Space Rangers 2: The Rise of the Dominators Review

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(More customer reviews)[last updated 11/03/06]: Note that Space Rangers 2 (SR2) is now available without copy protection [...] Instead, they use the same approach that they use for Galactic Civilizations II. I can only hope this means that updates for SR2 will be released.

By conventional wisdom, Space Rangers 2 (SR2) shouldn't be such a great game. After all, it contains a mixture of widely disparate game types:

-- 2-D turn-based space travel, including ship-to-ship combat;
-- 3-D ground-based real-time-strategy (RTS) combat among robots, with the ability to 'step into' one of your robots and control it personally;
-- 2-D 1980s arcade-style (real time) travel and combat set in a stylized "hyperspace" within a black hole;
-- text-based "choose your adventure"-style quests and challenges, some of which are quite tough.

All of this exists in a setting of sixty (60) star systems, with over 250 planets, space stations, and the like. You play a single character, of a given race (five available) and starting profession (also five available)--and you pretty much take it from there. There are another 50 or so non-player rangers zooming around the game universe in their own ships and pursuing their own paths and inclinations, as well as lots of traders, diplomats, pirates--and the dread Dominators.

And you know what? SR2 is a blast. In fact, as noted above, the longer you play, the more fun it gets. Part of that comes from increased personal skill; part comes from your character's development (not to mention your ship's development); and part comes from realizing that you're not in a "railroad game" (to use the term my friend Wayne Holder coined over 20 years ago), but that you really are free to choose any number of paths and find any number of approaches.

You can trade, gather asteroid fragments, explore planets (simple and a bit dull), hunt pirates, be a pirate, fight the robotic Dominators that are seeking to enslave humanity, or even try to get on their good side. You can trick out your ship, upgrade or swap out components, catch diseases, take various stimulants, pay for military campaigns against the Dominators, get loans, or even get a race-change operation (a good move if you've become too unpopular).

You're also free to suffer the consequences of what you do, which is why frequent game saves are a good idea. It's easy to die; it's not that hard to wipe yourself out financially; and it's even possible to get most of the known universe upset with you, as I did, inadvertanly in one game (the moral is, be careful when accepting a mission to track down and destroy another ship--some such missions are court-sanctioned, but others are simply political assassinations).

I have mixed feelings about the "choose your path" text adventures. On the one hand, it's a clever way of adding a great deal of varied content without having to come up with user interfaces to encompass situations as varied as being in prison, managing a ski resort, racing ground-based pods, competing in an interstellar (and trans-species) pizza contest, and so on. And you're never compelled to do them (except when you get thrown in prison), so you can avoid them if you wish.

On the other hand, I tend to approach new text adventures with a bit of wariness and weariness. Some can be relatively simple, but some can be quite difficult (though I have managed to eventually complete all the ones that I've actually started). And given how gorgeous the graphics are in the rest of the game, the simple sketches and text-based screens can be a bit of a letdown. On the whole, however, I'll take the content over the presentation, and I think SR2 is stronger for having these adventures in their current format than it would be if it lacked them entirely. Besides: they're a good fallback when you find yourself running low on cash and nobody wants you to carry some important object from one planet to another.

I find it interesting to compare SR2 with Microsoft's Freelancer. I had very high hopes for Freelancer and bought it as soon as it came out. Within a day, I had put it down again, and I haven't played it since. Freelancer had better eye candy and a more 'realistic' approach--but it felt far more like a railroad game than SR2 ever has. It is a classic example of the difference that good game design can make.

And that's what SR2 has plenty of: good game design. Trip Hawkins (formerly of EA and 3DO) famously said that a good game should be "simple, hot and deep." And that describes SR2. In spite of the variety of gaming styles--or, more likely, because of them--SR2 is addictive and fun.

SR2's greatest game design strength is, I think, the natural manner in which you can leverage yourself into having greater power and influence without ever losing the sense of your character being an individual. Natural (instead of arbitrary) tradeoffs keep you in line. You never command fleets; but if your leadership ability is sufficiently high, you can pay 1 to 6 other rangers to work for you for a while. While you can leverage up your ship and its components to take on the Dominators, you can still get killed if you get careless or overconfident--and there are still times you need to run away. Likewise, you may find yourself earning larger and larger sums for completing tasks and quests--but you may also find yourself spendings thousands or tens of thousands of credits in repairs and missile resupply after a single battle with pirates or Dominators.

