Satire is a difficult challenge for a game developer. On the one hand, the satire needs to criticise the subject. On the other hand, if the game feels too good to play, it is very easy to feel like a celebration of the subject instead. If you were to undermine the satire of Starship Troopers you would be left with something overtly pro-fascism, so the developers of Starship Troopers Ultimate Bug War really (really) needed to walk that tightrope well. Thankfully, it largely does.
Ultimate Bug War is developed by the same people behind the really very excellent Warhammer 40K Boltgun, and the heritage is there right from the outset. It’s a big-action boomer shooter that feels like it was taken directly from that sub-genre’s heyday.
Yet it’s also different. Where Boltgun was also inspired by the modern Doom’s ability to make players feel seriously powerful (and brutal) in the face of enemy hordes, Ultimate Bug War wants to make you feel like humans are at a serious disadvantage. It only takes a few hits to drop your character, and even the tutorial (where you play a game of laser tag that only takes two or three hits to knock you down) is willing to punish you if you head off and try to take on the bugs as a one-man-army.
Most of the time, there are squads of human soldiers running around, and you can additionally summon more to your side. They’re dullards, and that’s putting it nicely, but having other targets around for the bugs to slaughter has a direct impact on your own character’s survivability.
As a big fan of Starship Troopers, there were times this set-up made me feel quite uncomfortable, as it did seem to be feeding directly into the idea that the bugs are a viciously effective existential threat to humanity and the soldiers fighting bravely to hold back the tide – exactly the sentiment that the film works so hard to satirise as the rhetoric of fascism.
But then a cutscene would pop up, and I was reminded that the game does a really clever job of fitting within the film’s satire. See, the concept of Ultimate Bug War is that the game that you’re playing is a propaganda game that kids in the fictional Starships Troopers universe play to be inspired to join the “real” war against the bugs. You get to watch ads with real actors promoting Ultimate Bug Wars and everything.
This is clever, and so very poignant today, given that so many of the popular video games in the shooter genre that Ultimate Bug Wars exists in really does do this. I’ve been railing against how the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield support military adventurism and have subsequently had a direct correlation to the military hero worship that America now embraces as a source of national pride. All Ultimate Bug Wars does is take this to the same hyperbolic degree that Starship Troopers itself does (though given America’s behaviour today, it’s sadly less hyperbolic than it once was).
It’s also clever because it’s exactly the context that allowed the developers to focus on making Bug Wars an enjoyable game to play without having to worry about whether the gameplay would undermine the satire. And it is an enjoyable game to play. Controls are taut, and there’s a nicely visceral kick to each weapon. Levels are fairly open, and while the combat is too frequent to make exploration part of the experience, there’s some nice traversal with zip lines and the like. There’s also a steady reminder that the game has you playing tongue-in-cheek propaganda with the comments of your allies and commander over the radio.
The variety is as good as you could expect for this kind of straightforward shooter action, too. There are times you’ll be defending an outpost, and other times you’ll be on the assault. There are some massive bugs that act as boss battles, and, of course, more massive hordes than you could ever hope for. There aren’t all that many levels. Though each one will last as long as half an hour to play through, this is still a fairly short game. The ability to play some bonus levels as a bug, slaughtering humans, was meant to add longevity to the game, but those bug levels don’t play particularly well at all, and don’t carry the same satirical value.
For the most part, the game isn’t much of a looker, but then I chalk that up to the very self-aware nature of the satire and the perception that the propaganda military shooters have a reputation for being “brown.” Of course, the sheer scope of the enemy hordes probably has something to do with it too, given that there is the occasional framerate drop on the Switch 2 as it is. Nothing that undermines the gameplay enough to worry about, but the game is clearly pushing the hardware.
All in all, Starship Troopers Ultimate Bug War sits nicely next to the EDF series as a parody of militarism in video games. EDF does it by embracing B-grade aesthetics and bonkers attitude, where Starship Troopers instead builds on the film to deliver something sharp and more pointed. It’s sad that this game is just so intensely relevant right now, but that is the world we live in. As a satire, Starship Troopers Ultimate Bug War isn’t particularly funny, because it’s increasingly our reality.
