Arrowhead's 2024 shooter moves the original's top-down co-op to third person and keeps everything that made it funny and lethal. Four players drop onto a planet, call in equipment by punching in code sequences on a stratagem pad, and are constantly at risk from each other - friendly fire is always on, an orbital laser does not care who is standing in it, and a badly thrown supply pod will flatten a teammate. The satire is Starship Troopers played entirely straight, with managed democracy and mandatory patriotism delivered without a wink. Its real innovation is the Galactic War: a persistent front where the whole playerbase's mission outcomes decide which planets are held, run in real time by a designer nicknamed the Game Master who escalates in response to what players do. That produced genuine communal events, including a Terminid outbreak nobody planned for. It sold enormously, weathered a public fight over account linking, and has kept adding factions and stratagems since.
Overall
Metacritic
“A hilariously chaotic co-op shooter that delivers the best multiplayer experience of 2024, despite server growing pains and balancing controversies”