Along those lines, your insystem-speed (including during regular space combat) is a function of the ship's size (carrying capacity) and the compnents and cargo inside. This means that a big, hulking ship, loaded with lots of weapons and other goodies, may be _more_ vulnerable than a smaller, less-equipped one, since the enemy can 'surround and pound' you. (With a fast enough ship, you can actually outrun missiles and torpedoes.)

Full disclosure: over 20 years ago, the abovementioned Wayne Holder and I designed and developed a real-time graphical space adventure game for the Apple II called "SunDog: Frozen Legacy". Needless to say, it was a constrained and primitive game, since it ran in 64KB of memory and fit (along with the operating system and all game data) on a double-sided floppy disk (280KB total). (Note: that's _kilobytes_, not megabytes or gigabytes.) Our vision was of a much richer and more complex game than we could possibly fit within those constraints.

SR2 encompasses everything that we did, attempted to do, or every wished we could do in SunDog, but with 21st century technology. It is for me such a delight, 22 years after SunDog shipped, to finally get to play the game that I have been carrying in my head for all this time.

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PROS (besides those cited above):

-- The game is rock-solid stable. In many, many hours of play, I've had SR2 crash exactly one, and it did so gracefully. This is in stark contrast to many other commercial releases (Civ4, GalCiv2, Battle for Middle Earth II, etc.). In fact, SR2 is very robust when dealing with external interruptions; twice I've had my system drop back into WinXP due to some kind of alert box from another application (unrelated to SR2); each time, the SR2 bar at the bottom of the screen change to read "Click here", and when I did (after handling the alert box), I found myself right back in SR2 where I left off.

-- SR2 does an automatic autosave every time you lift off a planet (overwriting the previous autosave). As noted, you can save your own games as often as you'd like (but: see below under Cons).

-- The user interface is very slick, very attractive, very fast, and works very well. Likewise, the graphics and music make the game very enjoyable.

-- For most actions, SR2 gives you a choice between automated and user-controlled.

-- The ground-based robot RTS battles are quite fun; the ability to take over and directly control one of your units (with a ground-based view) makes them even more so and opens the door to some more intelligent strategies.

-- E-Games/Cinemaware Marquee (the US producer/distributor) provided very useful support when I had a problem with one of the CDs on my original copy (and simply swapped out my copy for a new one). (Thanks, Nicholas!)

CONS (besides those cited above):

-- As noted elsewhere here, SR2 uses the controversial Starforce copy protection system, though I've had indications from the manufacturer that they plan to replace it.

-- SR2 was developed in Russia (and in Russian); some of the text translations are a bit obscure or confusing, though at times that simply adds to the sense of speaking with an alien whose grasp of human languages might be weak. While in prison, I did find one screen of text entirely in untranslated Russian, but it's not a critical screen.

-- The more games you have saved, the longer the save/load game panel takes to come up (though it always has eventually come up). Since I tend to save games often, this can be an annoyance. My solution is simply to delete saved games more often.

-- You can't save games at all while doing one of the ground-based robot RTS battles or during one of your text adventures. However, both of those environments give you the option of restarting should you lose or fail.

-- There are only two graphics resolutions supported in most of the game: 1024x768 and 800x600. (This is probably one of the reasons why the game is so stable.) However, the ground-based robot RTS subgame also supports 1280x1024--and SR2 will automatically switch back and forth between that resolution and whatever your chosen resolution is for the...Read more›

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Product Description:
The Dominators have risen as an ominous new threat throughout the galaxy. As part of a planet responsible for producing war androids, it has become self-aware - producing The Dominators - a mutant force which has advanced beyond their sole programmed ability. They have developed their own intellect, force of will and agenda and are now striving to destroy everything in their path and expand their own horizons by conquering the galaxy...one planet at a time.

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