"Kill more than two legs!"
The movie "Galaxy Troopers" released in 1997, although it has never officially entered mainland theaters, has become the childhood memory of many Chinese people. And when the FPS game "Starship Troopers: Extermination" adapted from this movie was released some time ago, even if it did not Chinese, it still attracted a group of domestic fans.
In line with the goal in the movie, Starship Troopers: Extinction currently only has PVE gameplay, combining shooting, building, tower defense and other elements, and the only thing players have to do is "kill more than two legs". Since its release, the game has received more than 10,000 reviews on Steam, with a positive rating of 93%.
As for where the game is fun, players also have different opinions - restore movie scenes, exciting and interesting gameplay, IP feelings, and even some cockroach haters (or arthropod lovers?). Ecstasy.....
And a buzzword that has to be noted: make this game fun for tricky teammates.
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Although Starship Troopers: Extinction is currently rated as "particularly positive" on Steam, its reputation is among the best FPS games in recent years - but in fact, the experience brought to players by the game itself is not very good.
This game is still in the EA stage and can only be regarded as a semi-finished product. Not only are there only two modes and three character classes, but the opening guns are also pitiful, and the feel is not excellent.
And that's not counting the inexhaustible optimizations - when the tsunami of insects comes, and the player has not yet shot, the screen in front of them cannot withstand it. In contrast, more bugs in the game are less conspicuous.
BUG is also synonymous with the Arachi Zerg, which seems to make sense
A game matches 16 players, and players work together to complete missions and fight against a steady stream of Zerg until they finally evacuate. Not only is there no Chinese, the game currently only has several servers in Europe and North America and South America, and domestic players must withstand the torture of high latency even if they drive the accelerator to join the battle.
But none of the above problems seem to affect the conspicuously high rating on Steam.
Although the first movie of "Starship Troopers" has been released more than 20 years ago, when the Arachi Zerg, which resembles spiders, crabs and other arthropods, the Battle of Klanduff, where the 100,000 Earth Federation Army was destroyed, and the swarm of insects outside the walls of the whiskey outpost, etc., are reproduced with contemporary game technology, it is difficult for old fans not to be moved.
The most commendable thing about this is the game's restoration of the "Starship Troopers" IP. The game currently uses the force setting in the first movie, and the player, as a mobile infantryman, needs to fight the Zerg for territory on a planet, during which he is responsible for mining, repairing generators, holding signal boosters and other tasks. Although there is no plot, the CG at the beginning of the game unfolds in a way that restores the world view introduced by the Earth Federation website in the movie, and finally ends with the familiar phrase "Would You like to know more?" Come to an end.
Perhaps because there is no original soundtrack copyright, the developers used the original battle BGM variation, and the player played a passionate soundtrack in the fierce confrontation, and as the game progressed into a climax, a sense of glory and epic atmosphere was born.
This is matched by a strong visual presentation of war. The game adds an eye-catching explosion effect that once into chaotic combat, the scene is often smoky and players often get lost in it. At this time, the insects flew in the explosion, and the scene was bloody.
For example, the plasma worm responsible for launching ranged attacks, the blue flame generated by the explosion after being killed by the player is very spectacular.
There's also a vintage gif from station B UP master @nian - tumultuous youwei
As for the villain Zerg, it is as oppressive as in the film. They are thick armor, extremely fast, like a movie, very crisp, and move in groups. When it comes to building defenses and defensive phases, dense bugs rush in, and the visual effects are the same as in the movie.
The above scenes are combined, and a picture of human soldiers heroically fighting against strong enemies is shaped in front of the player. And seeing that the set has been set up, many players finally can't hold back the essence of the play, and the actor got on and started his own performance.
When the Chinese player, who did not know how to advance the game, entered the game with a confused look, he then found that the foreigners in the wheat had begun to command in words. Some of them are learning American soldiers by their throats, and reciting a movie line "The only good Bugs is a dead Bugs" at the beginning of the game to bolster everyone and relieve the tense atmosphere.
The dialogue is full of movie lines
Those who catch the play will echo the familiar "Sir yes sir!" to Chinese audiences, or shout "go go go" when heading to the mission point. From time to time, there are also time-space disruptors who "For Aiur" or "For the Emperor" on the stage, and the whole scene is chaotic and lively.
When attacked by insects, he deliberately imitated the screams in film and television works and made nonsense such as "I don't want to die", which caused people to laugh.
At first, domestic players just followed the lively army to kill insects and build fortifications with welding guns in the defense stage, and later gradually mastered the core of gameplay as they became familiar with the game.
Starship Troopers: Extinction emphasizes cooperation everywhere, except for the swarms that are difficult for individual soldiers to deal with, each time the player matches into a game, he will enter the interface of selecting a four-player cooperative team, suggesting that the player divides the labor, and then enters the class selection interface to refine the division of labor for each character.
The three major classes of assault, heavy armor and medics each have essential abilities, but each of them cannot complete all the links on their own, so cooperation is the inevitable way for all 16 players to win.
In such a situation, the "drama upper body" has become the glue that condenses the strength of the team. In the slogan of repeating the movie lines, nationality and language become no longer important, and everyone has only one goal: to get out of the siege.
Once someone falls to the ground and cries for help, they chant "not a single teammate" and raise their guns towards the "corpse" that is counting down.
