The Starship Troopers The franchise has enjoyed a bit of an upswing in recent years. Terran command brought it back to real-time strategy, and Extermination threw players into large-scale co-op battles with a hint of Misc. Now, Auroch Digital’s Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! goes back to basics with a PS2 era inspired single player shooter. Do you want to know more?
Released on March 16, 2026, the game takes citizens straight into the Bug War from Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 sci-fi classic. The narrative is more of a series of flashbacks as told by General Johnny Rico (yes, they got Casper Van Dien back) and new protagonist Major Samatha “Sammy” Dietz, with the developers still taking us to iconic moments like the invasion of Klendathu.
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“It was a pretty big shift, both in terms of the level design workflow and the approach to the player experience,” David Plant, senior programmer at Auroch Digital, told Space via our Q&A exchange. “You can’t tailor the exploration experience from minute to minute when you give the player so much freedom. You have to have a lot going on, you have to offer a lot of choices, you want to reward exploration, but you also have to make sure they don’t feel lost.”
He is not wrong. The first shocker when we started playing was having so much freedom to tackle targets from the start. Fortunately, the level design never becomes complicated or laborious to explore.
Despite its nostalgic visual style, there is an underlying performance cost in filling open spaces with bugs, mobile infantry NPCs and loads of particle effects. How did the team do it? The game’s launch is limited to current-gen consoles and PC is half that, but Auroch elaborated on the cost of his vision for this shooter: “We had to design things in a way that kept a lot of things separate, so we could partially load some bits, and make sure the NPCs and the flow of the level behaved nicely wherever it went, but it wasn’t a lot of work. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
Auroch Digital is best known for Boltgun, and there are definitely some similarities here, but as Plant explains, “It’s a very different IP and setting, so we needed to respect that and make it feel like its own thing instead of treading the same ground as Boltgun did.”
Ultimate Bug War! is really a different beast. First, you play as a blue-eyed grunt instead of an unstoppable killing machine. Sure, Dietz ends up a Federation hero, but during the Bug War she was just another soldier thrown into the meat grinder.
“We wanted to have a lot of big heroic moments, and new encounters, and make each area feel very distinct. We learned what weapons players were reaching for, and why, and that was a big guiding light in the design of the types of weapons we have here,” Plant added of the game’s overall design philosophy. It mostly pays off with an even mix of big “action hero” moments and “just another soldier” sections reminiscent of the defenses of the Whiskey Outpost.
As the overzealous recruits around you are bloody massacred while screaming (special attention has been paid to NPC barking in this one), Dietz never feels overpowered. The glitches are atrocious, and a wrong decision can lead to death in a few melees. Sometimes you don’t even need the bugs’ help, because in true Helldivers fashion, players can easily blow themselves up with the Federation’s largest explosive weapons and air support. Friendly fire won’t result in mission failure though, so just get the job done, citizen. Sacrifice brings victory!
Getting to that “sweet spot” between chaos and well-calculated power fantasy wasn’t easy, as Plant commented on the team’s early gameplay tests: “Early on, we definitely had too many NPCs and they were trying to be too smart. It was way too chaotic… It just felt cranky. Dialing it back to more focused, allowable encounters with more NPCs to be able to predict more NPCs… balance things much more effectively.”
The World Federation’s propaganda allowed the developers to “play up the heroics and set pieces without betraying the implied realism.”
Titular Ultimate Bug War! is actually a creation of the human government’s own developers – a video game used to train children and teenagers. It’s a clever framing that instantly elevates the narrative and the surprising amount of cutscenes. Also, it allowed the Auroch to easily justify the existence of a bonus Bug Mode as another part of the Federation’s in-universe research.
It’s a little disappointing that the insects don’t get nearly as much time to shine when you gain control of a new type of arachnid, as their optional levels are nice respites and distinct changes of pace if played between the “war is hell” scenarios Sammy has to push through.
Ultimate Bug War! doesn’t force players into a mixed campaign structure, but it definitely feels like the recommended way to play it. Otherwise, the confederation’s history feels a little too short. Those who vibe with the premise and the loop will no doubt enjoy replaying it on higher difficulties.
There’s a light strategic twist to the glitch levels, as you choose whether to clear out smaller groups of enemies yourself or create new spawn points for other arachnids as they attempt to attack multiple fortified outposts. You can fly, rush, and cut down entire groups of Federation soldiers, and even temporarily transform into a more powerful, fire-breathing bug that restores lost health. It’s great fun that ultimately feels like a test for something bigger… or at least that’s what I hope.
“Multiplayer was never considered,” Auroch told us when asked about the project’s inception and original scope, noting that neither player-versus-player nor co-op were options. Much of that came down to budget constraints, but the developers also point out an obvious obstacle: “It would have put us in the same competitive space as Helldivers 2 and Starship Troopers: Extermination instead of being our own thing.”
Even when the team decided to create a strictly single-player experience, “there were several shifts in tone for the core gameplay” due to the release of these two games. “We wanted to make sure we took our own path to get there,” says Plant. “We are happy that we have been able to differentiate ourselves as much as we can.”
“Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War!” is now available for purchase on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. A PC code was provided by Dotem.
