[Introduction]
Remember Westwood?
I sure do. I was raised on Red Alert and Tiberian Sun. The franchise as a whole was basically a household name in the glory days of RTS games. That's why it's such a shame that very few people remember Renegade, the first and (so far) only C&C shooter released. It checks all the boxes for what made Westwood's games so great.
Problem is, it also checks a bunch of boxes that... well, aren't so great.
[First Impressions]
Right off the bat, a lot of things should be familiar to you if you've ever played a shooter before, from the UI to the gameplay itself. You've got your guns, your ammo counter, your radar, your health meter, your directional damage indicator, the works. You've got your health pickups, your armor pickups, your hosing down anything that looks vaguely hostile with bullets, your... combined arms multiplayer? Huh.
Well, unfortunately the multiplayer is deader than Hassan, but maybe there's more to this.
[Development]
Renegade was released in February and March 2002 in North America and Europe respecively.
Only it was actually slated for at least two earlier release dates, both of which were missed. Not great, but at least it didn't spend 12 years in development hell. This isn't the interesting part though.
There's also some cut content, but that's mostly model changes, so that's not the interesting part either.
No, the real interesting part is the weird journey of the game's engine! See, Westwood started experimenting with 3D stuff as early as 1997, including both a racing game called Supreme GT (which may or may not have eventually become Sports Car GT) and a shooter called Command & Conquer: Commando. Curiously, this appears to have involved developer Point of View, but I wasn't able to find any other connections between the studios.
Fast forward a few years and the 3D experiments culimate in the Westwood 3D engine, also known as the Renegade engine; an engine derived from the SurRender 3D engine, which was more of a graphics library than anything else. This, in turn, was based on OpenGL. Alongside Renegade, Westwood 3D was also used in the short-lived MMORPG Earth & Beyond. Following these releases, it was intended to be used in a number of other games, including a sequel to Renegade, but all were canceled when EA shut down the studio.
This eventually culminates in the creation of the SAGE engine. Well-informed readers might recognise this as the engine used in almost every Command & Conquer game after Westwood went defunct, i.e. Generals and onward, as well as the Battle for Middle-earth games.
From OpenGL to SurRender 3D to weird experiments to Westwood 3D to SAGE to SAGE 2.0.
What a ride, across RTS, MMORPG and FPS. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to continue, because the last game to use SAGE 2.0 was Tiberian Twilight, and we all know how that turned out.
[Game Mechanics]
This might sound like a weird notion, but if you've ever played DOOM, Serious Sam or similar titles, then you already know the basics. Get your gun, shoot the bad guys, pick up health and armor to stay alive, pick up ammo to keep shooting the bad guys. The main difference lies in the game's presentation, meaning its campaign is entirely story-driven, and this being a C&C game, it's as cheesy as you would expect, but we'll get to that later.
Ignoring the tutorial, Renegade spans 12 missions, steadily increasing in challenge and stakes, going from taking part in a largely insignificant battle to pretty much straight up saving the world. You start out with some simple enough weapons at your disposal, like your assault rifle, pistol and sniper rifle. Fittingly, your opponents aren't particularly crazy, mostly consisting of enemy infantry, the odd officer and some armored vehicles here and there. This eventually culminates in your arsenal expanding to include a tesla rifle, a portable miniature ion cannon and a laser chaingun.
Now, this might lead you to believe that weapon variety is solid and warrants no criticism, but that's not really the case. Some weapons pretty much make other weapons obsolete, such as the chaingun being a flat improvement over the assault rifle, while other weapons are introduced at a point where they're borderline useless. A good example of this is the tiberium auto rifle, which you acquire around the same time that tiberium mutants start becoming common enemies. Why is this a problem? Well, true to the setting, tiberium weapons heal tiberium mutants, so either you switch between weapons to kill human enemies and mutant enemies respectively... or you just use laser weapons, which are predictably devastating to both. Hell, they even deal significant damage to vehicles and smaller structures.
A somewhat related issue with some of the weapons at your disposal is that tiberium weapons have a chance to turn human enemies into visceroids, a hostile blob of mutated flesh, that ironically pose a greater threat than standard infantry. This sometimes results in the weird scenario where you kill an enemy by turning them into another, more dangerous enemy. I appreciate the adherence to the rules of the setting here, but as a gameplay mechanic, it effectively makes me want to not use tiberium weapons.
Oh, and the mutant enemies? The ones that can wield guns typically come at you toting tiberium weapons. Most tiberium weapons have a small area of effect on impact, and enemies occasionally stagger when taking damage or flail when being set on fire. The staggering and flailing, combined with the tiberium AoE, frequently results in mutant enemies inadvertently healing themselves. On top of this, they'll also sometimes deliberately target their buddies and heal them with their infinite ammo supply.
That aside, the missions themselves aren't too bad. They often feature enemy bases with free reins on how you enter buildings and how you choose to go about progressing, but just as often, you get railroaded down lengthy roads, through long sections of hallways or narrow streets that try and fail to offer an illusion of an open environment. There are ups and downs as you either run or drive to your destinations, but these primary, secondary and tertiary mission objectives don't really fool anyone: Renegade is a largely linear game with linear progression.
Speaking of objectives, occasionally the objective is a boss fight. Thrice, as a matter of fact, but the game doesn't stop with the defeat of the final boss, because that wasn't REALLY the final boss. No, the actual final boss of Renegade is an escort mission.
Yes, an escort mission.
You escort an unarmed NPC through a short sequence featuring an environment so hazardous that it puts everything else to shame. You might find that hard to believe, considering the last boss you fight basically teleports you into an open room with no cover and a handful invisible enemies with laser rifles trained on you, but it's true. The NPC has no weapons, no armor, can't be healed and treats danger with absolute disdain. It's neither fun nor rewarding. Frankly, I'd have preferred a cutscene showing the escape rather than experiencing it myself.
