself as a FedDev product, the game can constantly blur the line between genuine threat and manufactured hype. Mission briefings can oversell victories, FMV interludes can quietly contradict Dietz’s war stories, and unlockable intel can hint at the cost the Federation never wants to show you. The recruitment slogans that punctuate levels will feel triumphant and hollow at the same time, much like the film’s infamous “Would you like to know more?” stingers.

For boomer shooter fans, that layer of commentary sits on top of a very familiar core. The shooters of the late 90s and early 2000s were not subtle, but they did have a distinct attitude. Auroch Digital seems acutely aware of that, riffing on the era’s energy while avoiding its clunkier excesses. Expect modern niceties in controls, hit feedback and checkpointing, even as the visuals and FMV lean hard into nostalgia.

For Helldivers and co-op shooter audiences, Ultimate Bug War! will not replace four-player bug massacres. It is, however, aiming to scratch the same itch in a curated, authored way. The Helldivers influence shows in the emphasis on tactical call-ins, overwhelming odds and the sense of being one tiny cog in a very large, very uncaring machine. Where Arrowhead lets you create your own emergent stories with friends, Auroch and Dotemu are scripting theirs, then wrapping them in the cheery fascism of Federation TV.

The pitch: a lost Helldivers prequel from 2002

Taken together, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! reads like an alternate history artifact. In some parallel timeline, this was the PS2 tie-in that turned a cult film into a mid-budget shooter series, complete with FMV Rico and split-screen co-op. In ours, it arrives in early 2026 as a consciously retro love letter, aimed at players who know exactly what that kind of game would have felt like.

That focus could be its biggest strength. Instead of chasing modern live service trends, Dotemu and Auroch Digital are targeting a tight campaign, expressive weapons, a handful of spicy systems and a tone that actually understands Starship Troopers. If they can land the feel of PS2-era bug slaughter while making its propaganda wrapper bite again in 2026, Ultimate Bug War! might end up the perfect thing to load up between Helldivers 2 ops, when you still want to stomp bugs but feel like time traveling a couple of console generations.