Starship Troopers: Extermination

I've had a couple of quick games but have put in for a refund before I run the clock up any further.

It's not really exciting until you get to the base building/defence & escape at the end of a mission, just a lot of running around with basic objectives. Sadly the performance takes an absolute dive when the hordes arrive in the defence phase, I was seeing the FPS go as low as the 20s with horrendous hitches/stutter at times. A quick scan of the steam forums and there's a lot of similar complaints so it's poorly optimised by the looks of things.

There's really not much there content wise either, it needs a lot more time in the oven yet to be worth the money.
 
Just had a go for a couple of hours last night, which went fast, enjoyed it, its fine if u take it for what it is, early access, definitely has potential. I didnt have much problems with performance, the odd stutter, but nothing major, on a machine thats a few years old, 2070 card. Bought it after seeing the steam reviews go from 300 to 2000+ overnight & still have 92% highly recommended. It probably will get dull quite fast due to lack of content atm, guessing a lot of its longevity will depend how fast & how good the content is put out.
 
Played this for about 5 hours yesterday. Mostly, the game ran perfectly fine on a 5900x and 1080ti, couple of hitching every now and again, but can count on my fingers how many times I noticed it.

Really fun taking down hordes of bugs. Only concern is the amount of content, and how quickly new content can be added to keep interest high. Really great Early Access launch, just hope they can keep the momentum going.
 
So coming back to say, wow what a game for an alpha release! Its face paced, PVE RTS but in FPS mode is the best way to describe it. Me and a few mates were playing together which made this game infinitely better as we worked together to achieve the goal. There is nothing more frightening that being surrounded by 8 feet tall Arachnid all going for your limbs! Good job your team mates are there to cover you or you're utterly ******! I've chucked about 10 hours into this over the weekend and honestly for what it is right now i would highly recommend it.

Cannot wait for them to introduce more weapons, gear, perks etc and more maps to play on with more scenarios in the future.

Also hoping for maybe a larger session with 32 players (platoon size) maybe and increase the horde size, that would be insane!
 
If this was a release title I say it's a bit of mess, but for an early access game fresh out of alpha it's fantastically good. The gameplay mechanics are solid, shooting hordes of bugs is very satisfying, even after the first few hours. And that's without any dismemberment or proper gore, both of which are mentioned in their roadmap.

Yes they have 100% embraced the cheese and satire of the 1997 movie. If you're a fan of that movie you will love this game.

Looks good enough graphically, nothing cutting edge but it does the job, explosions look very cool, weapon effects need some work.

Performance was great most of the time, but at the end of every mission when dozens and dozens of them swarm your base and everyone is fighting in the same small area it does affect performance, I was able to maintain 50-70fps even at the worst moments and GPU/CPU usage were both way below 100% so there's certainly optimisation to be done but it's perfectly playable for me right now. The rest of the time fps was comfortably stable at my fps cap of 120 (this is at 3840x2160, 75% resolution scaling, graphics quality on 'high', PC specs in my sig). I tried a few different things to increase fps in the most hectic moments including reducing the resolution and quality settings but they didn't have much effect. (I'm not a game dev but I suspect the AI decision-making and pathing are the issue rather than graphical rendering.)

Sound effects are passable and I expect they'll be much improved by release, no glaringly annoying problems though. There also team chat and proximity chat, people are quite chatty but also quite friendly, not come across the toxicity that plagues many such online games these days.

Progression system is one of this game's strengths, you have an overall rank which only goes up to five, you'll get to rank 5 within a few hours and this is only to unlock a more involved game mode. There are three character classes, hunter (general soldier), bastion (heavy soldier) and operator (medic, support), you choose one at the start of each game and cannot change your choice during the game. Each of these characters is levelled separately up to 20, you unlock weapons, tools, perks, throwables etc which greatly increase your general ability. This progression is very fun but IMHO the classes are not well balanced right now, the operator can do as much damage as the others but you can also heal/revive yourself and others easily which makes it more powerful than the other classes. The hunter can sprint faster and you get a jetpack but that's about it. The bastion has heavier armour. What's weird is you unlock the better weapons at an earlier level on operator than the others, but hey ho.

