Reviewed: April 28, 2002
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Electronic Arts

Developer
Westwood Studios

Released: February 26, 2002
Genre: FPS/Strategy
Players: 32
ESRB: Mature

10
9
9
10
9.5

System Requirements

While some of these RTS games were groundbreaking in their own right – like the Starcraft series - many were pathetic attempts to capitalize on C&C’s winning formula. I’ll be the first to admit that I have no great love for the RTS genre, yet despite my dislike for tedious resource management and the equally slow process of building troops and structures to send them to their death I am the owner of every Command & Conquer game, mission pack, and sequel. I’ve never finished any of them, but I’ve played them all.

When I heard that Westwood was taking their franchise into the world of 3D I was excited to say the least. The FPS genre is definitely my favorite, and the established world of C&C with its classic struggle of good vs. evil (or GDI vs. Nod) would certainly provide a wealth of opportunities for level design and story development.

Command & Conquer: Renegade embodies everything that we all know and love about the C&C universe and drives it home with some intense gameplay, amazing story, and great graphics. And while Renegade exhibits a few notable flaws, there is enough here to entice FPS lovers and C&C veterans alike.

Veterans of the series will instantly recognize many of the buildings, vehicles, and terminology, although you will now see them from an entirely different view, up close, and even inside. You will learn the various commands and how to use the EVA, a fancy name for your HUD and menu interface that displays missions objectives, a mission map, and access to a database of GDI and Nod information that will expand as you play the game and locate dozens of data discs.

When the game finally starts you are treated to an exciting opening movie. Renegade is the first C&C title not to use FMV movies with real actors. Previous games in the series have featured stunning high-budget movies shot on film with some big-name actors. Renegade manages to maintain this same high quality of filmmaking using the game engine and CGI pre-rendered cutscenes.

The movie opens with GDI troops cautiously advancing down a narrow canyon. A suspicious rockslide blocks the way and sure enough; about a dozen Nod soldiers emerge from the cliffs and ambush our team. A quick call for backup brings a chopper swooping in, a zip line drops, and our hero swings into action. From this moment on, prepare yourself for a nonstop roller coaster ride of action, intrigue, and adventure.

You play Nick “Havoc” Parker; an elite commando with more brawn than brains, and with a name like Havoc you can imagine that you will be causing some. Parker is your typical action hero with bulging muscles and an ego to match. He’s confident that every woman he encounters is “crazy about him”, and he generates a presence that rivals Schwarzenegger and Stallone combined.

Over the course of the campaign you will get to drive many GDI and Nod vehicles including various tanks, humvees, and a sporty red dune buggy. While the vehicles are fun they are often not as powerful as you might think. About the time you are given a tank you can be sure there is a narrow street ahead lined with soldiers with rocket launchers. I often found myself hopping out of my tank and clearing the road ahead with my sniper rifle then getting back in and moving on. This took some of the joy and pure carnage out of crushing my way down Main Street.

You will accumulate a large arsenal of weapons that are divided into ten categories. Some weapons double up in a category like the Assault Rifle and the Chain Gun, so to equip the Chain Gun you would tap the “2” key twice to cycle through the category. You can also pick your weapon with the mouse wheel, but when you start having to cycle through 20+ weapons you might be dead before you get the right one.

With so many weapons it can often be confusing as to which one to use, and quite often it doesn’t matter. The sniper rifle is unrealistically accurate, as are many of the weapons. If you line up the crosshairs and get a red dot you can fire and are pretty much assured of a hit, even at ranges that would defy logic.

Many weapons differ only in their rate of fire and the damage they inflict, but surprisingly, each weapon has it’s own ammo pick-up. Often in FPS games, similar weapons will share ammo and using a Chain Gun could quickly deplete your bullets for other weapons that use that same ammo. Not so in Renegade. Some of the more advanced weapons can get tricky. You won’t want to use the Chem Sprayer or the Tiberium Rifle on the mutants you encounter in the later levels, as they are immune to those types of weapons. Guys wielding flamethrowers are wearing flame-resistant clothing so attacking them with a flamethrower is ineffective, yet a well-placed shot into their fuel tank will turn them into a human fireball.

