Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! Review

Auroch Digital had one obvious problem coming into Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War!: anyone who played Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun was going to spend the first hour asking whether this was a genuine new shooter or just the same template wearing a Mobile Infantry helmet. The good news is that Ultimate Bug War! clears that hurdle more often than not. The better news is that it understands what makes Starship Troopers fun in game form. This is not just about mowing down alien insects. It is about turning every firefight into a collapsing military spectacle, where discipline fails, bodies pile up, and the Federation insists everything is going exactly to plan.

That tone carries a lot of weight here, and Auroch Digital mostly nails it. The FMV framing is the smartest part of the whole package. Briefings, propaganda clips, and campy live-action interludes give the campaign personality that a lot of retro shooters simply do not have. Instead of feeling like throwaway nostalgia dressing, the FMV material keeps the game anchored to the 1997 film’s flavor of deadpan military absurdity. It sells the fantasy of being one more disposable cog in a heroic meat grinder. If you came looking for a shooter that actually acts like Starship Troopers, this absolutely speaks the language.

The weapon feel is where the game proves it is more than a licensing exercise. Guns have a thick, crunchy punch that fits the retro presentation without becoming mushy or weightless. Automatic rifles chatter with enough recoil and audio bite to make suppressive fire satisfying, while heavier weapons provide the kind of screen-filling feedback that makes bug swarms feel worth unloading into. Auroch understands that a boomer shooter arsenal needs distinct rhythms, not just different damage values, and Ultimate Bug War! generally gets there. Swapping between crowd-clearing tools and harder-hitting finishers creates a tempo that keeps combat moving forward. It does not quite reach the manic purity of the best guns in Boltgun, but it is close enough that the comparison flatters rather than condemns it.

Just as important, the enemies justify that arsenal. The bugs are not a single interchangeable mass, even though the game obviously wants you to enjoy shredding dozens at once. Smaller swarming threats force constant movement and target prioritization, while heavier Arachnids and ranged attackers push fights into moments of panic. The enemy roster is varied enough to stop combat from becoming a pure hold-trigger exercise, especially once the campaign starts layering multiple threat types into larger encounters. The best fights feel like the game is asking you to process chaos rather than simply survive volume. That distinction matters. Good horde shooters create pressure. Better ones make pressure readable. Ultimate Bug War! usually lands on the right side of that line.

Where it separates itself from Boltgun is in scale and framing. Boltgun is about one absurdly lethal warrior ripping through heretics like a chainsaw given legs. Ultimate Bug War! is about being a soldier in a war that is always bigger than you are. Levels feel more exposed, more desperate, and more tied to frontline collapse than dungeon-clearing. There is a stronger sense of participating in battles instead of merely traversing arenas. Trenches, colonies under siege, and wide killing fields give the game a flavor that is specific to the license. Even when the underlying structure resembles Auroch’s previous work, the mood is different enough to keep this from feeling like a reskin.

That said, the campaign pacing is not flawless. The opening stretch is strong because it front-loads spectacle and novelty. You get the propaganda, the bugs, the chunky guns, and the immediate pleasure of a retro FPS that knows exactly what fantasy it is selling. In the middle hours, the cracks show. Encounter design remains energetic, but the campaign can lean too hard on familiar rhythms, and some missions begin to blur together instead of building escalation cleanly. It is never dull for long, but there are stretches where the game feels content to be consistently good when it should be trying harder to become memorable. The final impression is positive, though it lacks the relentless upward momentum of the genre’s best campaigns.

Replay hooks are more modest than the premise suggests. This is a single-player game, and that matters. If you are hoping for co-op bug hunts, this is not that kind of Starship Troopers adaptation. The appeal comes from replaying missions for pure combat enjoyment, chasing higher efficiency, revisiting favorite levels, and squeezing more value out of the arsenal and difficulty settings rather than from a deep progression metagame or social loop. For some players that will be refreshing. For others, especially those used to swarm shooters built around repeatable squad play, it may feel thinner than expected. The core action is good enough to support revisits, but the game does not offer much beyond the pleasure of shooting bugs well.

Performance, based on launch reporting and platform listings, appears broadly solid across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2, though the most demanding large-swarm scenes are the obvious stress points. That is hardly shocking for a game built around filling the screen with alien bodies and explosive chaos. The retro art direction helps keep the spectacle readable and generally stable, but this is still the sort of game where platform differences matter most when the battlefield gets crowded. On stronger hardware, that pressure should be easier to absorb. On less capable systems, the question is less whether the game runs and more how gracefully it handles peak mayhem. Even so, the overall impression at launch is of a polished release rather than a technical disaster, which already puts it ahead of plenty of licensed action games.

The biggest compliment I can give Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! is that it understands adaptation is not just about iconography. Plenty of licensed shooters can throw familiar enemies and logos at the screen. This one actually captures the rhythm of the property. It knows Starship Troopers should feel gung-ho, stupid, theatrical, and grimly funny all at once. The FMV does a lot of that heavy lifting, but so does the battlefield design, the enemy density, and the sense that every mission is one order away from becoming a massacre.

It also avoids the deadliest sin hanging over it: feeling like Boltgun with the serial numbers swapped out. The similarities are real, and anyone pretending otherwise is being generous to the point of dishonesty. But the similarities are mostly in foundation and craftsmanship, not identity. Ultimate Bug War! has its own combat texture, its own pacing issues, and most importantly its own sense of place. It is less feral than Boltgun, less singular in its power fantasy, and more interested in warzone spectacle than pure forward momentum.

So no, this is not Auroch Digital catching lightning in a bottle for a second time. It is something slightly messier but still worth playing: a confident retro shooter that translates its source material with genuine affection and a good eye for what makes bug blasting satisfying. It does not reinvent the form, and it could use stronger mid-campaign escalation plus more meaningful long-tail hooks. But when the guns are barking, the bugs are flooding over the ridge, and some Federation-approved maniac is barking propaganda in your ear, Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! absolutely does its part.

Score: 8/10