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A lot of bug for your buck.

The new PC FPS takes a lot from the movie - well, too much, if you were expecting an original story or cutscenes. But, there's still something appealing about the game: it has a pretty engine (on the higher end, of course) and some challenging gameplay. It is just really satisfying to obliterate tons of bugs with a small nuke. Really satisfying. The game is sufficiently difficult, with a few frustrating spots, but once you get the hang of things there are some really epic moments and times when you're proud that you managed to stick it to that Royal Warrior. At the same time, it's just gross how many bugs you have to kill sometimes. I would've liked to have seen stats on how many I put down. Thousands.

And then there's the saving and loading system. It's the worst I've ever seen implemented in any game and detracts immensely from the experience. Just awful. I feel that saving and loading should be made as simple and unobtrusive as possible, as it's not actually a part of the game play, but there, Empire Interactive failed. Of course, this had to come immediately after I finished with Quake 4, which as I said, had a wonderful save system.

So, down to the details. Quicksaving will take roughly a minute. Loading a level will take 2 or 3. In addition to those bad times, here's the biggest problem: quickloading (or just loading a quicksave) will take you no less than 2 or 3 minutes, and often upwards of 6 or 7. Now, my machine is pretty fast. There is no need to have a quickload that takes more than 5 minutes. For that matter, a quick load should be quick, as in, measured in seconds. I have no clue how playtesting this game was even possible, because by far the most frustrating moments were those when I was just waiting - with the bar at 99% done - for the load to finish. It was incredibly aggravating, and made going through one particular tough spot that was about 5 minutes in game time took 90 in real time. On top of that, quicksaves never overwrote each other, and you can not select more than one at a time, so I had to delete each one individually in order to keep my saved games organized. I don't like spending my time being uber micro with my saved games.

I ended up feeling like I was wasting my time with the game and actually loaded up my PS2 to play Star Ocean: Till the End of Time while I was waiting for the loads to finish. When I have time to make progress in a game during another's quickload times, you know something is terribly wrong.

If you like pretty standard, but challenging FPS fare and are willing to put up with attrocious load times, then I'd recommend Starship Troopers. But, it falls short in the most disappointing way just like Quake 4 - the ending is terribly un-epic considering what you've gone through to get there. I think I need to play through FEAR again just so I review it here - that game managed to have a good solid ending that left questions unanswered but still made my trials seem worth it.