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This is actually an exciting space battle. In terms of the structure, it’s essentially a more complicated turn-based Pirates set in Space. You play an eponymous Space Ranger, looking down on a two-dimensional view of the solar system you’re currently in. Planets rotate around stars in perpetual motion. Other space ships go about their daily business – Pirates, pirating, Traders, trading, Diplomats, diplomatting. Dominators invade and destroy all life, but we’ll get to them a bit later. Travel between solar-systems via your jump drive, exploring. Try a little trading, by buying high, selling low and swiftly going out of business. Take missions from planetary governors for cash rewards and honours. Either turn to intergalactic thievery or help innocent merchant vessels beat off attacks. Explore, laying down probes on uninhabited space areas. Join the war effort against the dominators, who, no, really, we’ll get to eventually. I don't know about you, but I really fancy him. This all accrues money, experience and honours. 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. The experience is used for the small role-playing aspect, skills able to boost your performance in combat or trading. 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. 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. In other words, there’s lots of ways for your decisions to bounce back at you in positive and negative manners. That’s the basic game – 2D turn-based space-adventuring. So it’s a big game, an unusual game, but a game you can just about understand. You’re happily playing when – biff! Bang! Pow! – the game goes insane and does something you were never expecting. Now, Pirates has done this sort of subgame thing before, but is a much simpler and shallower game than Space Rangers. That the subgames were relatively light and the strategy games were similar in tone meant that it became easier to view as a single cloth. So, for example, when you go from an exploratory space game one minute to a Williams-arcade-game style shooter when you go down a Black Hole, it’s somewhat unexpected.

Or when you get a planetary mission where you’re placed in charge of a simple – but functionally complete – RTS with you commanding an army of robots whose components you choose from a lengthy list of options.