Star Rangers makes no pretense of being Wing Commander 3.5, which is good. Despite numerous similarities to that august series, the newest release from I-Magic tackles the space combat genre from a completely different - and not altogether unwelcome - angle. Where the former is a story-driven, cinematic game which uses space combat to give you something to do between scenes, Star Rangers is a shoot-'em-up, plain and simple. It sets out to quickly get you into combat, a task it accomplishes admirably.
There IS a plot, albeit a somewhat thin one. It has no real bearing on the game; it's not interesting enough to be a selling point on its own, but it does lend some slender thread of justification as to why you are where you are and why you're doing what you're doing. You're a Star Ranger. (I know this comes as a great surprise, in light of the title.) It's your duty to protect the human frontier from alien incursion. Got all that? Good. Now go blow up some aliens.
At the start of the game, you're dumped into a practice mode, where you just whack away at enemy ships in waves until you die. You can bail out of this and choose Campaign mode, in which you basically play mission after mission until you finish the game or fail utterly.
Missions won't slow you down much, either. You're given the briefest of briefings - missions can pretty much be summarized as "kill all the incoming bad guys before they blow up any of OUR stuff." Then you can pick your wingman. I haven't seen much of a difference among the available wingmen, but I did notice that the game gets a lot harder if you elect to fly without one.
Then you launch. That's where the game gets good. The space combat mode is fun and fast. Your loadout consists of three different type of guns: plasma guns (read "blasters"), autocannon (read "shorter-ranged, self-targeting blasters") and "Sharp Stick" dumb-fire missiles. You also pack a variety of guided missiles, the type and number of which vary from mission to mission.
If you've got a beefy machine (say a P-90 with lots of RAM), you can play in SVGA. There's definitely some slowdown, but it's tolerable. The graphics are pretty decent. The texture mapped ships are not HUGELY detailed, but they're acceptable. Combat interface details include many of the features we've come to expect from a spaceflight game, such as a "lead" indicator, which shows you where to shoot to hit your current target, and a direction pointer to show you which way to turn when your target isn't directly in front of you.
The game's loose mission structure is both a blessing and a curse. You can kill your opponents in any order you wish, by traveling to them at warp speed. While you're polishing off one bunch, however, the remainder are advancing toward the bases and civilian ships you've been charged with protecting. This results in you jumping all over the place trying to keep ahead of the onslaught. It's challenging, and fun. I have yet to finish a mission on the hardest difficulty level and not lose at least one base. (In the same vein, the easiest difficulty levels are SO simple that ANYONE could enjoy this game, even the terminally uncoordinated.) On top of this, you must manage your power supply and damage. When you run low on energy (or missiles!), or your ship gets too damaged, you need to be close enough to a base to dock and make a pitstop.
Unfortunately, I'm not completely satisfied with the space combat. The sound effects and explosions are sort of cheesy, like you'd find in a cheap arcade game. Maybe that's what the designers were shooting for - after all, this game DOES owe a lot to the Atari classic Star Raiders - but I think the overall effect would have been greatly enhanced by putting more BOOM into the booms. Also, the cinematics are not entirely satisfying. The scenes with 3D rendered ships and bases are okay, but the 3D rendered talking heads are simply frightful, and the voice acting sub-par.
There's also one "feature" that drives me nuts: when other entities in the game (your wingman, your commander, a base) send you a message, their face briefly appears in your MFD and you hear them talking to you. Regardless, it seems, of how tough your system is, there's a momentary speed hit while the game grabs the sound file off the HD or CD. This results in a pause of a second or two where your ship, as a data model, is still moving, but the screen is no longer redrawing your view. This quickly becomes very irritating. It's especially annoying when you are in Warp mode. Traveling at warp speed involves flying down the center of a cone-shaped "tunnel." Hitting the side of the tunnel increases your Error value; if this gets high enough, you can end up a long way away from your intended destination. Needless to say, a warning from your commander that another base is under attack can result in the destruction of the one you're on your way to save!
Despite these flaws, the game is actually quite a lot of fun. It is what it set out to be: a quick and dirty space action game. Nothing epic, just an entertaining arcade shooter. If you need strong moral justification for blowing up enemy ships, and like getting involved in an intricate story, there are better choices out there. If you just want to shoot things, however, Star Rangers may just provide for a few hours of quality time with your PC.
