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The never-ending debate is whether MOHAA or Renegade is better. Although Renegade won the poll, I would say otherwise. Westwood's foray into the FPS (First-Person Shooters, if you've been wondering what that means... In a graphic card context it's also "Frames Per Second") genre is pretty good, but just not good enough.
Westwood's forte has always been the Command And Conquer series of RTS (Real Time Strategy) games, legendary titles like Command And Conquer, Red Alert and the expansion pack with the infamous Giant Ant Missions, Red Alert 2, Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun, not to mention numerous expansion packs. They've also managed a decent RPG (Role-Playing Game, not Rocket-Propelled Grenade) in Nox. But their strength has always been RTS games, and they tried to infuse an element of RTS gaming into Renegade. In my opinion they wasted their time.
It would have been okay if the "Database" were accessible through a press of a key, but a rather useless radar map which loads up when you press Escape loads up. Another infuriating thing is that changes I made to the config (I changed vehicle steering from keyboard-based to mouse-based) changed back the next time I played the game.
Sound effects for most weapons were kind of muffled and just didn't sound convincing. The rocket launcher sounded good, but otherwise the sound didn't impress.
The graphics are also quite unimpressive. The special effects, like when the ion cannon powers up, look really great, but the tanks look like two carved blocks stacked on one another with a cylinder sticking out the other end, and the buildings look very boxy. The power plants seem to be supposedly round, but in fact they're ugly-looking hexagons.
And I'm not using a package low-end type system. Mine is medium-to-high-end. AMD Thunderbird 1.333 Ghz, 64MB GeForce 2 MX graphics card... simply put, unless you're Ian Tay or Nat, my comp kicks your comp's ass all the way to Barrow, Alaska. The special effects may look cool, but you don't see special effects all the time, and what you do see most of the time is boxy, repetitive graphics.
Granted, the Renegade levels are quite big and if they were at the standard of MOHAA or the models at the standard of Counter-Strike (yes... the models in Renegade can't beat a mod created for a 4-year old game...) it would lag that new 400 gigahertz (or some other drool-tastic number) IBM supercomputer, but I would prefer to see the hated "LOADING..." popularized by Half-Life and get some nice eye candy. Each mission has some distinct seperate parts anyway, and it'd be better to be able to pause for breath after wiping out yet another NOD base.
This is becoming quite a bashing isn't it? Well, before I go on to whinge about the AI, here's the plus sides. Command And Conquer is quite an illustrious series, with tons of backstory to it, and the whole idea to experience it from the perspective of a commando on the ground rather than from a aerial view pushing tanks around from some command satellite is quite good in itself. The atmosphere is also very well done and the units and buildings you see in the RTS games are all faithfully recreated to be seen from a new perspective.
The plot of the story is also quite well done for an FPS game. After all, quite a bit of the success of the RTS games was a good plot as a sideline. In essence, a good reason for killing people. Renegade provides quite a bit of that as well.
All right, back to bad cop. The AI was really wooden. I can't count the number of times that the supposedly elite Black Hand soldiers couldn't get through a simple door, or waited by a lift door waiting for me to walk past on the railing above and drop a grenade. I've seen better from CS RealBot. And the physics were quite unrealistic. Most weapons don't have any recoil. Don't start on that "they've got some new technology that eliminates recoil" crap. If you're using gunpowder or any kind of explosive needed to fire a bullet, you've got recoil. If you're pulling a trigger for flames to gush forth and burn people, you've got recoil. So why in the hell isn't there recoil?? Even the sniper rifle has no recoil!
Renegade is a good idea executed so badly, someone at Westwood should be executed. If there is ever going to be a sequel, it'd better be a lot better than this. Look around, Westwood, and take a hint from successful FPS games.
I can't help but feel that it would have been a lot better had it used a better engine, rather than one they cooked up themselves. The feel might not be the same, they wouldn't be able to have those health bars, but it would have played and looked a lot better.
FINAL SCORE
GOOD: Good plot and atmosphere. That's it!
BAD: Badly boxy graphics, sound effects just aren't convincing, AI is quite wooden.
OVERALL: If this is the best FPS Westwood can pull out, they shouldn't go in there EVER AGAIN!
RATING: 55% (WASTE OF MONEY)
Reviewer's Comp Specs
AMD 1.3GHz Thunderbird
256MB RAM
Windows 98 2nd Edition
GeForce 2 MX 64MB
56x CD-ROM drive
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
No lag usually. Crashes to desktop occasionally.