I played through the UK release last year and SR2 is, hands down, the best PC game released in 2005. It manages to have turn based ship to ship combat, a top down arcade style shooter and text based adventure portions without loosing its focus and it has the best UI I've seen in an RPG to date. Fans of Star Control 2 really, really need to check it out.

Yes, it has Starforce but it's been cracked. Check the usual suspects for it.

Staaaaaaar Fooooooorce
Nothin' but Staaaaar Foooooorce
Those near and far fooooooorce
Let's all go to the baaaaar fooooorce
'Cuz they really suck.

btw, there seem to be some more disturbing news on the starforce front. bluesnews: Starforce wars
I really hope that the worm like behavior of starforce is not true...

I have it, love it. haven't had any problems with starforce.

Oh, another advantage of going to eBay for the UK DVD release: it has both SR1 and SR2 on the disk.

I really enjoyed SR2 and plan to get back to it, as I barely scratched the surface, really. I got the UK release at Fry's back during the summer last year, I think. And now that it's got a no-DVD crack so I can get Starforce off of the machine, so much the better. BTW I saw it still on sale at Fry's as little as a month ago.

Not purchasing anything with Starforce on it for the reasons Wounder gave. The loss of HoMMV is painful to me, too, as I LOVE the Heroes games, and was looking forward to V since it sounded like it was more in the vein of III than IV.

If they'd drop the Starforce contract, I'd buy either SR2 or HoMMV with no second thoughts.

SR2 is a great game, overall. The bad english in the text only portions of the game bugged me a little, but only because it broke my suspension of disbelief. It's a very fun game, but understand that it acheives so much breadth by sacrificing some depth.

Maybe I am just a dick or something, but this seems to be just as bad to me as Starforce. I paid for the damn game, let me do what I want with it already.

I got this game as a Christmas present.

I wound up spending 100% of my free time for about a week playing it. Solid. And then just last month I idly picked it up again to see how well I could do on Impossible difficulty. I haven't been that obsessed with a game in.. I'd really have to spend a while thinking to come up with a figure.. a long, long time.

This game is truly worthy of being called one of the greatest games of all time. It inarguably has flaws, of course, among them a steep learning curve and the fact that the translation is of very mixed quality.. but I could also talk about the bugs I've run into while playing X-COM for the tenth time. If you are seeking quality, and a turn-based space game with elements of three other genres even remotely appeals to you, your life will not be complete until you have played Space Rangers 2. I cannot invent sufficient hyperbole to describe this game.

As for Starforce, I've got a weird perspective on it. Most of my game purchases these days go to indie developers, and I very much want to support that market. Not for high idealistic reasons that small developers are better than soulless corporations (though I don't disagree with that), but simply because they are the only people producing output that appeals to me. The days when I could walk into EB and find ten titles on the shelf I wanted to try are long gone.

So, in short, 'support brilliant indie developer' ranks higher with me than 'avoid supporting Starforce'. If I were a mainstream gamer my priorities would likely be different. Naturally, speaking from my biased point of view, I urge you to buy copies of SR2 both in the hopes that it will result in a sequel I can play and because it really is worth your time.

*looks up the review*

I found one aspect of the control scheme vaguely annoying, namely the fact that in order to choose between three methods of attacking a target in space you wind up having to repeatedly single-click a target, and accidentally double-clicking inevitably sends you off doing the wrong thing. I ultimately resolved this issue by changing the default attack action in the options.

Also, I was mildly irked that at times I wound up wasting a turn of combat because my ship with superior maneuverability simply went the wrong way to continue pursuing my target.

Other than those two issues, it's perfect and utterly transparent; in other words, I never actually had to think about how to do anything. I just did it. One feature not mentioned in the review is the ingame notebook.. basically there's a taskbar-like bar on the bottom of your screen.. almost every piece of information in the game has a button which you can click to turn that piece of information into a little bubble appearing on that bar, mouseover to reread, right-click to get rid of it. Mission information is automatically stored there.

As far as I am concerned that particular UI feature should be mandatory in any game requiring any degree of thought from now on.

Also, I at least found the shooter subgame easier than the reviewer did. Weapons obtained later in the game and a couple minor strategic insights will allow you to cheerfully obliterate groups of seven enemies quite easily. And I am not a shmup God. I know people who are and I have tried the games they play. Briefly, as in 'and then I quit, still cringing from just seeing that many bullets'