Now, Pirates has done this sort of subgame thing before, but is a much simpler and shallower game than Space Rangers. You're happily playing when - biff! Bang! Pow! - the game goes insane and does something you were never expecting. So it's a big game, an unusual game, but a game you can just about understand. That's the basic game - 2D turn-based space-adventuring. In other words, there's lots of ways for your decisions to bounce back at you in positive and negative manners. There's also individual reputations with all the characters in the universe, with pirates holding grudges from previous attacks and individual planets declaring you a wanted man and launching police-vessels whenever you're around. The latter is the equivalent of the "Rating" in Elite, climbing the ranks in the army and your reputation among the Space Rangers of the galaxy. The experience is used for the small role-playing aspect, skills able to boost your performance in combat or trading. The former is used, like Elite, to increase your ship's equipment, slowly climbing the long tech tree from utterly useless to the sort of firepower that makes the Death Star feel a little inadequate. This all accrues money, experience and honors. Join the war effort against the dominators, who, no, really, we'll get to eventually. Explore, laying down probes on uninhabited space areas. Either turn to intergalactic thievery or help innocent merchant vessels beat off attacks. Take missions from planetary governors for cash rewards and honors. Try a little trading, by buying high, selling low and swiftly going out of business. Travel between solar-systems via your jump drive, exploring. Dominators invade and destroy all life, but we'll get to them a bit later. Other space ships go about their daily business - Pirates, pirating, Traders, trading, Diplomats, diplomatting. Planets rotate around stars in perpetual motion. You play an eponymous Space Ranger, looking down on a two-dimensional view of the solar system you're currently in. In terms of the structure, it's essentially a more complicated turn-based Pirates set in Space. It's almost as if someone escaped from the Wario Ware design team, snuck off to Russia and performed a putsch at an unwary strategy game developer. This is a game made with absolute, brilliant disregard for the accepted conventions of gaming niches. It's also the sort of game which makes me think that the tongue-in-cheek post-genre label I made up for the Darwinia review was actually onto something.
But sober-minded reviewers give the latest merely competent game in a big franchise ninety percent because it exists, so to hell with them. And it's not that it doesn't have enough flaws for a more sober minded reviewer to kick it down a little. Because it might be just because it's precisely aimed at my soft spots - emergent situations, freeform universes, sheer quirkiness, and being constructed by an underdog developer in the middle of nowhere (Vladivostok, apparently). Essentially, the game's amazing, but I had to put myself in quarantine for a week to make sure it's actually something I have to recommend to the world.
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