There's a reason Renegade was never really praised much for its campaign. A lot of people shared the opinion that it's only really enjoyable to fans of the C&C franchise. Speaking as a fan, I'm inclined to agree, because there are a lot of bugs that were never fixed, the AI swings wildly between having dirt for brains to having laser precision and the game runs rather poorly on modern hardware. Add onto that a cavalcade of frustrating sections and it doesn't paint a particularly impressive picture. So what did get praised, if not the campaign? The multiplayer!
That's right, the multiplayer, and what a strange multiplayer game it was. Ordinarily, games like this has game modes. You know, like how Halo has Capture The Flag and Deathmatch and what have you. Renegade only had one, and it was called COMMAND & CONQUER MODE. What a name. It's like a weird mix between an RTS and a combined arms multiplayer FPS, except rather than controlling the base, you control the units churned out by the base in imitation of how Command & Conquer RTS games usually work. You protect the harvester so you can get money, you spend money on weapons and vehicles and you try to either deny the enemy team resources by destroying their harvester or just straight up destroy their base. Whoever destroys the enemy base or has the most point when the timer runs out wins. You had a pretty large arsenal on some decently sized maps, including APCs, tanks, scout vehicles and even air units. It was an unusual experience and largely experimental in nature. This was all before Battlefield, PlanetSide and Call of Duty as well. Groundbreaking stuff if you think about it.
You might also have noticed that I changed to the past tense when I brought up the multiplayer. That's because GameSpy and Westwood Studios are both gone, taking official servers with them. Now, this doesn't mean that it's ENTIRELY dead, for two very good reasons:
1. CnCNet are maintaining unofficial servers with help from W3D Hub.
2. Totem Arts is working on a successor to the multiplayer element of Renegade: Renegade X.
Westwood may be gone, and EA may be hot garbage, but it's a testament to the success of the C&C franchise that these communities exist.
[Graphics]
Dated, to put it mildly.
Almost on par with Halo: Combat Evolved, but with the addition of really weird facial expressions on most models. There's a lot of over-exaggeration and a discrepancy between faces being relatively detailed while hands are comparable to Minecraft.
If you're used to something dazzling, going back to 2002 is gonna be jarring, there really isn't much else to say. There were no fancy tricks used to give the game a timeless appearance or any tech wizardly to create a product that looks as impressive today as it did back then, because it really wasn't impressive to begin with.
Moving on.
[Story]
Here's a question I bet you've never asked yourself:
What if James Bond was a G.I. Joe character with the modus operandi of Deadpool in the Command & Conquer universe?
It sounds weird, but it really kinda works. You've got Havoc, the main character, going off on his one-man-army invasions of enemy facilities. You've got the crack team of elite soldiers. You've got the femme fatale love interest. The cloak and dagger pretense before escalating to gunning down anything that moves, the blatant disregard of danger and bad jokes of the main character, the cheesy serious-but-not-quite tone of C&C, the commanding officer who (mostly) begrudingly puts up with your shenanigans... it's all there.
As stories go, it's not at all as adventurous as the game itself; it's well within Westwood's comfort zone. Havoc, an elite commando who treats the chain of command as an optional part of military service, goes on a couple missions, blows up a couple Nod bases, then gets briefed that the Brotherhood has captured some scientists, most notably Dr. Ignatio Moebius, a returning character from Tiberian Dawn.
The focus then becomes rescuing the scientists. No spoilers just yet, but considering that missions 3 through 12 are spent trying to save the eggheads might give you an idea of how well it goes. During your ongoing efforts to be a big goddamn hero, you uncover a number of Nod secrets, become privy to details of the First Tiberium War that weren't available to the player in Tiberian Dawn, and generally experience the setting in a much more hands-on way than an RTS game would allow. It's pretty fun. There's also an in-game codex of sorts which gives access to log entries on a bunch of units and lore elements. Nothing consequential at the end of the day, but very nice to have. It basically amounts to flavor text, which I always like.
Naturally, you eventually defeat the big bad evil antagonist and become a big goddamn hero.
In a lot of ways, this is what Renegade is most remarkable for: its efforts to allow the player to experience the setting from a first person perspective.
[SPOILERS]
You probably already figured out that Havoc repeatedly fails to rescue the scientists, although to his credit, he does manage to save one of them. She gets recaptured (along with himself) basically immediately after, but hey, solid effort.
Some of the more significant things you get to see includes the predecessor to GDI mech units in the form of the Moebius Suit (an experimental suit of power armor), the earliest known controlled Tiberium mutation, the beginning of Nod's cybernetics program, the origins of the Black Hand, the first Nod interaction with extraterrestrial technology and the circumstances of Kane's first "death."
[Pros]
- It's a Westwood-era C&C shooter
- It's also a surprisingly competent shooter
- Wide selection of weapons
- Levels are often open enough that multiple paths are available
- Stays true to the setting
- Widescreen support
[Cons]
- Westwood had no prior shooter experience
- Pretty janky, especially on newer hardware
- AI is clunky
- Some bugs never got fixed
- Very dated graphics
- Lore accurate elements can be annoying
- Some weapons are borderline redundant
- (Official) multiplayer is dead
- ESCORT OBJECTIVES
[Conclusion]
My nostalgia-induced bias means I recommend this game regardless of its (many) flaws and adverse effects on my cortisol levels. It frustrates me to no end, but I still love Renegade.
Moral compass optional. Honestly, friendly NPCs are responsible for 99% of friendly fire incidents anyway.
[Score]
6/10
/DUX
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