Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War is dull, uninspired, and devoid of the series' characteristic wit. PC Gamer's got your back Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware. What is it? Licensed FPS based on Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. Reviewed on: Ryzen 7 7700, RX 7800 XT, 64GB DDR5 RAM There's a vision for combat in Ultimate Bug War that you can make out from a distance, but never comes into focus. Spray and pray weapons with what should be a stiflingly small ammunition capacity are often more than a match for Bug War's generally low enemy density. The iconic warrior bugs don't swarm with anywhere near the intensity seen in the film, and rarely do the other subspecies of arachnid work in tandem to overwhelm the player. There's a perfunctory reload mechanic a la Gears of War that allows one to cut down their reload time by half, but rarely did I find myself in a teeth-gritting, life or death situation. It's a shame, as the gunplay is generally quite good, with a weighty, gas-fed ratchet to the iconic Morita assault rifle and its variants, each high caliber round impacting with a satisfying orange-blue sploosh when it penetrates bug chitin. There's a perfunctory arsenal of airstrikes that rain down with a satisfying swoosh, deployed from a low-poly Federation jets that fly five abreast like the Blue Angels, but this torrent of hellfire never quite gels with the sandbox—there are rarely enough active bugs in combat to justify calling in an airstrike, and the long deployment time and ease with which you can blow yourself up further negate the Fleet's usefulness. Of course, that's if you can find a bug. Ultimate Bug War largely consists of wandering around mostly empty maps devoid of significant enemy encounters and completing tedious scripted mission objectives, often recycled from mission to mission—this war is won by planting sat