It is out now on Steam in Early Access. 16 player Co-op as Starship Troopers vs. the Bugs. Troopers come in 3 classes:
The Hunter class is the basic Trooper. He has the fastest sprint of the 3 and has a jet pack as the class specific ability. All class specific abilities have a cooldown timer, and for the jet pack it's about 60 seconds before you get to use it again.
The Operator class is a support Trooper. His class ability is the medical UAV. You can activate it to revive downed troopers nearby. He also has a healing stim that he can use on himself or other troopers.
The Bastian class is the tank Trooper. He comes with an LMG by default and his class ability is to go into seige mode, where he goes immobile and has a small shield wall around himself. Seige mode also removes a lot of the recoil of the LMG, making it a very stable weapon platform.
Each class has primary, secondary, and utility unlocks as well as perk unlocks.
The main premise of the game is the Troopers land on a bug planet, complete missions as given to them by Command, and it culminates in the drop of an ARC unit on a base location. The troopers must then build fortifications and defend the ARC until it completes it's data gathering (basically timed base defense against a horde of bugs). Once that's done they need to run to an extraction site where the dropship will extract them. Why the dropship can't land in the base is beyond me
.Anyway, you get XP for kiling bugs, reviving your fellow troopers, completing missions, and more XP for each surviving trooper that gets evac'ed from the planet. I should mention that during the evac phase respawning is disabled. So downed troopers must be revived or they die a permadeath
Currently, the missions are: destroy bug patrol, activate refinery and gather ore, restart generators and guard them, guard the HQ, guard the beacon. The devs are presumably adding more and sometimes the battles happen at night, so you get to see the glow of trooper flashlights a la Aliens. There are 3 difficulty levels: recruit, veteran, and hardcore.
There is friendly fire but the troopers automatically yell stuff to let you know you are hitting them. And I haven't seen any griefing to be honest. Every game I've played has had Troopers working together, reviving each other, and generally cooperating. My death was ignored once - the dude next to me did not try to revive me at all; he just kept firing at the bugs outside the base.
At $25 I decided that I wanted to know more, so I paid and downloaded. I've leveled up my 3 classes a few levels and can't wait to kill more bugs.
