Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators
Review
It may entertain, if you have the patience to crawl through the mini-games
by Magus
reviewed on PC
Crime (or anything else) doesn't pay (cont.)
Once you actually get out of the downward spiral you will begin the interesting part of the game: fighting, getting better equipment, buying a bigger ship, advancing in the Ranger ranks, etc. Unfortunately, it's taken me almost forty hours just to get to the point where my expenses almost even out and jousting just for the fun of it is one of the most expensive hobbies there is.
Mini-games frenzy
The game is full of mini-games that range from mildly interesting to outright boring. For example, if you break the law you will be taken to the closest jail and you will begin a text adventure worthy of any 1980s adventure game. The options are repetitive, the dialogue is uninteresting (and bleeding long), your objective is hardly clear and the game is boring. I'm not sure if it's just a marvelous prison simulator or just a dreadful mini-game. In addition, there are so-called black hole missions where you control your ship and fight some other ships. There are a few strange things in this mini-game: the weapons you have equipped don't behave like they should (the fragment cannons fire laser beams, the missiles fire yellow circles), your ship isn't really your ship (no matter what engine you have you will always move at the same speed and no matter how much armor you have you will die just as quick). The black hole mini-games are actually fun although too easy once you learn how to win.
There are also ground battles where you play a kind of strategy game with the Dominators, this mini-game actually has a lot of potential and it almost lives up to it. You can create your robots from different pieces (not many but at least there's some variety) and then you send them to war. To win the game you have to conquer the enemies' bases, which in turn give you more resources to create robots. Losing bases means less robots and a diminished chance to win. The advantage the enemy gets by conquering your base plus the resources you lose amount to a huge disparity with every conquered base. Besides, there's only one material which really matters: metal. All the other materials are seldom used so losing a metal-producing base is far more damaging and can change the tide of battle in seconds. While the game isn't that boring, the steep level of difficulty after the first few missions and the seemingly infinite resources the AI manages to get makes it very frustrating.
A long time ago...
As far as the graphics and sounds go this game is really poor. While you are navigating your ship you will get a top down view as seen in almost any space shooter since 1990. The ground battles look better but they still look worse than the four-year-old Warcraft III even though the maps are really small and the character count isn't that high (eighty robots on the map at most but usually around forty). The story isn't even told through videos or speech. Music (when you actually get to hear it) is tiresome and unexciting, to the point where I preferred to leave my music player running while playing the game. And the sound effects range from generic boom to a Star Wars laser sound.
To quote a robot: "Danger, Danger!"
Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators is a mildly entertaining game with lots and lots of potential which is affected by buggy gameplay (the game freezes and exits out of the blue), boring mini-games, brain dead AI (I almost cried when I read that Elemental Games is really proud of the AI in this game) and absurd learning curve. If you have a lot of time to invest in a game and you don't care about graphics or sounds then this is the game for you because, once you actually invest thousands of hours into buying some cool equipment and fighting the Dominators, the game becomes very addictive. Unfortunately, this comes at too steep a price for yours truly.
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
