The Starship Troopers franchise has been enjoying a bit of an upswing in recent years. Terran Command brought it back into real-time strategy, and Extermination threw players into large-scale co-op battles with a hint of Helldivers. Now, Auroch Digital’s Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! goes back to basics with a PS2-era-inspired single-player shooter. Would you like to know more?
Released on March 16, 2026, the game takes citizens right into the Bug War from Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 sci-fi classic. The narrative is more of a string 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 quite a big shift, both in terms of the workflow for level design and the approach taken to the player experience,” David Plant, senior programmer at Auroch Digital, told Space via our Q&A exchange. “You can’t tailor the minute-to-minute exploration experience when you give the player that much freedom. You need to have a lot going on, you need to offer lots of choices, you want to reward exploration, but you also need to make sure they don’t feel lost.”
He’s not wrong. The first shocker when we started playing was having so much freedom to tackle objectives from the get-go. Thankfully, the level design never becomes complicated or laborious to explore.
Despite its nostalgic visual style, there is an underlying performance cost of filling wide-open areas with bugs, Mobile Infantry NPCs, and plenty of particle effects. How did the team pull it off? The game’s launch being restricted to current-gen consoles and PC half-answers that, but Auroch elaborated on the cost of its 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 that the NPCs and the flow of the level all behaved nicely wherever you decided to go. It’s not glamorous, but a lot of work went into making sure that runs smoothly.”
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 honour that and make it feel like its own thing rather than treading the same ground Boltgun did.”
Ultimate Bug War! is indeed a different beast. For one thing, you’re playing as a blue-eyed grunt instead of an unstoppable killing machine. Sure, Dietz ends up as a hero of the Federation, but back during the Bug War, she was just another soldier thrown into the meat grinder.
“We wanted to have lots of big heroic moments, and novel encounters, and to make each area feel very distinct. We learned which weapons player gravitated towards, and why, and that was a big guiding light in designing the types of weapons we have here,” Plant added about the game’s overarching design philosophy. It mostly pays off with a steady mix of big “action hero” moments and “just another soldier” sections reminiscent of the defense of Whiskey Outpost.
As the overeager recruits around you are massacred in gory fashion while screaming (special attention has been paid to NPC barks in this one), Dietz never feels overpowered. The bugs are savage, and one wrong decision can lead to death in a few melee hits. Sometimes you don’t even need the bugs’ help, as in true Helldivers fashion, players can easily blow themselves up with the Federation’s biggest explosive weapons and air support. Friendly fire won’t result in mission failures, 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 clever. It was overly chaotic… It just felt grindy. Dialling it back to more focused encounters, with a smaller number of NPCs making more predictable decisions… allowed the designers to balance things a lot more effectively.”
The in-world Federation propaganda allowed the devs to “play up the heroics and the set pieces without betraying the implied realism.”
The 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 smart framing that instantly elevates the narrative and the surprising amount of cutscenes. Moreover, it allowed Auroch to effortlessly justify the existence of a bonus Bug Mode as another part of the Federation’s in-universe research.
It’s a bit disappointing that the bugs don’t get nearly as much time to shine when you’re given control of a new type of Arachnid, as their optional levels are nice breathers and distinct changes of pace if played in between the “war is hell” scenarios Sammy has to push through.
Ultimate Bug War! doesn’t force a mixed campaign structure on players, but it clearly feels like the recommended way to play it. Otherwise, the Federation story feels slightly too short. Those who vibe with its premise and loop will no doubt enjoy replaying it on higher difficulties, though.
There’s a light strategic twist to the bug levels, as you choose whether to clear smaller groups of enemies yourself or create new spawn points for other Arachnids as they try to attack more fortified outposts. You can fly, rush, and cut down entire groups of Federation soldiers, and even temporarily morph into a more powerful, fire-spewing bug that regenerates its lost health. It’s great fun that ultimately feels like a test for something bigger… or at least that’s what I’m hoping.
“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 limitations, but the developers also point out an obvious obstacle: “It would have put us into the same competitive space as Helldivers 2 and Starship Troopers: Extermination instead of being our own thing.”
Even when the team decided it wanted to create a strictly single-player experience, “there were several shifts in tone for the core gameplay” due to the release of those two games. “We wanted to make sure we took our own path to get there,” says Plant. “We’re happy we’ve been able to distinguish ourselves as much as we can.”
“Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War!” is available now for purchase on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. A PC code was provided by Dotemu.