The building system is simple but functional. Having someone on your team who knows how to build strong defenses and do it quickly (you only get 2 minutes to build before the final onslaught of bugs at the end) makes a massive difference to the chance of success. If there's no coordination and people just randomly builds you're gonna have a bad time. (Put the electric fences around the beacon, don't put turrets on the outer walls, use bunkers strategically as they have more health than walls but you only get four of them, put ammo refills inside the bunkers.)

There are 3 difficulty levels, "easy" which I only used once when learning the game mechanics, it's no challenge at all once you know how to play. "Normal" isn't really too much of a challenge if the majority of the 16 players are competent, I play this difficulty when playing alone or with only a small group. "Hard" is really quite difficult unless you have a full 16 strong team of experienced and coordinated players. Sticking together, being aware of where your team mates are and where they are moving to is essential, and you need plenty of operators to heal everyone.

There are many placeholders in the menus for things yet to be added like weapons/perks/grenades, a 4th difficulty level, more game modes etc. So they obviously have solid plans to flesh all this stuff out before release.

Tips for beginners: make sure the 'use' function, build tool, grenade and class special ability are on easy-to reach key bindings, you'll use them a lot. Don't go exploring on your own, you'll just die, stick with team mates. You can respawn with no penalty through most of the game but at certain phases the respawns are disabled. You can be endlessly revived by team mates, after dying you have 20 seconds where you can be revived by anyone. Refill ammo at every opportunity.
 
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Ormy1 said:
If this was a release title I say it's a bit of mess, but for an early access game fresh out of alpha it's fantastically good. The gameplay mechanics are solid, shooting hordes of bugs is very satisfying, even after the first few hours. And that's without any dismemberment or proper gore, both of which are mentioned in their roadmap.

Yes they have 100% embraced the cheese and satire of the 1997 movie. If you're a fan of that movie you will love this game.

Looks good enough graphically, nothing cutting edge but it does the job, explosions look very cool, weapon effects need some work.

Performance was great most of the time, but at the end of every mission when dozens and dozens of them swarm your base and everyone is fighting in the same small area it does affect performance, I was able to maintain 50-70fps even at the worst moments and GPU/CPU usage were both way below 100% so there's certainly optimisation to be done but it's perfectly playable for me right now. The rest of the time fps was comfortably stable at my fps cap of 120 (this is at 3840x2160, 75% resolution scaling, graphics quality on 'high', PC specs in my sig). I tried a few different things to increase fps in the most hectic moments including reducing the resolution and quality settings but they didn't have much effect.

Sound effects are passable and I expect they'll be much improved by release, no glaringly annoying problems though. There also team chat and proximity chat, people are quite chatty but also quite friendly, not come across the toxicity that plagues many such online games these days.

Progression system is one of this game's strengths, you have an overall rank which only goes up to five, you'll get to rank 5 within a few hours and this is only to unlock a more involved game mode. There are three character classes, hunter (general soldier), bastion (heavy soldier) and operator (medic, support), you choose one at the start of each game and cannot change your choice during the game. Each of these characters is levelled separately up to 20, you unlock weapons, tools, perks, throwables etc which greatly increase your general ability. This progression is very fun but IMHO the classes are not well balanced right now, the operator can do as much damage as the others but you can also heal/revive yourself and others easily which makes it more powerful than the other classes. The hunter can sprint faster and you get a jetpack but that's about it. The bastion has heavier armour. What's weird is you unlock the better weapons at an earlier level on operator than the others, but hey ho.

The building system is simple but functional. Having someone on your team who knows how to build strong defenses and do it quickly (you only get 2 minutes to build before the final onslaught of bugs at the end) makes a massive difference to the chance of success.