According to the rules of the game, after the evacuation phase, the ship responsible for evacuation will randomly land in an area waiting for the player to board the ship, and if the player's character cannot board the ship at the last moment, the experience gained by the game will be less than half. But once there are one or two tricky brothers in the whole game, there will be a group of players who are on the head "life and death", often staging people who have boarded the ship in the final stage, and suddenly raise a gun and rush out to rescue a player who is calling for help.
Some people don't have time to retreat, and there are often "last words" such as "leave me alone" in the barley - although the second middle school is also somewhat moving.
Similar scenes are really rare in other games, and some domestic players who have experienced it personally even sighed that "it seems that there is a community with a shared future for mankind".
The existence of the opera masters really brings the icing on the cake to this game, and many Chinese players have expressed their deep impression of it, which can be regarded as the most interesting gain in the exciting game process, which gives the evaluation of "the foreign value of 90 yuan".
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To date, Starship Troopers Extinction has more than 1,200 reviews Chinese Steam — including, of course, a lot of "We need Chinese." A shooter of this scale, facing such a large group of Chinese players on Steam, the fact that the first release did not Chinese really made many people linger.
This is probably not a deliberate disregard for Chinese players by developers - another shooter game from Offworld Industries, Tactical Squad, also added a PLA camp late last year and is also well received by the domestic community, clearly valuing domestic players.
And the most likely scenario is that foreigners on the other side of the ocean do not know that "Starship Troopers" also has a fairly large audience in China.
Released in 1997, "Starship Troopers" is a remake of the science fiction novel "Starship Paratroopers", the film cost up to 110 million US dollars, the film crew in order to restore the alien scene in the remote desert, specially built a road in the mountains of Wyoming, using trucks and helicopters to carry equipment and building materials.
However, such a cost achieved little in that year. First of all, the release of "Starship Troopers" coincided with the era of Hollywood noble films, and big productions emerged one after another, including "Men in Black", "Alien", "Jurassic Park" in the same year, and later the record-breaking "Titanic". Star colonization and human-bug wars were somewhat unremarkable at the time.
Do you think that the male protagonist's superior, Sergeant Ziem, is a little familiar?
The film takes fascist costumes, totems, and inflammatory conscription mobilization films, combined with the original novel "Starship Paratroopers" has long been criticized for promoting militarism, and soon received negative comments from film critics, which directly led to a decline in the box office after the film's release. According to IMBD data, the North American box office was only more than 50 million when the film was released, which can be described as a fiasco.
From the current point of view, it is not difficult to feel the director's strong irony of human colonists with the symbol of almost fascism
It was not until Hollywood critics revisited the movie many years later that "Starship Troopers" finally turned over, and was even pushed by fans as one of the best sci-fi films in film history, and its IP development was on track in the next two decades.
On the other side of the ocean, even if "Starship Troopers" has never been released in China, it has also "dominated the screen" under the spread of pirated discs and on-demand stations. More than a decade ago, local TV stations basically had a channel called "on-demand stations", and viewers dialed the number displayed by the channel and paid to watch the content they wanted.
This function has benefited a large number of people - thanks to local tycoons everywhere, the majority of viewers have been exposed to many Japanese comics, Korean dramas, songs and even games with questionable copyrights, including movies from various countries.
Interestingly, according to the reactions of netizens across the country, "Galaxy Troopers" often dominates such channels.
The reason for this probably comes from the extremely impactful pictures of the movie itself, such as the bloody and curious shots, and the brain-sucking scenes that make people's heads tight.
and a certain striking scale of co-bathing shots.
Although we cannot say for sure the purpose of the on-demand viewer, these images did influence the first 90s and 00s of the TV set of that year, and even impressed them in the next two decades. Perhaps the director himself could not have imagined that this film could plant such a "cause" on the other side of the sea in such a peculiar way.
Today's "Starship Troopers: Extinction" can also be regarded as receiving "fruits".
Happily, the majority of players now remember their sci-fi attributes, original lines, human hatred for bugs, and pay more attention to how to fight the Zerg and stick to human territory.
Although some players are still secretly thinking about the bathhouse back then.
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The adaptation of "Starship Troopers" "Starship Paratroopers" (1959) itself has a profound influence on the entire science fiction world - the setting of human-bug battle influenced the later "Warhammer 40K" and "StarCraft".
As for "Starship Troopers", it is almost recognized that it parted ways with the original, and has become a completely different work, and has also gained its own loyal fans. Unfortunately, because of the box office failure of the movie that year, resulting in insufficient investment in the subsequent sequel, the two productions of 2 and 3 after the millennium have a clear gap with the first one, and the once lifelike bug has become a rigid model, and word of mouth is naturally seriously consumed.
Perhaps the only impression in the sequel is the song "It's A Good Day To Die"
But it seems that it has also found its own way - the "Starship Troopers" IP still seems to be able to maintain its vitality in the field outside of film and television today. Happily, at present, in terms of word of mouth, this work is not only a self-hilarious for fans, but also the game itself is well received, and it seems to be extremely single gameplay, and it does not make players bored as quickly as imagined.
Considering that only the Zerg lineup appears in the movie, and the gameplay developed based on the classic campaign, it seems that there is still a lot of room for digging into the game - and perhaps it is not impossible to unlock the power mech in the novel one day.
Tank bugs, jumpers, etc. have not yet appeared in the game
In the face of today's official Chinese requests full of screens, developers can't ignore it. In the future, including the official Chinese, a large number of players may have the opportunity to meet with players, perhaps in the EA stage, or in the official version of the game. It probably depends on how efficiently Offworld Industries works – but don't worry about the bathhouse.