The only game I know that is similar to the rangers is Sid Meyer's pirates. But the problem here is that rangers are so superior to pirates that it's you can't really advice the latter to anyone who hungers for more rangery action. I mean, let's compare:
- Naval combat in pirates is similar to black hole combat in rangers (although black hole combat is not as important gameplay-wise, but nevertheless). Still, I'd say that rangers are better here, simply because there is more weapons and more tactical options. Sure, there's no wind to screw you up royally, but there still are accelerating movement lanes and gravity wells surrounded by the spikey stones, not to mention the power-ups.
- Tactical combat in pirates could be compared to either turn-based space battles in rangers or to the RTS mode. RTS mode is clearly superior - I mean, it's so much deeper than pirates' astonishing richness of 2 types of units versus 2 types of units, not to mention that you can even play the rangery RTS as an arcadish shooter and with a modicum of success, to boot! On the other hand, space battles are kinda on par with tactical battles in pirates - yeah, there's only 3 kinds of weapons viable (rokkits, atomic visions and vertixes; well, maybe also an IMHO-9000 if you're short on vertixes), but they still don't get boring that fast.
- Analogues to dancing and stealth - luckily, there's no shit like this in rangers. Really, who the hell need your stupid QTE action, and as for stealth, why would you ever use it, really? There's almost zero reasons in the game to do so.
- Trading - more interesting in rangers, because, first, there are more kinds of goods in that game, second, there's an option to smuggle things in, third, you don't have to deal with the always overly annoyed crew.
- Treasure hunting and artifacts - well, with artifacts rangers are somewhat superior to pirates, because first, artifacts in them have a broader range of uses, second, there's more ways of getting them than just farming governor's daughters and mysterious travellers. Treasure hunting is also not as annoying in rangers - sure, rewards are smaller, but you can buy the probes on your own and just scout random planets with them instead of having to gather those stupid maps.
- Duels - ok, here pirates win, there's nothing like duels in rangers, gameplay-wise. But then, it's not like the duels are that deep and cool.
- Quests - the few quests in pirates involve fun stuff like defeating the very same guy sixteen times in a row, so it's obvious that even postal quests in rangers are better due to their quirkiness (which is kinda replaced with cheesyness and sillyness in translation, so yeah). And I'm not even starting to talk about text quests there, because really, who wants to be a pirate in the caribbean when you can be a master of the ikee-baana, rock-star, pizza chef, secret agent, holocaust bomber and God knows what else in rangers 2? It's like another game in itself.
I could've also said that there are also things like stimulators, extortions, alternate ways of dealing with bosses, diseases and stuff in rangers, but at this point it should be pretty obvious that they're much deeper and richer game. Now, this comparison may look silly, I mean, who fucking cares here, but see, it's an old pain of mine - rangers 2 and the last incarnation of pirates were released in the same year and most of the major russian game magazines (back then I was still kinda young, inexperienced and soft-skinned so I paid attention) praised pirates over rangers, no, really, what the fuck was with them? It's like if this year most potatoland journalists would've said that tWitcher 2 is shit and DA 2 is the new shit - how pathetic that would've looked? That's a travesty.
