Yay, finally done with Space Rangers 2 in the year 3330. The only way to defeat the Dominators once and for all is to eliminate the three bosses: Keller, Blazer and Terron. The main way to do that seems to be researching them by gathering parts from destroyed Dominator ships and handing them in to a scientific base. The more materials you hand in, the faster the research rate will be. The other way is to confront the bosses directly and defeat them in combat. As you’d expect, this is pretty hard as each of them has a ton of hit points, and the Dominator-controlled planets nearby will spawn an infinite stream of Dominators to protect the bosses.

As seen from the screenshot above, I’d managed to climb to the top of the rangers rating chart by 3324 after concentrating heavily on hunting and destroying Dominators, also becoming the most Distinguished Fighter in the process. It was also at around this time that the Coalition forces managed to whittle down the area controlled by the Dominators to just the three systems occupied by each of the bosses. I made a conscious decision to target the Keller boss first. This was because while the other bosses could only launch attacks against systems adjacent to their own, Keller has the ability to attack systems through black holes, allowing its forces to strike behind the Coalition’s lines, so to speak. This made it very annoying to have to constantly travel away from the front lines against Blazer and Terron to rescue a system attacked by Keller.

So whenever possible I prioritized research on the Keller boss. Once that was done and I’d paid for the special software that would defeat Keller, I parked myself in a central location in the galaxy and waited for news on where Keller would pop up next. I was lucky that when he did attack, a bunch of other ranger ships were also nearby to help defend the system and keep the other Dominators off my back. I fought Keller for a while until it retreated into a black hole, followed it in, and fought it some more until it initiated conversation with me that allowed me to run the program to terminate Keller.

I was stuck for a while after this because research on the remaining two Dominator bosses was still a long way from completion. I ended up joining the other rangers in “farming” the two remaining systems under Dominator control. We’d jump in, kill whatever Dominator ships in the system while avoiding the main boss, collect loot until our holds were full and jump out again to sell the stuff to the nearest ranger base of scientific station. Repeat ad infinitum. I did try to convince the other rangers to join me in attacking the main boss but they all said that I was crazy and ignored me. However, when I spotted a strike force of Coalition battleships heading in to attack Blazer, I grabbed the chance and joined in. It turns out that the military are basically suicidal. They all got killed by Blazer, but their attack did keep the system clear of other Dominators long enough for me to destroy the boss in a protracted battle that took months to complete.

This left Terron as the last boss. In a fit of impatience, I tried assaulting it head on, but Terron has 9900 hit points to Blazer’s 6600. Between my shields, cladding and repair droid, my hull structure could take a beating from Terron indefinitely, but my weapons were continually being worn down and eventually I couldn’t do any signficant damage to it. The only option left was to farm Dominator parts and wait for research on Terron to complete. This took the better part of two years and ended up being a fairly dull grind. Once the research was finally done, all I had to do was fly into the system, have a nice chat with it, and it basically destroyed itself. Bye-bye Dominators.

So I’m all done with the game now. There’s not much I can say about the game that many others have not said already. It’s clearly something that only developers from Eastern Europe could have come up with and it holds plenty of lessons that more well-funded developers could learn from, not the least of which is that innovative gameplay can often trump graphics. At the same time, the text adventures are charming in a retro way, but is a one-trick pony. It’s nice to see something like that once in a long while, but there are good reasons why game companies don’t use them anymore. I’m looking forward to playing more modern games now but I’ll be sure to give the new version of King’s Bounty that was made by the same group of developers a try somewhere down the road.