At the time of release, I decided to give Renegade a miss, as it had pretty mediocre reviews. However having picked up the First Decade C&C pack, I've now been able to give it a whirl. As it's now 4 years old, I wasn't expecting much but as it turns out, it's quite a good game:
-Wide variety of environments, with towns, bases, caverns, deserts, islands etc... some of the levels are pretty big, too.
-Fast paced gameplay with new secondary/tertiary objectives appearing all the time. Helps to keep the game flowing
-Great array of weaponry. Some of the guns are a bit samey and it lacks a shotgun type gun, but overall, I haven't played many games with such a nice selection
-Reasonable storyline which ties in the with the C&C universe, and some high class cutscenes as one would expect from Westwood
-Excellent performance at 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF max details. The graphics still look half decent in places too.
-Good balance and scaling of difficulty - the early missions are quite straightforward, but as you progress through the game, things get steadily more difficult.
On the downside, the scripting obviously hasn't been properly tested as I came across quite a few bugs, particularly in tutorial level. If you do something like go back and talk to the wrong person, or tackle something out of the 'correct' order, you have to repeat entire sections of training again. There's other occasions in the game itself where if you don't follow the objectives in order sometimes it 'resets' them or gets a bit confused. Furthermore one mission where you have to meet up with members of your old team, its a bit stupid because you actually have to talk to them. I had to go back to an old savegame, because I rescued a colleague, then ran off onto my next task, only to find they get automatically killed (time limit or something) because I hadn't triggered the end of that objective by physically pressing the 'use' key next to them. Sigh.
Overall I think Renegade ticks most of the boxes required for a high quality FPS - it falls short in a few areas but I've played a lot of inferior games. With enhanced graphics (textures/lighting mainly) and AI, it would be a top notch game.
Currently I'm inside the Temple of Nod which I believe is near the end of the game - absolute chaos with large number of tricky opponents to overcome. Gonna be tough to get through, especially with my staple bullet/laser weapons being very low on ammo, but I should have enough in my backup arsenal to take care of business given enough quicksaves
-Wide variety of environments, with towns, bases, caverns, deserts, islands etc... some of the levels are pretty big, too.
-Fast paced gameplay with new secondary/tertiary objectives appearing all the time. Helps to keep the game flowing
-Great array of weaponry. Some of the guns are a bit samey and it lacks a shotgun type gun, but overall, I haven't played many games with such a nice selection
-Reasonable storyline which ties in the with the C&C universe, and some high class cutscenes as one would expect from Westwood
-Excellent performance at 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF max details. The graphics still look half decent in places too.
-Good balance and scaling of difficulty - the early missions are quite straightforward, but as you progress through the game, things get steadily more difficult.
On the downside, the scripting obviously hasn't been properly tested as I came across quite a few bugs, particularly in tutorial level. If you do something like go back and talk to the wrong person, or tackle something out of the 'correct' order, you have to repeat entire sections of training again. There's other occasions in the game itself where if you don't follow the objectives in order sometimes it 'resets' them or gets a bit confused. Furthermore one mission where you have to meet up with members of your old team, its a bit stupid because you actually have to talk to them. I had to go back to an old savegame, because I rescued a colleague, then ran off onto my next task, only to find they get automatically killed (time limit or something) because I hadn't triggered the end of that objective by physically pressing the 'use' key next to them. Sigh.
Overall I think Renegade ticks most of the boxes required for a high quality FPS - it falls short in a few areas but I've played a lot of inferior games. With enhanced graphics (textures/lighting mainly) and AI, it would be a top notch game.
Currently I'm inside the Temple of Nod which I believe is near the end of the game - absolute chaos with large number of tricky opponents to overcome. Gonna be tough to get through, especially with my staple bullet/laser weapons being very low on ammo, but I should have enough in my backup arsenal to take care of business given enough quicksaves
