Ultimate Bug War has retro looks and modern edge

“We always knew from the start that it was going to be a retro-esque first person shooter,” producer Anthony “Ant” O’Neill tells Polygon. That direction came out of Dotemu’s broader mission, which acquired the IP from Sony Pictures and loved what Auroch had done with the Doom-inspired boomer shooter Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. “[They] just said, ‘Hey, can we try and merge those two things together, basically?’”

But Ultimate Bug War didn’t fully lock into its identity until outside competition forced a rethink. “It was what, four, six months into the project when Starship Troopers: Extermination and Helldivers 2 were launched and announced,” says lead programmer Rose Russell. “We were feeling a bit uncomfortably close to that. We didn’t want to just be considered the cheap cousin.” The breakthroughs came when the direction went even more retro and the script imagined the game as a piece of media “produced” by the United Citizen Federation.

That framing reshaped everything. “This is not really your story as the player, this is Sammy’s story,” Russell explains of the playable lead character, whose memories of war have been converted into the game’s missions. The result is a shooter that constantly pulls you between immersion and critique, and finds the right moments to undercut the fantasy.

The retro angle was meant to add to the meta tension. “We want to try and make players feel like they’re playing a game like they remember it rather than it actually was,” O’Neill says. That meant smoother controls, more readable design, and levels that stretch beyond what players might associate with old shooters. Of all touchstones, a MacWorld demo of the original Halo served as an inspiration for Ultimate Bug War’s non-linear approach to level design. If it melted Steve Jobs’ brain in 1999, it was perfect for Auroch.

Getting the balance of new and old took iteration. “We had so many versions over the course of this game of that first real level, that Klendathu Drop experience where the basic idea remained the same throughout, but it was like… people are getting lost here. How do we tweak the player’s first approach?” Russell says. The goal wasn’t just fun, but clarity. “How do we get this into a point where it’s instinctively understandable?”

The team at Auroch spent a great deal of time iterating on the scope, as playtesters could get lost in open-ended environments and missions. But scale was a necessary and deliberate choice. The game was never going to match Helldivers 2, but when you’re adapting a film with battles set across wide plains and deserts, that has to be recreated by whatever means possible.

“We wanted those levels to be big and open so that we can replicate the theme of the film,” O’Neill says. “And then the other factor, of course, is the nature of the enemies you fight within the game. They are big hulking monstrous entities, any one of which could kill you in a second, which doesn’t really pair well with the whole concept of a retroshooter where you’re just gunning down enemies.” The result is less power fantasy, more panic. You are constantly moving, retreating, improvising, trying not to get overwhelmed. Bless the team for adding “God Mode” to the accessibility features.

“Getting that core gameplay loop down pat is the most critical thing for us,” O’Neill says. “Making the enemies feel like they are in the film, really dangerous, but also making it so the player actually feels like they have agency.”

If the level design raises the stakes, the art design reinforces the satire. 3D artist Oliwia Janczewska notes that the decision to render your fellow MI troopers as pixel sprites who exist at a much lower resolution than the bugs is intentional (and, in my opinion, hilarious). “They’re expendable cannon fodder.” The bugs, meanwhile, command attention. “You want to focus and you want to see them, you want to notice when they’re attacking you.”

Good news: you also get to play as the bugs. In select missions, players embody a single bug that can transform into a number of mutated attack positions and wreak havoc across an RTS-like map. “That was part of the original pitch… that you can play as the bugs,” O’Neill says. “There is some actual interesting tactical gameplay of, what resources have been given to me? How am I going to approach taking down this base?”

The big surprise happens right out the gate: Casper Van Dien, parodic chiseled hunk of the original Starship Troopers, is back as Rico. He’s now a one-eyed general instructing those playing Ultimate Bug War and thanking them for their service. Van Dien is joined by Charlotta Mohlin (Immortality) as Major Sammy, whose inspiring marksmanship becomes the perfect propaganda tool for recruitment.

“We knew that we wanted to have FMVs be part of the game experience,” O’Neill says. The pitch-perfect recreations of the movie’s flamboyant performances are the perfect reward for completing a mission. Russell says a retro game like Ultimate Bug War needs that type of gift to keep people hooked. “Each FMV gives you that little bit of, ‘Ooh, what’s next? What else have they got for me?’”

Part throwback, part remix, full-blast satire, Ultimate Bug War is a quiet achievement. As O’Neill puts it, the philosophy required to pull it off was simple: focus on what matters, then build everything else around it. And making a quality shooter mattered. “It was very enjoyable earlier in production to just sit in a blank empty room and just gun down a bunch of enemies.”

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War is out now on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was profiled on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease download code provided by Dotemu. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.