Full of mirth, depth, and addictive pacing, Space Rangers 2 lacks only the polish of a higher budget.
Space Rangers 2 takes place in the future, and puts you in the role of an interstellar militiaman tasked with quelling the rising threat from the Dominator robots. Though the exact origin of the mechanical menace is unknown, you can piece together the story through your trials and tribulations. The game is extremely open ended, and has the prototypical trader/pirate/police triangle going for it. You can run trade missions, steal from ships, or hunt the thieves. Each play style is extremely unique, and serves to increase replayability and further engulf the player in the game’s content to maximize their advantages. The game has a number of features that highlight the effect your influence has on the systems you visit and people you meet. People start reacting based on your reputation, offering you a better mission, or some secret information they would only share with their closest friends. If you decide to recruit help, based on the outcome of the relationship others will want to join your command or refuse employment. The system is well implemented, and has you not only nurturing relationships with people, but looking for new contacts as well.
At first you will only have access to a small number of ships and equipment, but as you complete missions, explore new systems, and gain experience, more ships become available, better equipment enters the market, and so on. This is counter balanced with the increasing occurrence of the Dominators and more dangerous enemies. The pacing is perfect, leaving the game at just the right difficulty to keep you interested without being a walkover or punishment from God. While traveling, the game features a simplified point and click interface. You click on something, and it brings up appropriate options based on the item clicked. For example, clicking on a planet will land, clicking on a ship will start combat, follow, or go to firing range, and so on. It’s extremely basic in practice, and can become monotonous, but serves to help new players. Unintentionally it also makes combat a rather hands off affair. After choosing attack strategies (use these weapons, go here) the battle fights itself with little to no input. It’s disappointing, but not life threatening. In addition to the standard mode of play, many of the missions you can take as any of the three jobs add both adventure elements as well as a full strategy game, both of which are cunningly developed as to be both simple and entertaining. The adventure portion of the game is a text-based affair, and includes a cornucopia of scenarios from running as a candidate in a planetary election to testing a portable jump jet. These scenarios are well developed and extremely amusing, but they are incredibly text heavy, slowing the pace of play dramatically. In addition, some of them are a trial and error affair, producing some maddeningly obtuse solutions to seemingly simple problems. The strategy missions are by far the most interesting, giving the player the option to create robots from different equipment and body types, but also take control of the robots via third person controls. These missions have you taking resource nodes away from the enemy and building defensive structures to keep them safe, making the experience satisfying if not unique. The AI is problematic, which diminishes the challenge as well as constantly forces you to corral your forces for maximum efficiency, but these are really just small problems compared to the pleasant surprise of having a competent strategy game built into a mission.
The game is splashed with a liberal amount of humor, making the game seem spry without diluting the serious parts of the plot or gameplay. One mission had me transporting “An ancient virus that threatened to destroy the earth called Windows”, with the destination being an ancient museum of war crimes. Every aspect of the game permeates with small tidbits of humor which help make the gameplay even more memorable.
If the game had come out three years ago, the graphics would have been perfect, but the presentation is conservative by modern standards. There are very few three dimensional models with the exception of the RTS mode, the fighting looks rather bland, and the character graphics are aged. It doesn’t look hideous however, and the graphics don’t bring down the game by any means, but are more functional than mind blowing.
Music, lasers, engines, and other audio related aspects of the game are good. The music does an adequate job of adjusting to whatever situation you find yourself in, fighting sounds good, and traveling between systems has a satisfying roar of your engines kicking in. It won’t win any awards for excellence in this department, but it certainly isn’t a slouch.
For buying Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators, you get the first Space Rangers as well, giving the package extreme value. While it could have definitely benefited from a greater budget, the overall quality of SR2 is far above expectations, making this a must buy for anyone looking for a great game.