There are 3 difficulty levels, "easy" which I only used once when learning the game mechanics, it's no challenge at all once you know how to play. "Normal" isn't really too much of a challenge if the majority of the 16 players are competent, I play this difficulty when playing alone or with only a small group. "Hard" is really quite difficult unless you have a full 16 strong team of experienced and coordinated players. Sticking together, being aware of where your team mates are and where they are moving to is essential, and you need plenty of operators to heal everyone.

There are many placeholders in the menus for things yet to be added like weapons/perks/grenades, a 4th difficulty level, more game modes etc. So they obviously have solid plans to flesh all this stuff out before release.

Tips for beginners: make sure the 'use' function, build tool, grenade and class special ability are on easy-to reach key bindings, you'll use them a lot. Don't go exploring on your own, you'll just die, stick with team mates. You can respawn with no penalty through most of the game but at certain phases the respawns are disabled. You can be endlessly revived by team mates, after dying you have 20 seconds where you can be revived by anyone. Refill ammo at every opportunity.
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Bastion has an issue of not having enough ammo currently, not until you unlock the perk for more ammo anyway. I've been playing it quite abit since i played Hunter mostly before and i find initially i can hold off hordes from attacking my team mates while they finish them off as the stagger on the SAW is very useful, however i run out very quickly and become a hindrance thereafter. Even worse if you join a team that doesn't have an ammo fab.
 
Jay85 said:
Bastion has an issue of not having enough ammo currently, not until you unlock the perk for more ammo anyway. I've been playing it quite abit since i played Hunter mostly before and i find initially i can hold off hordes from attacking my team mates while they finish them off as the stagger on the SAW is very useful, however i run out very quickly and become a hindrance thereafter. Even worse if you join a team that doesn't have an ammo fab.
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I have barely played bastion, just going off what people on my team have been saying over voice about it. I mostly play as operator, currently got that to level 10, just unlocked the grenade launcher but not had a chance to try it yet, and occasionally play as hunter just to mix it up, think my hunter is level 6, I want the hawkeye but difficult to motivate myself to level the hunter to get hawkeye rifle when I already have it unlocked on operator haha.

Have you found any discord servers with chill people that play in voice chat? Trying to find more communities to play with.
 
Ormy1 said:
I have barely played bastion, just going off what people on my team have been saying over voice about it. I mostly play as operator, currently got that to level 10, just unlocked the grenade launcher but not had a chance to try it yet, and occasionally play as hunter just to mix it up, think my hunter is level 6, I want the hawkeye but difficult to motivate myself to level the hunter to get hawkeye rifle when I already have it unlocked on operator haha.

Have you found any discord servers with chill people that play in voice chat? Trying to find more communities to play with.
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Hawkeye is great, i have it on my hunter. 2 shots on easy basically takes out a bug, 3 shots on normal. Reload time on it sucks though, so its always better to switch to secondary but then again you shouldn't be that close to the bugs if you're playing a sniper role.

Me and a friend play together, we also found a random last night that joined us on discord, you're more than welcome to join us if you fancy a game during the evenings.
 
Ormy1 said:
I have barely played bastion, just going off what people on my team have been saying over voice about it. I mostly play as operator, currently got that to level 10, just unlocked the grenade launcher but not had a chance to try it yet, and occasionally play as hunter just to mix it up, think my hunter is level 6, I want the hawkeye but difficult to motivate myself to level the hunter to get hawkeye rifle when I already have it unlocked on operator haha.

Have you found any discord servers with chill people that play in voice chat? Trying to find more communities to play with.
Click to expand...

Discord Channel link if you wanna join: https://discord.gg/tya6wYaV

Open to anyone else who just wants to play with comms
 
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Anyone still playing this? I tried the newly released horde mode last night, played 3 games got trashed all 3 times even on easy :cry:. They've done it so its more true to how the movies depict it, tons of bugs just spawning and surrounding your base. Your base defences don't stand a chance though, got overrun so many times in the last few waves, its absolutely insane lol.
 
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