The 1997 movie version of Starship Troopers featured many space soldiers terribly dead to show how bad society as a whole was based on joining the army to fight aliens. So it’s strange that I rarely lost soldiers in at least half of Starship Troopers: Terran Command’s 19 mission campaign. I’m not proud of it. These bugs are tolerant at an early stage. But when this simple but capable RTS finally heats up and provides a fairly exciting single-player experience in the second half, it’s a lot of fun to watch the genocide.
I promise I’m not going to spend the entire review on joking about how “buggy” it is. In a technical sense, it’s not really bad. The only exception is pathfinding of the unit. In this case, if the squad is too close or too close to the obstacle, this severe jitter will occur, as if you were jumping on the stimulus pack. Movement orders can be unreliable, especially if the squad must avoid obstacles and make U-turns. From time to time, if you give the unit a direct attack command and they can’t look at the target, they just fall asleep and let the flock tear them apart. I rarely used it because it takes so many micros to effectively operate a large, chunky Marauder mecha, and sometimes it’s more responsible than an asset.
But once I got the hang of these habits, I realized that there were some surprisingly satisfying tactical actions. Terran Command aims to maximize the line of sight to the enemy. This is because mobile infantry are generally attacking beyond bugs. However, hordes of chittering have significant advantages in maneuverability, number, and close combat. Most squads cannot shoot through allies and can either take a clear shot to deal full damage, reduce damage with a partial shooting line, or block completely. It takes a lot of clicks to optimize the field of fire, but I enjoy using terrain and altitude to set the perfect kill zone to monitor the bugs melting before the onslaught. did. This is a pretty clever way to keep things interesting, even if you have a basic rifleman for a basic drone.
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The problem is that at least the whole first half of the campaign was so easy that I didn’t feel I needed to pay too much attention to my positioning. This is a mission-by-mission attack movement simulator 2022, which only charges first in a fairly proper order and often has few or no casualties. You can adjust the difficulty, but you can’t really do it with subtle nuances or interesting ways, such as adding new enemies or reducing resources. It simply applies a percentage-based damage reduction to all your weapons. that’s it. Anyway, most missions don’t even have a penalty for losing the entire army. The two resources, supplies and war support, are both simple population caps, so there is no shortage of soldiers. This fits into the world of Starship Troopers, where the Federation is pleased to continue to supply a warm body to the meat grinder. But it also removes a bite from many scenarios.
And before we move on, we need to mention that the 20-hour campaign is really everything here. My complaint that the first half is a cakewalk shouldn’t be a big deal unless it’s basically half of the whole Terran command. There is no multiplayer. It feels like I missed a big chance. I wanted to protect the base from friends who were trying to conquer it, or to participate in cooperative operations. There’s a huge number of units and a completely different playstyle, and it might have been really fun to tinker with it, but there’s no bug campaign. There isn’t even a scenario editor. At the end of the campaign, all the work that TerranCommand needs to provide is completed, except for a few challenge scenarios.
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Fortunately, for me, the second half of the campaign, not the soldiers, really gets hot and presents some interesting challenges. Having to balance my resources between defending refugee camps and getting rid of hellish attacks in the war-torn city of the planetary capital is more of a problem. Throwing was just a real test of the skill, as it doesn’t just do the trick. The overrun underground facility, which had no way to get reinforcements, was tense and full of deadly surprises, so we carefully considered how to approach the new rooms and corridors. The difficulty curve really hit me in some respects, but by then I was asking for it.
The story is not particularly groundbreaking. Your job is to tackle the insect epidemic on the desolate mining planet Kwarasha and deal with various elements of the Federal Army along the way. The dialogue between the unit and the named character is very disturbing, but it’s perfect for the Starship Trooper. The scenario writer seems to be satirical in the movie, with a lot of satire asking, “Are we bad guys?” The moment when the union organizer tries to protect the station while it is being executed live. Some of the mobile infantry are trying to do good, but it’s definitely portrayed as a horrifying parody of Jackboot’s military fetishism that Paul Verhoeven envisioned. Unfortunately, Neil Patrick Harris doesn’t exist.
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Fans of Robert Heinlein’s novels and the expanded Starship Troopers world are also looking forward to the Terran Command, which incorporates elements from those sources. Although they appear quite late in the story, it was great to see the Federal Marauder Mecha and the Elite Powered Armor Infantry rendered in modern graphics for the first time. It’s also a pretty cool game! Combat can be very chaotic, so I was impressed with the use of colors, lighting, and UI to make everything readable and understandable.
Bugs have come to bring surprising shares as well, and learning which tool to use for which enemy has become a big part of keeping the war interesting later. Scorpions and Royal Guards can melt even the most well-organized regular shooting lines, so it’s imperative to bring a missile launcher and be truly accurate in focus shooting. I can also use combat engineers to maintain itself with autopilot, basically leaving the base completely unmanned and freeing more troops for offensive operations, overlapping statics. I really enjoyed seeing if I could build a network of defenses.
