DEBUG MODE
STARSHIP TROOPERS: TERRAN COMMAND gets both the strategy and the satire right
By Rick Lane
It’s all going bad on the planet of Kwalasha. I’ve just sent dozens of the Federation’s finest to their deaths to restart the planet’s mining operation, only to discover that the miners have drilled into an Arachnid nest. This needs a counter-response, but the mines are no longer Command’s priority. Instead, they redirect my unit to a prison, where they want my forces to hold back a bug assault long enough to see through the execution of a dissident, which is being broadcast live.
My soldiers man the defences to prepare for the bug assault, but there’s barely enough room on the walls for my soldiers to raise their weapons, hindering their ability to shoot. This makes them sitting ducks for the hulking tanker bugs, whose incendiary spit eats through my ranks but really it’s an before my rocket troopers can pulverise them into bug soup. In the end, we manage to hold off the attack, but only at the cost of dozens more soldiers, all so the Federation can watch a man fry on interstellar pay-per-view.
BUGGING OUT
Starship Troopers: Terran Command calls itself a strategy game, but really it’s an anti-strategy game. You spend most of its 19-mission campaign dealing with the fallout of Federation High Command’s terrible strategic decisions, cobbling together ragtag offences and frantic defences in scenarios that typically end either in narrowly averted disaster, or outright catastrophe. By focussing on the substance of Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic rather than the style (and it is the film this game is based on, not the novel) developer The Aristocrats has created a clever and quietly innovative RTS that’s thrilling and mechanically satisfying, while remaining true to the film’s lampoon of fascist imperialism.