Consider this an addendum to the other great reviews posted by other users; I just wanted to add something. That 'something' is a word about the mission editor. If you are like me, you've always been intrigued by the idea of designing your own scenarios for games but way too scared of the cryptic, impenetrable editors that your favorite games shipped with. That is all changed with the editor in this game. It is so intuitive, robust, and straightforward that I was able to set up a 20-on-20 city night battle, complete with tanks, apc's, and helicopters, in a remote town on an island of my choosing in about 3 minutes without looking at a manual. And I've never made a mission before in my life in any game. Even if you never touch the campaign or the many missions available, you can lose weeks to this game just setting up nearly any battle scenario you can think of and playing them any way you want. This is truly a modern warfare sandbox, and it is sublime.
Space Rangers 2 is an Adventure game. It's a Turn-Based Space-Flight Combat game. It's a Real-Time Strategy game. It's a Trade Simulation. It's everything we've been told can't work in a PC game : a mishmash of genres that plays great in all different modes. In Space Rangers 2, you play as a pilot and choose yoour alliance by what you select as your beginning class and by what missions you take and whether you succeed at them. You're missions might be violent assassinations of other pilots or trade ships, peaceful ship escorts, planetary jaunts (which play out in brilliant text adventures!) or militaristic assaults against the titular Dominators, which take place in both space and on planets as a simple but fun RTS game. You can buy a fast, nimble fighter bristling with weapons or a lumbering cargo ship with tons of space to transport goods (both legal and illegal). You can choose from thousands of different ship parts with which to outfit your ship, including guns, lasers, missiles, engines, shields, sensors, radar, and alien artefacts. You can be a vicious pirate, a peaceful trader, a noble protector of other ships, or a soldier fighting against the evil Dominators. There is practically no limit to what you can do and how you cna choose to do it. Everything you do has consequences. On one planet I decided to buy some (iilegal) drugs to sell at another planet for a tidy profit. When I got there, I was arrested for selling items on the Black Market. Game over, right? WRONG! I was taken to a nifty text adventure of my stay in an alien prison, where I could choose to escape, behave and work for the warden, be a noble prisoner fighting against the man, become a bruiser, be an intellectual idealist ... just in this one adventure, I couldn't believe the range of choice I had. And there are dozens of these throughout the game. This is the easiest recommendation I can make - anyone who likes games will find something to like in this stellar but criminally-underappreciated masterpiece. Buy it NOW.
