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- Anti-Climax Boss: In theory, the planetary battle to take down Terron, one of the three Dominators' leaders, should be the hardest mission since you can't build robots and what you came in with is all you get. In reality, it's easiest mission in the entire game by far, you can cheese it by manually controlling one of the rocket robots and shooting enemies just barely out of their line of sight (with enemies making virtually zero efforts to stop you). You could do the entire mission without losing (or using) a single unit.
- Designated Hero: All Rangers controlled by AI. See Dirty Coward on the main page for most reasons, but they also befriend pirates and will very rarely help you in attacking them, some of them actually are pirates. You can be one too.
- Even Better Sequel: The first Space Rangers was universally beloved for being an innovative game. Space Rangers 2 took everything that was great about it, then made it even greater, along with making several new additions to the game and rebalancing a few things for better gameplay.
- Fan Nickname: Gref for the Player Character, since that's the default name used when starting text quests from the menu.
- Funny Moments: In the "Fishing Championship", the way to reject doing the quest involves you spitting in the eye of the human escorting you. The resulting scene involves the man loudly yelling, stomping his foot, and kicking your ship, which eventually hurts his leg and makes him yell even louder.
- Since the text quests don't account for your race, you can do this as a peleng, even though you have acidic saliva. Meaning that you took his eye out just because you "Don't care about the goddamn fishing".
- Game-Breaker: Unique hulls have enough space for you to mount just about anything you want, and they can take loads of damage. And none of the NPCs can ever obtain them. Piloting a fully equipped unique hull you can easily take on an entire enemy fleet by yourself. The devs recognized this, and they were made optional in the HD version (off by default), except for the one that is hardest to obtain.
- Goddamned Bats:
- The Dominator suicide drones in the second game. While they have very low hp, they make up for it by being incredible quick (fast enough to catch up with a 900+ engine with afterburner), capable of changing course on a whim and do some serious damage when they hit you. Which can be a huge problem when you're at the same time trying to stay ahead of the main dominator fleet.
- Similar to the above are the Lirecron missiles. They don't do that much damage individually, but end-game pirates loves spamming them so much that having 100+ after you at once aren't uncommon, and unlike regular missiles you also can't just boost away from them either, as they will pretty much follow you around forever.
- Good Bad Bugs: Even though selling contraband grants you pirate rating (rather than trader rating), it can still result in you receiving praise from the Coalition for being a great trader (even though you were breaking the law while doing so), combined with you getting trader rating for it.
- Memetic Mutation:
- The life of a great ranger has ended.Explanation
- "Mystery of the luatans" running out of money.Explanation
- Sequel Displacement: Space Rangers 2, due to being an Even Better Sequel that uses all the same mechanics, has completely eclipsed the first game, as it's pretty much superior to it. It also helps that there are few references to the first game, and that the series puts emphasis on gameplay over story.
- Sequelitis:
- Quest is all about text quests, with everything in-between not being of much importance. It wouldn't be too bad, except nearly all the quests are taken from Space Rangers 2, and are completely unaltered. Since there are free alternatives for playing text quests on a mobile device, few fans see a point in bothering with Quest.
- Legacy suffers greatly from being an Allegedly Free Game with an inconvenient interface, Canon Defilement (such as pelengs with nostrils, or Dominators existing in year 3000), an unfitting art style, reuse of old music tracks and sounds, and a lot of bugs and unimplemented features. As such, it was denounced by fans of the series as a cheap cash-grab, and few people remember it.
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- The RTS segments of the second game. While fairly easy for the first few maps or so, the AI gets downright brutal in the later ones. Combined with the atrocious pathfinding of your robots and the in general very glitchy and clunky gameplay (not to mention the fact that they can take several hours to complete, time in which you could have earned 10 times as much money as they pay out) means many simple don't bother with them and turn them off the first chance they get.
- The pirate faction added with the HD Remake independently invades systems just like the Dominators, essentially doubling how many Coalition systems are under siege at any given moment. They are also equipped with powerful, specialized equipment introduced by the remake which makes short work of the local system defenders, making running into them an Early Game Hell. Many players prefer the non-HD Space Rangers 2 as a result, or use mods to turn off the faction.
- Medals are infamously disliked for frequently replacing the normal special awards you can get for completing quests. Fortunately, you get given less and less medals as you obtain more of them, but it still gets rather annoying in the early game.
- While rocket launchers themselves are popular, no one likes the fact that missiles often hit the loot from destroyed ships, blasting it too.
- Scrappy Weapon:
- Electronic Cutter in the second game is amongst least popular weapons. Its gimmick is that it gradually breaks attacked ship's equipment; however, the game deliberately lowers its effect on other ships (only the player suffers the full effect), and its usage damages potential loot, lowering its selling value (or forcing you to spend more on repairing it if you plan to use it for yourself).
- In the planetary battles, Light Guns are generally considered a waste of resources: they have neither durability, killing power nor range, and only waste limited turret slots.
- Self-Imposed Challenge:
- One of the fandom's on-line tournaments gave you a savegame with 200% difficulty where you start with lousy equipment and down to one system in the whole galaxy. Now go win the game. (Although, realistically, any 200% game ends up like this sooner rather than later).
- Completing the game on the 500% difficulty, as it wasn't tested to be beatable without cheating, and (like all difficulties above 200%) is locked away so that casual players don't stumble into it. Even if you restrict yourself to just dumping the game's save (which shows you the location of various items and such), it's still an incredibly difficult Luck-Based Mission that relies on Save Scumming and carefully planning out everything you do.
- Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: It's rather easy to be distracted by the text quests, especially as they're highly varied and have a lot of funny and good writing, along with plenty of lore. It also doesn't help that the main menu allows you to launch any text quest you want, so you don't even need to play the standard game. This even led to the official creation of Space Rangers: Quest, which is a glorified text quest player.
- That One Achievement:
- One achievement requires experiencing all diseases within one game. The issue is that not only getting any of them is random, but some of them are unique to specific race, so you have to change your race multiple times to get them all.
- One achievement requires collecting all kinds of medals within one game. The problem? Some medals can only be awarded for missions, and there's a chance that you would receive equipment instead (or just nothing at all), or would get a medal you already own; and the chance to obtain medals drastically decreases once you accumulate 15 or more, so you have to gather medals from different categories in specific order, or you may softlock the achievement's progress by getting easily-obtainable medals too early.
- That One Sidequest:
- Quests that require you to destroy specific ships tend to be significantly hampered by the mere act of those ships landing on a planet to repair. And if they are wanted there they will be arrested for 2 months which doesn't count for the purposes of the quest, meaning that you have to pay their bail for them to get off the planet and start shooting them again.
- The "Depth" text quest is probably one of the deadliest in the entire game, featuring you guiding a submarine to a specific point. All of that, however, is hindered by randomness, little tolerance for errors, the possibility to render the quest Unwinnable by Design (such as if you hit the bottom in the wrong place), the Sea Monster that attacks you (with the fight being purely random), and the fact that the quest doesn't even make it easy for you to resurface and save yourself.
