Renegade X - Operation: Black Dawn

I've been playing the standalone First Person/Third Person shooter Renegade X over the last two days and it ended up leaving me pleased. Sure the game has some mediocre animations, voice acting and a very arcadey feel to gameplay, but once you embrace all of that it becomes a lot more fun. The one thing I could not embrace was the voice acting though, it almost always through me off and it left me puzzled as I heard random NPC's with better voice acting that the main characters, but like someone pointed out to me the voice acting may be intentionally cheesy and over the top. I wrote about Renegade X earlier this month when I was watching the release trailer in uneasy anticipation. It came out on the 28th for all to play and for free. The game was made by Totem Arts who based the game off the fairly awful Command & Conquer Renegade, but they replicated the C&C in Renegade X very well and with some surprisingly good graphics. If you don't want to read anything I have to say and are already sold then head on over to the Renegade X Indie DB page to download the game. For everyone else I will spend the rest of this discussing my impressions and what the game is about. There is also a multiplayer version of this game coming out sometime in the future.

In Renegade X you control a man named Havoc, the head of spec ops team full of various people from various cultures. Why do I say it like that? Well your three main companions in Havoc squad are a Scottish man, a typically large and gruff man with a gatling gun and a woman's who accent I cannot discern, but it is definitely heavy. You can see this all like me and think that the voice acting is bad, character creation is bad, story is bad, or you can look at it from the perspective of an action movie or something like a G.I. Joe comic. If you look at it that way it is far more enjoyable, because not only does the story/voices not detract from the gameplay but they instead emphasis the general feel and theme. Speaking of theme I love the Command & Conquer assets everywhere. There are GDI troops, mammoth tanks, chinhooks, jeeps and so much from the original games that if you've played anything before C&C Tiberium Sun it should be bringing back some nostalgia filled memories. Fighting tank battles with Tiberium under your treads or watching the GDI Ion strike hit the NOD base is absolutely splendid. The game looks pretty good and runs well on the UDK engine. 

While the theme is splendid and the graphics are well done there are some not so likeable things in the game. A.I. for instance is all over the place. You can see some tanks doing a good job taking out enemy troops while at the same time you can see enemy NOD soldiers flat out running past everyone as if they don't have a care in the world. One of the biggest problems was soldiers grouping up and doing nothing but stand in place once combat started. There is obvious work that AI should be running around and trying to do some kind of tactical maneuvers, but for the most part they just run all over the place and some don't even fire back until you start hitting them. That isn't to say the game isn't hard, it is fairly if not very challenging on the upper two difficulties, while normal feels much like it should. If you are expecting the weapons to feel really solid, like Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare, then you are going to be let down, so expect them to have a more light weight/arcade like feel to them. Even though that may just be the theme they are trying to convey, they could still benefit greatly from making the guns feel more like real weapons. Check out some of the AI behavior, action and general gameplay from some areas in the last three chapters of the game.

The game is fairly fun as long as you embrace the arcade and action based feel. It's not too long, maybe 3-4 hours if you aren't dying a lot, and you cannot save it during a mission, but most missions aren't very long and you can always select any mission to play from the main menu. I do recommend it to anyone who has played the C&C games, specifically the really old ones with NOD versus GDI, and has a really fond memory of everything related to that, if you don't have that you may not be able to enjoy it but the video above should give you a good idea. Check out the links below if you want some more information or what to download it and like I previously stated there will be a multiplayer version coming in the future. Thanks for reading and be back tomorrow. 

IndieDB Page: http://www.indiedb.com/games/renegade-x

Main Website: www.renegade-x.com 

*The Main Website has been down all day for some reason. 


-Written by Sean Cargle