This is a game made with absolute, brilliant disregard for the accepted conventions of gaming niches. 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.
In terms of the structure, it’s essentially a more complicated turn-based Pirates set in Space. So Elite meets Pirates, basically.
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. Meteors float along. Other space ships go about their daily business – Pirates, pirating, Traders, trading, Diplomats, diplomatting. Space Stations float silently. Dominators invade and destroy all life, but we’ll get to them a bit later.
You’re free to do whatever you want. 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 honors. Either turn to intergalactic thievery or help innocent merchant vessels beat off attacks. Explore, laying down probes on uninhabited space areas. Mine space rocks. Join the war effort against the Dominators, who, no, really, we’ll get to eventually.
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.
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...
And as for the Dominators... you are really going to have to find out about them yourself. Good luck!