A game that undertakes many roles, but keeps strong core elements to bring it all together.
You are a ranger, which is like a free-lance soldier, who goes about doing whatever he wants. You could help the Coalition, or hit up some transports for cash. You could trade, or just steal it from some schmuck. Every aspect in the game has an opposite side, and a few things in between. You wanna be a drug-runner? Be a drug-runner. Want to be a galactic hero? Go liberate some Dominator-controlled systems.
Here's the break-down of the game:
Gameplay
SR2 features a turn-based galaxy, which might seem weird to some. How can a game be highly addictive and engaging, while using an almost-dead game mechanic? Simple: make it simultaneous. That's right, you plot your moves and everyone else moves with you. Strange as though that may sound, it is amazingly ingenious in practice.
The aspect allows for you to tactically consider every single move you are going to make. Since turns are aligned with a day and year system, you can have a very accurate approximation of what's going to happen. This system works wonders in combat. Thankfully, the developers let you know the flight path of everyone, should you highlight them. This allows for you to keep your enemies "in the sights." If you're following after that pirate, and he decides to make a sharp turn in order to shake you, you can make the turn before him and cut him off. This allows for you to lessen the handicap of a slower ship engine.
It's a lot of little things like that that just keep you coming back. Making bite-sized tactical decisions and trying to make everything you do as effective as possible is a very appealing proposition. That's not to mention the fact that your ships are upgradeable. Every single habitable planet has an arms shop. Which, needless to say, means you have huge possibilities for upgrades. Along with randomly generated stats for weapons and the like, you can build yourself a killing machine.
Or you can go the peaceful route, buying a transport, maximizing your space usage so you can have more cargo, and then trading to fund your upgrades and adventures. Luckily, the economy is very dynamic in a structured manner. Wait, what? The economy has its ups and downs but doesn't get complicated. For example, a planet has some environmental problems that is killing its people. You capitalize by bringing food and medicine.
The game helps you in that regard by giving you a heads-up. Every station and planet have "Information Centers", which tell you everything that is going on in the galaxy. It lets you know if such and such happened to planet so and so. It almost sounds like the developers make it easy on you, but you really do need it because the game is constantly moving with you. SR2 doesn't come off like X3: Reunion, which featured a very indifferent world. SR2 has things constantly happening (ranger pirate gets captured, corsairs attacking a system, Dominators defeated at this system etc.), sometimes for you to take advantage of.
Although this game isn't perfect, unfortunately. It has a rather steep learning curve, and even though it features a training mission, you kind of have to hoof it at first. It can be frustrating too, since you can get blown up very easily. Eventually you learn to save your game just before any kind of daring move. Especially like when you goto black-holes, where you face off against real-time opponents in an arcade sort of deal.
Graphics:
Frankly, these graphics aren't mind-blowing. With the exception of a great interface, and some interesting spokepersons (although the same on every planet belonging to the same race) on planets/stations, they are something you'd see several years ago.
The graphics are akin to Galactic Civilizations 2, but SR2's textures look more dated and muddy. The game will only run in two resolutions, 800 by 600 and 1024 by 768. Which might be a gripe to some owners of expensive monitors. But even if you could go higher, there probably isn't any real visual advantage. SR2 also has a lot of graphical tweaks that honestly don't do much at all. It's understandable that they are there to take less processing power, but if you have a video card that's not more than 4 years old, your GPU will handle the game just fine.
Another thing is that Space Rangers 2 comes packaged with the original Space Rangers. Being a sequel, SR2 isn't much of an upgrade visually. A lot of the same textures are used, with some tweaks added (suns look a lot better). You can even see some parts of text ported directly over into the sequel if you take the time to compare.
Sound:
I think the music is awesome in this game. It's varied, going from up-beat techno to appregiated guitar playing. But that is the biggest down-fall of the music. You can land on a planet to hear some rave-trance, then take-off to hear sad acoustic guitar.
The sounds and music don't cycle around too much. And it's just the awkward tense of the music during transitions (space to surface or system to system), and the repetitive nature of all the sound effects, that cause you to take off your headphones/turn off your speakers after a while.
Value:
The replay of a game like this, is endless if you want it to be. If you can't get enough of the mechanics, you can just keep playing. Since this isn't a scripted game in the modern sense of the word, the way things play out is different all the time. Combined with multiple endings, you have a lot to play around with.
However, after you run through the game once (or have played it for many hours) you've seen all there is to see. Every new game is an open-ended campaign of the same thing everytime.
However, Space Rangers 2 comes packaged with (as mentioned) Space Rangers. This means once you've been SR2/SR1 you can go play SR1/SR2. But don't get your hopes up, unfortunately. Since they are almost the exact same game.
The graphics don't change much, the story doesn't change much (aside from a different enemy), and some of your enemies are the same enemy ships from the other game.
Tilt:
With excellent and thrilling combat, albeit strangely turn-based, rapidly moving economy, dynamic galaxy, and huge scale, Space Rangers 2 will keep you occupied for a very, very long time. But after a while you kind of wish there was more to other aspects, rather than expenditures on frivolous things. Also SR2 is really just incrementally better than the original, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If it isn't broke, don't fix it, right?
Reviewer's Note: There is much more to the game than what I spoke about above. But due to the sheer scale of this game, I simply had to choose what I thought needed to expounded upon.