Space Rangers should have become a game with minimal graphics, no sound and working in a window. In the same way as how Dmitrii Gusarov, the creator, made his previous project – The General. In the cold city of Russia by the name of Vladisvostok he met a developer Alexey Dubovoi. Dubovoi immediately liked the idea of Space Rangers and insisted on making a more modern project with nice visual action.
They searched for an artist and soon found Alexandr Jazinin who joined the team and together they committed to a 3 years journey to bring this project to life. The game was made by only 3 people with support of their families and occasionally the game development fans – they mostly contributed to music.
You could think that the reason of success was the game itself but that’s only a half truth. Another half are the system requirements of the game. All you need to play it were Pentium 2 and 64 megabytes of RAM as optimal configuration. Even less for minimum. You even can decide what graphical parts of the game you really need during the installation.
I tried running a game on my Pentium M (Pentium 3 mobile) laptop and I need to admit it doesn’t work so so great for a machine with better hardware than optimal. It lags during some turns but that’s still probably the most advanced game this machine can run anyway. We also had different perception of lags back in the days.
Back in 2002 people who lived in Moscow or Saint Petersburg could afford good PCs, but regional salaries in Russia are few times lower than in the main cities and majority of population of Russia still lives close to poverty to this day. Creators of Space Rangers bet on these people and won their hearts.
Despite the same turn based core the first game was in many ways different from the Space Rangers 2 The War Apart you probably know as a game on Steam.
First and probably the most annoying and memorable part of the first Space Rangers game is that when you try to stop the turn it still plays the next one after current. Sometimes you and your enemy get far from each other but game ignores your action to stop in the end of a current turn and you miss the opportunity to shoot other enemies while you’re getting closer to your target.
Game has lesser amount of space stations and different spread of their importance. In SR2 the most important station and scientific one because you sell the dominators’ equipment over there but first SR game has a unique quirk. You don’t get experience from killing Klissans (the global enemy in the game). You get experience by delivering protoplasm left by injured Klissans (in SR2 replaced by nodes) to Ranger Centers. So Ranger Centers are the most important stations in the first SR game because without them you won’t be able to up your skills.
Hyperspace battles are different as well. Arenas are much simpler, you can gather minerals in hyperspace for some reason and to exit the arena you need to enter the exit portal. Also, to enter hyperspace battle all you need is to do a jump from one solar system to another. Game shows you a path of some massive objects you use for navigation. If you take unsafe route you will encounter pirates.
Still, these hyperspace battles didn’t provide any artifacts – it was a way to make a quick credit on equipment dropped by hyperspace pirates and it worked. Artifacts were still acquired by black hole hyperspace battles and from missions.
There is one key decision in the middle of the game that can affect the outcome. At the pirate station ruled by a one-armed man. You meet him after some time since the start of the game. He asks you to pay some credits to listen to his story about how he lost his hand. If you reject – you won’t be able to fight Rachehan (the story antagonist who brought Klissans to our part of the galaxy) in the end of the game.
SR2 doesn’t have such turning points, it only provides you with different ways to win against dominators. One of them is provided on a pirate space station as well.
On a hard difficulty SR literally limits you to only one possible winning scenario – helping scientists to build a communicator to talk to Machpella (the leader of Klissans).
If you try to free the whole galaxy and take Machpella by force – at some point of liberation for each destroyed ship in the occupied system local planets will spawn a new one. Even if you take out 4 or 5 of them in one turn the next turn all of them will get respawned.
If military and you will attack a planetary system where Machpella currently is it’s possible to destroy it, but in reality at hard difficulty it has 4500 life points, fast restoration and powerful weapons. I’m simply unsure if it’s even possible.
In this game even piracy is different. It’s common here to pay much bigger bills for trespassing. In SR2 pirates usually ask for normal amounts of credits. It will be around 200 or 300 credits in the start of the game.
In SR they start with 800. So if you have a powerful ship you can get some good cash very fast by piracy to buy a new upgrade. In comparison in SR2 piracy is more like an addition than the main income.
SR2 encouraged you to kill dominators and bring their parts to the scientific centers to help find a way to beat dominators. For equipment you get the full prices and twice as much for special parts. In SR you still need to bring Klissans’ equipment but you simply sell it as any other items based on your commerce skill.
The only way it’s possible to play this way – it’s much cheaper to fix your ship in comparison.
On the battlefield all the time you need to decide what to gather – protoplasm or equipment because both are important. Value of Nodes in SR2 is much lower than protoplasm in SR.
Even military acts a bit differently – most of the time they don’t even announce their attacks on nearby systems, they don’t give you the exact dates and they attack immediately after all the ships near the striking point.
And the cherry on top – SR is much darker than SR2. Even the loading screen is depicting people on the space station getting exploded. SR didn’t target any market outside of Russia and was barely released on other languages.
Remember one-armed one from the pirate station? He tells you a story on how they were surviving in an emergency escape pod after their pirate ship got exploded. Crew ran out of food and started to eat each other and that’s how he lost his hand.
Also Space Rangers 2 was terrible at launch with tons of bugs. Second game – twice more crushes. First Space Rangers was overall a polished experience for a game made by 3 persons in early 2000s.
Otherwise you have everything you would expect from Space Rangers – missions given by governments, pirates, traders, text quests and long battles in the space in the game that plays itself even when you don’t look.
Would I recommend it nowadays? Only if you are curious about this game. Especially about the story and atmosphere.
Space Rangers is definitely a game I wish we had a good remake of with some quality of life improvements.