The only real complaint I had with this game was the quirky enemy AI. I played on the medium difficulty level and sometimes the Nod troops were amazing tough and other times they looked like boot camp dropouts. On more than one occasion I would be standing in a room and a Nod soldier would back into the same room and stand their waiting for me. I almost wish I could have tapped him on the shoulder before I blasted him.

The buggy AI extends to the vehicles as well. Apparently tanks, buggies, and troop carriers can only “see you” if they have a firing solution on you. So if you stay out of their line of fire you can peck away at them with your 9mm all day long, and they won’t move or fight back. I was also disappointed that even after acquiring a Nod tank or buggy the enemy instantly knew I was inside. I was hoping for some stealth infiltration capabilities, but no such luck.

The various missions take place on some of the largest levels in FPS history. One mission has you storming a bunker-filled beach, much like Saving Private Ryan, then moving along the cliffs taking out cannons shooting at your ships, and finally into a large Nod base complete with Power Plant, Communication Building, and many other structures you will be familiar with. Another mission takes place on a heavily armed giant tanker boat with a submarine pen and onboard prison where you must free your comrades, booby trap the ship, and steal the sub.

Even though the gameplay is virtually identical throughout the entire game, the unique level design and creative mission objectives make each mission more exciting than the last. You will start with a primary and a few secondary missions. As you progress through the levels more objectives will be assigned to you, sometimes at an alarming rate. One mission had over a dozen secondary objectives. I was sure the admiral was going to ask be to pick-up some bread and milk from the store before it was all over.

These objectives play a part in the unique scoring system. After each mission you are given a ranking based on many factors including; skill level, objectives completed, mission time, etc. While I enjoy the challenge of trying to get a good ranking, I don’t like the idea of being rushed to get a high score. I am a cautious commando who likes to slink in the shadows and use my scope. Another factor in scoring is how many times you have to reload your game. This is really cool as you can save and quicksave as often as you want. You are only penalized if you have to load one of those saves.

The ranking system will offer perfectionists a reason to replay the solo campaign, and the game even creates a unique autosave for each campaign mission so you can go back later and replay any mission at any skill level. You will need to play some levels many times before you can learn the layout well enough to beat the time limit for a good score.

You might think that juggling a dozen objectives at a time might be confusing, but the EVA does a great job of organizing and displaying each goal with a distance meter and directional finder. For objective targets, the indicator even features an image of the specific person or building.

Even though Havoc is a lone wolf, he will often team up with other members of his former squad or the occasional reinforcement that drops from a chopper. Other missions will have him rescuing innocent civilians, assisting with a civilian resistance movement in the city, engineering a jailbreak, or escorting scientists to safety. There are a lot of scripted events that propel the story throughout the game and it ties all the missions together in one epic saga.

The pre-rendered cutscenes are gorgeous and there is a movie player, so you can go back and enjoy them over and over. I was a bit disappointed that some of the smaller mid-mission cutscenes weren’t available. Even though the movies are pre-rendered, they still maintain the look and feel of the game graphics.

The animators made excellent use of a handheld camera technique throughout most of the movies giving the game an almost documentary look. The first major movie takes place on an aircraft carrier and you almost get seasick as the virtual cameraman circles around the characters and the ship rocks with the waves.

Scripted events are handled using game engine graphics and are seamless with the regular game. The same handheld camera effects are present in these movies as well. The opening movie where the GDI are ambushed in the canyon is brought to life with some amazing camera work as the virtual cameraman runs around, ducks for cover, and is rocked by the nearby explosions. It really puts you in the action.

The characters are modeled with ample polygons and some of the best textures I have ever seen in a FPS game. The camouflage army apparel, metallic mesh flame suits, red Nod jumpsuits, all look realistic from any distance, even at maximum zoom with the sniper scope. Parker has scars on his face and can generate realistic expressions depicting a variety of emotions. The sexy leather clad Sakura has numerous tattoos and battle scars.

The levels are designed very well, and bases are laid out much like you would organize them if playing the 2D RTS version of Command & Conquer. As mentioned earlier, the levels are enormous and in order to accommodate these large levels sacrifices had to be made in the areas of detail and texture.

You will notice that mountains and terrain are created with minimal polygons giving them a jagged look dating back to the first outdoor Quake levels. Once you get inside a building you will find the various textures are pretty plain and usually single colors with no bump mapping or lighting effects.

