Starship Troopers: Extermination's latest update adds a big stompy mech, ideal for squashing the shooter's newly polished bug holes

I liked Starship Troopers: Extermination when I reviewed it back in 2024, even though it was technically uneven and added a truly awful single player experience that it did not need. Regardless, there's something about Extermination's take on tower defence that felt distinct from anything else I've played.

The way you had 16 players constructing a base and then defending it in rapid succession, the massive bug-piles you could create as you slaughter the arachnid menace by the dozen. It was novel enough to stand out even with the massive, looming shadow of Helldivers 2.

The game has also come a long way since then too, well worth revisiting if you haven't checked it out for a while. Developer Offworld has added all manner of features including Helldivers 2-style airstrikes. The latest patch seemingly continues the trend of borrowing from Arrowhead, primarily adding a hulking, stompy mech for you to pilot.

The Marauder M-11E Babar is by far the biggest toy Extermination players have got their hands on yet, essentially a walking tank armed with a rotary cannon, and auto-howitzer, and twin, shoulder-mounted smoothbore cannons.

While powerful, the mech has limited ammo and is slow to manoeuvre, meaning it is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by Arachnids if unsupported by Troopers. The Babar is currently only available in the game via a randomly appearing mutator, but Offworld says "new methods" of earning the mechs will be coming soon.

Alongside the Babar, the update adds a new weapon—a powerful revolver named the TW-7 Liberator—as well as a new battlefield. This sees players fighting among the ruins of the Federation settlement Hope's Retreat. Situated on the planet Valaka, Hope's Retreat comes with a new base building zone and various new missions.

That's it for notable additions, but the patch also makes some significant adjustments to how Extermination plays. For starters, it tunes Arachnid bug-holes so that they're more vulnerable to collapse from different types of damage, with significant increases for fire and napalm, demolition, and explosives damage types.

Not every change is in the Federation's favour. The bugs have evolved their ambush tactics. Now, instead of sending a trickle of arachnids at random players, they will attempt to pick off isolated targets with a sudden, tightly packed wave of bugs. Offword says that ambushes represent "the start of major steps we are taking to increase the baseline difficulty in a typical match" and should ensure that "Troopers are getting pressured in a variety of ways throughout the match."

Elsewhere, the update tweaks Tac fighter airstrikes so that they're more likely to target big bugs and less likely to accidentally obliterate fellow Troopers, makes various balance tweaks to classes and weapons, and implements the usual array of bugfixes. Between this and the release of retro-FPS Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War, it's a good time to be a fan of blasting alien spiders into green goo.