There's an old saying that goes something like "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." That old saying pretty much sums up Empire Interactive's Starship Troopers game for the PC. Fans of the film (and the Robert A. Heinlein's novel the film is based on) can forgive that the game is many years removed from the cult classic film it's based on, but what's hard to swallow is that the game doesn't really have any real connection to its source material - save the myriad of movie clips interspersed throughout the game. On the other hand, players could even forgive all that if the first-person action it promised was even moderately good. It's not. And therein lies the problem - Starship Troopers is a game that doesn't do anything right and offers gameplay that just isn't any fun.

The game is set five years after the end of the film and the Human race still finds itself struggling against the insect race known as the Klendathu. Players don the role of an elite Marauder in the service of the Earth's mighty military forces. This is the kind of character you'd call in when things get particularly dicey or critical. While you're supposed to be a part of an elite squad (if you believe the manual for the game), the truth is that you won't be working with any fellow Marauders in the game - instead you'll find yourself running solo most of the time, handling a variety of situations without any real back-up or support from your squad. Yeah, you'll be working with mobile infantry soldiers on various missions, but these warriors seem to have a death wish and aren't very helpful to the player. You can tell that the developers were trying to create a Master Chief kind of protagonist in the game, but your character doesn't really measure up to that lofty persona at all.

Players will find themselves playing through mission after mission with familiar objectives like killing bugs, escorting bran-dead AI controlled NPCs who like to put themselves in harm's way, and killing wave after wave of bugs. That's it. The game is pretty generic in its approach. Maybe you can forgive the unsubtle way the game throws hundreds of bugs at you and the lackluster arsenal of weapons you'll use to kill them, it's still hard to get by the fact that the game is bereft of the whole Starship Troopers mythos that's it's based on. The cheesy jokes, the political satire, and the whole propaganda angle that the film offered isn't in this game. Sure there are some stabs at it, but it just comes off as watered down and weak. To add insult to injury the game throws in clips from the film that have absolutely nothing to do with the game's plot. You have to wonder what the point is of even including them - it is yet another reminder that the game doesn't do the film justice.

The game offers 12 single player missions set on a Federation planet under heavy bug attack. The missions are comprised of the aforementioned ridiculous wave after wave of enemies, some rail shooter action where you control some stationary guns, big boss battles, escort missions that are a real pain (the AI always seems to throw caution to the wind and puts itself in the line of fire), and environments that are drab and recycled over and over again.

In the end, Starship Troopers just doesn't have any soul. It's a generic first-person shooter, with gameplay that isn't very much fun and doesn't do justice with the license its based on. Gamers looking for a decent PC shooter experience would be better served looking for another game to play. Even more to the point, fans of Starship Troopers should be warned that this game will disappoint them severely.