Space Rangers 2: Dominators

The Good
Space Rangers 2 rewards you as soon as you open the box, as you’re literally flooded with posters, leaflets and a hefty and informative manual- not to mention a copy of the previous game ‘Space Rangers’. A part of me wished I was given this game as a Christmas present as a kid; but the predominant part of me giggled with joy anyway.

It’s hard not to feel daunted when you dive into the game for the first time. After a brief introduction you’re sent off to various systems to learn the ins and outs of your space-born craft. Your immediate surroundings are teeming with activity. Civil ships run back and forth on their errands, asteroids hurtle past or collide with ships and stations, planets rotate around their star (why this never happens in other space-based games is beyond me) and other Space Rangers go about their own business. The world is alive in every sense.

Thankfully the game mechanics balance out what could be an unbelievably disorientating experience. The game essentially works in turns. Once you’ve left a base or entered a system the game pauses while you choose what to do next. On long distances and auto-battles the game cycles forwards in real time, although the aforementioned battles tend to be more successful if played a turn at a time.

The wealth of options open to you is extraordinary. Do you trade goods across the various systems? You need to keep up to date on the fluctuating market and random events, such as disease epidemics, which affect your profits. Do you explore unknown planets with probes, plying them for objects and resources to sell? Do invest in Space Station building projects, or organise military campaigns? Do you go vigilante and attack (and loot) the various pirates, or become one yourself? All these activities are handled smoothly via a well-designed interface, though it’ll take a while before you get used to all of them. Discovering new avenues of profit and adventure is the most interesting activity of the game.

The main plot of the game is based around the invading robotic Dominators, and it is your job to defend and liberate systems captured by them. You can of course completely ignore this aspect; though the more systems they encroach on the harder it becomes to ignore them. Because of the dynamic movement of their attacks you may suddenly find yourself engulfed in a full-on battle while innocently trying to sell alcohol to some far-flung planet. Alongside this you have your Ranger Level, an intergalactic scoreboard that rates your abilities against the 50-odd other rangers, including the best fighter, merchant and pirate. There is also the personal Elite-like goal of upgrading and enhancing your ship with various weapons, thrusters, shields, repairers and a vast amount of unique augmentations.

ON TOP of all that are the missions dealt out by almost every planet, depending on your relationship with the race, government type and reputation with the individual planet. These quests often take the form of deliveries and escort missions, but it is their imagination and humour that distinguishes them. In one case I had transport a delivery or Big Red Buttons to a particularly trigger-happy planet. In another I had to deliver footage of a malfunctioning movie prop, which I could actually WATCH by clicking on it! The more diverse missions take the form of those old choose-your-own-adventure books. At one point I had to represent a planet at a royal banquet and had to choose how to greet the warlike Maloq guests: punch them in the face or grovel at their feet. Each choice has a humorous reaction, though there is only one route to winning each mission.

This whimsical nature is one of the best aspects of Space Rangers 2. This is not some bog-standard, deadly serious universe. You attend, and participate in, inter-system Pizza cook-offs, save Ambassadors transformed into lesser life forms, train office workers for Olympic-style competitions. The vast amount of detail and imagination put into these quests is welcome and genuinely charming.

As finding out new aspects of the game is part of the fun I won’t even go into the other adventures you undergo, such as travelling through black holes and surviving in prison. Needless to say this game has a staggering amount of personality.

The graphics are functional and sometimes pretty. They are psudo-3d (though the game takes place on a 2-d field), and as such any additional interactivity would only bog the gameplay down. Character portraits and the models of the planet’s representatives are beautifully, almost scarily realistic in their texture and animation.

Sound effects are okay, and fit the setting well. The music is a kind of techno, and varies just enough not to be repetitive. More attention seems to have been payed to functionality than to bells and whistles, and the game exceeds for it.

The Bad
I’ve mentioned the good points, and on first play these are all you need to know before leaping head first into this game.

The vastly open-ended nature of the game does have its downside however. It is in fact so open-ended that it could truly be called INFINITE. I haven’t “finished” the game yet, and there doesn’t seem any obvious way to complete it. And this is playing as only one race and one profession without exploring the entirety of the game universe.
It’s sad to say it but having a lack of any goal drains from the game play somewhat, though it isn't apparent until many, many hours of playing happily.

There are many diverse aspects of the game, but the designers seem to have gone a step to far with the addition of the RTS element. The principle is that you get to liberate planets on the ground. You command individual robot units which are customisable, choosing their various weapon and armour payloads. It’s then a race to capture various resources and claim the map. However slow unit movement and a ridiculous population cap hamper this need for speedy game play. Your units die extremely easily, and once they’re dead the enemy is free to re-capture the entire map back again. You always start in an extremely daunting position, with very few resources at your disposal. Once your main army is destroyed (and it will be) you’ve lost.
Needless to say I never won a single one of these matches. In addition to this, while the 3D engine is competent enough each map looks identical and has identical scenery, no matter what planet you’re on. Space Rangers 2 could have survived without this mini-game, and it suffers because of it.

I liked the choose-your-own-adventure missions for their character and humour. Unfortunately they don’t leave much room for mistakes. Make one wrong move, even right near the end, and you fail. You then have to repeat the mission again and again. This is made worse in competitive missions that often involve memorising different character’s weakness and strengths. The most irritating aspect of them is that many would work perfectly well with a more visual interface, maybe an “interactive movie” style play style. Some even involve travelling around an environment, a simple activity handicapped by a silly design decision (Go left or right? My mental image of the environment gets forgotten every time I read the next joke). One even involves combat between two robots in a bastardised text version of the RTS mini-game! If they’d have dropped the god-awful RTS and spent more time on this, the game would be superb. What visual (hand-drawn) graphic accompanies the text is often repeated in other missions.

The game is randomised. You heard me. Every time you start a new game the universe is completely different. The environment was large enough to warrant replayablility anyway. In fact if it were a single, defined universe (possibly with randomised missions) then much more character would be retained. I’ve not played the game more than once (though that was for several weeks) and wouldn’t like to replay those plotted missions again! Also because it is randomised the creators seem to have run out of inspiration with many of the planets. Case in point I once had to liberate the noble and persecuted citizens of… Glove. Yes.

As a final point the translation of the game is a tad… odd. It’s not glaring or consistently bad, but occasionally words are missing, or used in the wrong context, or spelled badly. With such a large, randomised game it must have been hell on the editor.

The Bottom Line
This Independently-made game does much, much, much more than many commercial games made even now. And it does it with a style and sense of humour all of its own. With just a few changes it would have been perfect.

HOWEVER it is superb value for money and a very very fun experience to play for the first few weeks, which is longer than other similar games (cough... Freelancer... cough) lasted for me.