This pretty much means that the "squad-based" part of the game degrades into "terrified, huddled clump of damp-trousered soldiers-based" because you simply don't dare move anyone away from the main body of your squad. The bugs of Starship Troopers are quite incredibly tough customers, pretty much capable of taking out any one of your troopers, no matter how well-armed and -armoured he may be, and in most cases, well able to take out packs of three, maybe four troopers single-handedly. This sort of brings me to my first of a couple of issues with the game, that being that, if one of your troopers has wandered off on his own he pretty much deserves to die for being an idiot. Wounded troopers can be med-evac-ed mid-mission if you've chosen a medic as one of your support troopers (support troopers feature psychics, snipers, medics and the minelayer/armour-healer engineers), but should you run out of med-evac resources (four per medic per mission), you're pretty much obliged to return to wherever your troopers died and retrieve his dog-tags. Okay, there's the odd mission where you get an extra squad member to babysit or a rescue mission with some healable walking wounded, but the fundamental dynamic of this game is that you have to keep your troops alive from the beginning of a mission to the end.
The defining feature of squad-based RTS games is that there's no way to reinforce your team once you enter the combat zone. Missions featuring the film's gun-emplacement-laden forts, holding off literally hundreds of bugs while you wait for a dropship to cart you out of the danger zone go hand-in-hand with a truly innovative propaganda mission that sees you safeguarding an unscrupulous TV presenter as he films the recently evacuated inhabitants of a faming community being "safely" returned to their homes.
The missions that result are a surprisingly comfortable hybrid of the film's pitched battles and the book's guerrilla/terrorist military actions. But back to Starship Troopers.īased graphically and operationally on the film, Starship Troopers takes several cues from Heinlein's book by adding (or returning, if you want to look at it that way) powered armour, long-range jump capability and the infamous micro-nukes from the book. It's under a pile of games I actually like. Well, Gunlok, too, but I only thought of that because I can see it from where I'm sitting.
Only this, Commandos and Ground Control really spring to mind. Squad-based real-time strategy games are, for the most part, a rare lot.
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