Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War gets a satisfying demo and release date

The retro single-player FPS Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! has a demo available on Steam and it's going to release March 16th. Coming from the same team that made the rather excellent Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, it's another retro-styled licensed shooter.

We have a number of modern Starship Troopers games now including an online-focused FPS, and a strategy game but thankfully Ultimate Bug War is nicely different again.

Check out the new trailer:

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From the press release:

Today’s trailer includes a message delivered directly from General Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) introducing the brand new singleplayer campaign and its hero, Major Samantha Dietz (Charlotta Mohlin, Immortality). The player dives into Dietz’s wartime experiences from 25 years earlier, and the gameplay follows the promising young recruit on the hunt for the despicable Assassin Bug during the First Bug War, as depicted in the classic 1997 film. Dietz’s story spans missions brimming with thrilling action, expansive weaponry, and exemplary devotion to the Federation.

The demo gives you a single location to run through, the famous Zegema Beach and gives you a small taste of what to expect from the shooter. While the game will have various different locations, each mission appears to have quite an open setting with you picking the order of the objectives you do as you run around. In my testing it ran flawlessly with Proton 10.

As a big fan of the classic movie it seems to have the right amount of cheesiness to it, especially with the cut-scenes. The actual gameplay lets you relive some classic moments too with various weapons and different bugs, which I very much enjoyed blasting through. Throwing a grenade at a big tanker bug that came up through the floor - perfection.

The human NPCs AI is a little on the weak side though, they're ridiculously stupid and will walk right in front of your bullets, but in a way that's part of the charm here - as everyone is pure fodder, much like the original movie. The game is all about you living out that bug-stomping fantasy. Still, some tweaks to stop them just wandering directly in front of you are needed.

Incredibly promising, hopefully the rest of the game is just as good.