Game Review: Space Ranger (Amiga, Mastertronic)

While it was commonplace in the 8-bit era, by the time the Amiga and Atari ST arrived on the scene arcade clones were less prevalent and publishers were spending time developing more original titles for the new hardware. When games did pay homage to the past, they built upon older games and enhanced them significantly. So it was a surprise when Mastertronic looked to a Williams arcade classic for inspiration when developing Space Ranger, especially when it was one of their titles destined to make it on to their own arcade system…

Space Ranger – The Premise

I won’t waste time going into the plot behind Space Ranger as it’s a pretty convoluted affair – suffice to say that planets across the galaxy have come together in a time of peace, an alien race has appeared to threaten that and it attacking and kidnapping creatures from one particular star system. You are a member of a team assigned to protecting the galaxy from hostile forces but as expected, you’re the only one available to help in this crisis…

So off you fly to three planets in the Beta Crucis system in turn, armed with nothing but a jetpack and a laser pistol in hand. You have to fight off the wave of invaders, avoid hazzards thrown at you from the Harvesters that are flying above the ground trying to capture all of the critters on each planet, and sending the critters to safety using your Telekinesis Nets.

Gameplay

If you haven’t guessed by the game description or the screenshots, Space Ranger is an unashamed clone of Defender. There are a few basic differences to the gameplay but the core game remains intact. First, as well as protecting the critters from being captured, you have to get them to safety. Where Defender just needed you to stop them from being captured, here you need to land next to them and activate your netting so they’ll leave the planet. It’s a similar idea to Dropzone, but instead of simply walking over them and it being done automatically, there are issues as I’ll mention later on.

The Harvesters are probably the other big change. While they are there primarily to capture the critters, they’re also there to hinder your progress and throughout the game they launch various items at you. These vary from homing missiles, drones that can’t destroy you but cling to you and push you around until they are destroyed and so on.

Control Chaos

Space Ranger gives the player the option to play using keyboard or joystick but no matter which option you choose you’ll find yourself struggling. If you select keyboard, the numerical keypad is used to control movement, while SHIFT is used to fire and SPACE is used to activate the Telekinesis Netting to rescue any of the critters. Movement is cumbersome and while you can control your ranger in 8 directions from the keypad, managing to do this while firing/using your netting is incredibly uncomfortable.

As you’d expect, most people will opt to play with a joystick instead, but this doesn’t fare much better. Movement is controlled with the joystick, and you shoot with the fire button. However, to activate your netting you have to press SPACE, the right mouse button assuming you still have a mouse plugged into port 1 or the second fire button on the joystick. But being realistic, the majority of Amiga owners back then wouldn’t have been using joysticks that had independent fire buttons so almost everyone playing would have been relying on pressing SPACE.

Playability

The idea of using a larger ship for capturing the critters rather than having the individual alien craft do it makes for a novel twist on the Defender idea, but the fact that it can’t be destroyed makes it an annoyance, especially when you’re trying to focus on the aliens (who are also shooting at you), and rescuing the critters (and not shooting them accidentally thanks to the fact that the game allows you to fire in 8 directions).

Now, it has to be said that this isn’t the deepest or longest Defender clone with just three stages, but because of the issues with the controls, it really is a chore to play and you spend more time fighting against the controls than anything else. You can complete each level without saving any of the critters and apart from missing out on bonus points and extra lives, there’s no real incentive to save any of them as you’re not prevented from progressing in the game and frankly when you’re trying to survive while taking your hand off the joystick to reach for the space bar it’s easy to give up all together and play something else instead.

Identity Crisis

One thing I did notice with Space Ranger is that there seems to be some confusion with the packaging when it comes to the Mastertronic catalogue number for the game. On the spine it has the number IT 0212 although by the time this was released the IT prefix was primarily only being used for Atari ST games. The American release, however, used another prefix altogether – AM 0212.

Things get even stranger looking at the disk label as that uses the number IM 0211 – a completely different prefix AND number! Looking at most of their other Amiga releases, IM seems to be the correct prefix, but the change in number seems to be a mystery!

Graphics And Sound

Now where do I start with this… The back of the packaging for Space Ranger boasts that the game has “some of the best animation ever produced on an Amiga”. This really was Codemasters-level marketing here as I’m sure Trading Standards might have wanted to have a word with Mastertronic about that claim. There’s some pretty good parallax scrolling on the backgrounds, and the animation on the creatures as they walk and jump around on the landscape isn’t too bad but that’s about it. The graphics generally are quite bland though and certainly don’t stretch the Amiga in any way.

Sound on the other hand – effects are quite bland and repetitive and as for the music… this has to be some of the worst I’ve ever hear from the Amiga (and I’ve heard a LOT in my 35+ years as an Amiga owner!). Fortunately there’s an option to turn it off, and that’s something that you’ll be eager to do quite quickly.

Overall

Space Ranger is a perfect example of everything that was wrong with the entire Arcadia project. Mastertronic took an arcade classic and tried to add a new twist to it turning it more into a computer game rather than an arcade title, but made the fundamental mistake of retaining arcade-style controls that relied on multiple fire buttons. In the arcades the frustrating gameplay and poor visuals and sound wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, and in the home the controls let it down even more.

If Mastertronic had simply opted for their own take on Defender with a change in visual style – in the same way Archer Maclean did with the C64 and Atari classic Dropzone – then they could have been on to a surefire hit. Instead, it’s easily forgettable and is one to steer clear of.

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