EXTERMINATION And Starship Troopers
Currently, if you were to pre-purchase and play Starship Troopers: Extermination you would be met with a menu that looks like Gunz: The Duel backed with a Hollywood soundtrack from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. It’s beside me to admit it right here, and right now: but maybe the real Starship Sroopers were the friends we made along the way: or elsewise.
Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers feels like I have to declare the first part so we know what the second part means. Robocop, Benedetta, Total Recall. We know the style of the director even if we’re not first familiar with his entire ouevre. Somewhere, a childhood memory lurks on VHS or DVD or now syndicated on the SyFy Channel, or one some spurious streaming website the few months of the year they have real flesh and blood movies up on the service.
One time, hold on, let me get there – one time a decade ago I was working retail, opening boxes and putting more boxes on shelves. I had innumerable coworkers – an old man who I talked about politics with, probably 70 at the time of writing, who referred to himself as a “dyed in the wool socialist”. He knew more about every question I had for him than I could reasonably look up online or find in a book, and he knew it casually.
I wrote this, or maybe I could say I started writing it almost a year ago, at a point when the world was lacking in the Helldivers 2 department, the game that launched that took us all by storm for half a year or more. How does Helldivers 2 stack up against Starship Troopers? it’s at first, a comparison that is starkly impossible to ignore. One of these games is dripping so thoroughly in the movie-led comedy and ephemera of the 90’s classic, and the other is gesturing towards it while being unable to save face for its own execution.
Starship Troopers is a combination horde-mode base-building game centered around players accomplishing objectives around a map before exiting, or a mode we tried where the player is rooted in a small area and charged with collaborating with strangers to build a defensible base out of a limited pool of resources: pure marketing speech mechanics, in other words. It is Habitable and Defensible and Synergistic. In practice, most of the missions become absolutely chaotic in the final stretch in a way that feels Ripped From The Headlines (movie) and otherwise unplanned for. The acrobatic jukes of Helldivers are replaced with front-and center Gunplay Cameras and Class Loadouts.
Long and tall, we may never actually escape the shadow of Battlefield 2.
