Gameplay

When will the hurting stop?

Renegade’s single player campaign is too short, and too easy. On standard mode I finished the game in less than 10 hours. A combination of short levels and push-overs for enemies helped move things along. Everything is pretty easy until the last mission, which is damn near impossible. I could get by with 2-3 reloads per level until the last, which took me 18 reloads. I was shocked when I found the last mission so difficult since everything before it was a cakewalk. This shows that Westwood had some real trouble pacing difficulty in this game. Most games increase difficulty linearly as the game progresses, but in Renegade everything is easy until the end.

Watch where you point that thing

Freedom!

Mendoza?

The AI in Renegade is laughable. Most of the time enemies will run right at you and shoot blindly. I thought that kind of AI went out with Doom and Duke Nukem. There’s also the “run into a door” tactic, or the equally effective “duck and look the other way”. Vehicles are just as bad. Every time I’d see an Apache helicopter I’d chuckle because I knew that it would never hit me and spend most of its time shaking back and forth and warping around the map. The friendly AI is even worse, if you can imagine that. It seemed like every time I had to escort someone they would do nothing but run ahead of me (faster than I could) and get in front of every enemy possible. They would do nothing useful but draw fire away from me.

The scripting in the single player breaks all of the time. I lost count of all the times when the spoken orders from EVA cut off mid sentence. How lame is that? You’re supposed to be getting orders and all you hear is half a thought. You can also break the order of goals – sometimes you can skip a secondary goal without even knowing it. Some of the levels don’t guide you to the goals since the door/path you need to go through is hard to see. Mistakes like this just show a general lack of polish.

Cruising

Power plant

Obelisk

Guns and Hotrods

Renegade’s weapons suck. For example, the basic “bullet” weapons hardly do any damage unless you hit headshots (which is damn near impossible with the bounding box problems). The Flame thrower and Chemical Sprayer only work with straight sprays, so it’s useless to use against moving targets. The reload time is way too long for every single weapon (and there’s a bug where you can reload a fully loaded weapon).

One redeeming value to Renegade is the vehicles. They’re easy to use, they have infinite ammo, and you can transport multiple people. Just like the RTS game, you can run over infantry units (which is a lot of fun). Unfortunately in the single player missions the vehicles are barely used. And when they are used, the level boils down to a rail shooter. It’s tragic how almost all FPS games that use vehicles can’t design a level that uses them well. Hopefully game designers will take notice of Halo and make things right.