This Starship Troopers game is a worthy Helldivers 2 alternative | Digital Trends

Starship Troopers: Extermination might have entered early access prior to the launch of Helldivers 2, but its 1.0 release this October will now have to follow up Arrowhead Game Studios’ popular shooter. That’s both a blessing and a curse. Starship Troopers: Extermination will no doubt be compared to the exhilarating Helldivers 2 — I’m doing so right now — despite the fact that it’s quite different as a 16-player cooperative first-person shooter with base-building elements. On the bright side, developer Offworld also has the chance to learn from and be better than Helldivers 2 in other ways.

By adopting elements of Helldivers 2′s metagame and offering up a single-player experience, Starship Troopers: Extermination could be poised for success. Considering that some players are mad at Arrowhead Game Studios and Helldivers 2 right now, this is a good time for an officially licensed Starship Troopers game to swoop in and attract some of Helldivers’ audience.

A single-player experience

The primary draw of Starship Troopers: Extermination is its cooperative mode, in which players fight bugs as a solider in the Deep Space Vanguard. Extermination has some distinct flair on paper: matches that support up to 16 players, bugs remain on the ground after they are killed, and underlying character class and base-building systems underneath. To ease players into the game’s complexities, Offworld is creating a single-player experience called Special Operations Group, or S.O.G.

It will only have 25 missions at release, but it stars Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico from the films, and Offworld plans on adding more content post-launch. At a hands-off preview event, project lead Peter Maurice explained that these levels were designed to teach players the basics of the game, but aren’t packed to the brim with obvious signposts. He says that honing down Starship Troopers: Extermination into a single-player experience allowed them to refine tech and mission design behind the entire game, which yields benefits for the multiplayer modes.

Lead game designer Chaz Barker tells Digital Trends that there were challenges in ensuring that the AI bots helping players don’t feel overpowered and making sure player felt like they had agency in the story. Overall, though, he seemed to have enjoyed recontextualizing the game in this way.

“Weaning the level designs away from large, expansive areas for 16 players and focusing it on a single-player experience and balancing for that has been part of the fun,” Barker says. “It’s actually not that much of a challenge; it’s more of a change in mindset.”

A more structured offline experience like this is also something that’s not very common in most modern co-op shooters. It’s the part of Starship Troopers: Extermination I’m excited about the most, and hopefully serves as an engaging gateway to the rest of the game. The developers played up that everything they do narratively is canon to the universe, clearly hoping that Sony Pictures draws from their characters, planets, and other narrative ideas in future Starship Troopers media.

Its own take on Major Orders

While Offworld is differentiating itself from Helldivers 2 in a lot of key ways, there is one feature clearly inspired by its metagame. Players can join Companies, which are this game’s version of a clan system. Those clans can then work together on company operations chosen by leaders in order to get rewards. On top of that, there will be time-limited campaigns in the Galactic Front, and the community will have to work together between companies within the allotted timeframe in order to get them done.

The results of these Galactic Front campaigns will affect the course of Starship Trooper: Extermination’s post-launch narrative and encounters players will come across on certain planets. Clearly, the Galactic Front system is taking notes from the Major Orders in Helldivers 2. The community needing to work together to accomplish these objectives is part of what rocketed Helldivers 2 to popularity in the first place, so it’s sensible for Starship Troopers: Extermination to implement a similar system.

Barker told me more about the consequences players will face if they fail.

“We really want to make sure that the stakes are high with this kind of thing. If you fail, you fail, and you’re going to get an earful from the Sky Marshall,” Barker says. “That’s not to say that we might not set that Galactic Front again in the future, but we would change it up and add different rewards. There will be certain things that would be exclusive for a Galactic Front, a badge of honor kind of thing … I also want to make sure that if you do lose a Galactic Front, we could in theory take that story into the future and say you failed this mission so this changes the story.”

It’s clear that Offworld is aware of its competition and is finding clever ways to stand on its own despite that. Starship Troopers: Extermination gives players a better on-ramp to the experience with its S.O.G. single-player missions, and then providing its own spin on Major Orders with the Galactic Front campaigns, hopefully giving the game a passionate community post-release. If you’re getting burnt out on Helldivers 2 and are looking for something that hits many of the same high notes while readjusting many other elements, then this a game that should be on your radar.

Starship Troopers: Extermination will exit early access on PC and launch for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 11.