After a brief ‘tongue in cheek’ intro we got to the main menu and selected New Game where we were offered a choice of species with which to play the game. These are the five species that inhabit the Space Ranger universe; they all have different qualities and relationships to the others. Each species also has a choice from five craft types to use; Fighter, Mercenary, merchant, Corsair and Pirate. Along with these choices are two other option boxes. In one you can set the basic difficulty level in four stages from Easy to Impossible; you can also open a custom menu that will give you eight other categories to set such as ‘are Scientists stupid’ or how many Black Holes there are. The other box allows you to set the initial skills and equipment. All these options mean the game can be customized in hundreds of ways. As a Space Ranger it is your job to defend the Galaxy from the invading Dominators, a cyber life form that consists of various Robots and mechanical fighting machines that are slowly taking over some of the 250 planets around some 60 star systems throughout the galaxy. The beauty of Space Ranger 2 however, is that you don’t have to follow the game plan. You could just set yourself up as a Pirate or a Merchant and just go off and do your own thing, the amount of gameplay options makes this a truly open game, the sky really is the limit.