Keep in mind that Renegade has been in development for quite a long time. When this game was in its early stages of development I am sure it was state of the art. And even though the detail levels might not stack up against newer FPS games, the lack of texture detail enabled this game to fly by on my 1.4ghz and GeForce 3 at 1600x1200x32bit with no visible loss of frame rate.

Oddly enough, random parts of the levels are very well detailed. Water has some good texture and animation effects and trees are also very well done. Objects such as vehicles are modeled with plenty of polygons and excellent textures. Overall, objects important to the game are nicely detailed, and all the extras are simply adequate.

There are plenty of special effects including brilliant explosions, water spray from waterfalls, plumes of snow at the ski lodge, flashy ray guns, and my favorite, the orbital ion cannon strike. Imagine placing a beacon near a building then dashing for cover as the sky darkens and rain begins to fall as the clouds overhead become ionized from the impending strike. As the satellite locks onto target you see a dozen streams of light beam down from the heavens and converge on the target morphing into a column of blue death and erupting into a huge ball if energy. While the Nod forces don’t have ion cannons, they do have nuclear capabilities and the resulting mushroom clouds from such an attack are equally as impressive.

The voice acting is amazing and surpassed only by the script itself. The story and plot development is true to the C&C legacy and all the missions are tied together neatly with the ongoing storyline. All of the characters are voiced by some amazing talent including Rene Auberjonois (Odo from Deep Space Nine) as Dr. Mobius, but my hat goes off to Wally Wingert who voiced Havoc.

Not only did Havoc have some of the best one-liners in gaming or motion picture history, they were delivered with a style and confidence that really made me believe this character actually could go up against an entire army and win. One of my favorite moments was just after I had rescued some fellow soldiers from a prison on a large ship. When asked, “Are you going to take on the entire ship yourself?” my reply, “Don’t seem fair does it? Maybe I’ll shoot with my left hand.”

Westwood has promised to keep the Renegade saga alive with lots of new maps and add ons. They also plan to release development tools to create your own levels and mods. You will want to visit the Westwood Site for more information on these updates.

If you are a perfectionist then you will ultimately want to replay this game on the highest difficulty and achieve a perfect rank for each mission. Once you have exhausted the solo action you can take your fight online.

Once you see how good the multiplayer portion of Renegade is you will think the solo campaign was tossed on to appease the people who don’t like online games. With support for up to 32 players, you can really get some major battles going between the Nod and GDI forces. And while the solo game puts you in the restrictive role of the “good guy”, the multiplayer game lets you join the evil Nod army.

The multiplayer version of Renegade is more deeply rooted in the RTS tradition of the original game. You will harvest your Tiberium and process it in the refinery. Your can use your resources at a variety of Purchase Terminals (PT) to buy buildings, weapons, or upgrade your character. Character classes also play an important role. Damaged buildings can only be repaired by Engineers, so you will want to have at least one of those handy.

The multiplayer game consists of each side trying to destroy the other side’s base. This can be done by destroying all their buildings or placing a beacon in the other team’s beacon zone calling in the appropriate nuke or ion strike. If you are playing against the clock then whoever has the most points at the end of the time limit wins the match.

Westwood has included a convenient set of radio hotkeys so you can send important messages to your teammates quickly and easily. There is also a real-time chat option so you can converse with others or even page, locate, and invite others to join your game.

Renegade is supported on the Westwood Online gaming system and the service will keep track of all match scores on a ladder scoring system. Scoring is based on a system that rewards teamwork and innovative gameplay style. Support for this service as well as local LAN support is provided on the CD and can be selectively installed. You can also play Renegade on the GameSpy service.

I had no trouble getting online or finding fun people to play with and the game ran very well; even on my dial-up. I did have to crank the resolution down to 1024x768, but that was a small price to pay for the human interaction.

For those of you that want to practice you skills before going online, there is a practice mode that allows you to play the multiplayer levels and fight with and against bots. The only problem is that the AI that drives these bots is even worse than the AI in the solo game. You will also find that your weapons that were so accurate in the solo game are now as precise as an Uzi with a bent barrel.

Renegade already has a built-in player-base from its RTS series who just might become the next generation of FPS gamers, and the intense combat action is sure to attract a lot of existing FPS gamers who may become engrossed in the Command and Conquer universe and start playing the RTS games. This is a brilliant marketing move for Westwood, and this cross-genre release is guaranteed to please anyone who plays it.