The Command & Conquer series stands as an early pioneer in the RTS (real time strategy) genre and one of the most identifiable and iconic game series today.  Ask any PC gamer and they will likely first tell you which branch is their favorite (the main series, Red Alert, Generals, etc.) and then regale you with a tale of one of their most memorable moments.  For many (including this author), it has to do with the power and charisma of the Commando unit.  While most single "grunt" type units died a quick and often pointless death, the Commando would wade into battle, single-shot killing enemies and blowing up enemy structures with ease.  Because of this, the Commando missions in the first Command & Conquer title were always my favorites, and often over far too soon.  Then one day a Westwood employee spoke up at a meeting:

"What if you could be the Commando, but like in Quake?  You know, get right down into the action and see things from his perspective.  Right?"

Right indeed.



That "meeting" quote is a little theory of mine as to what actually happened when this game was pitched for the first time, and as I cannot find anything in to either confirm or refute it, this is the story that I'm going to stick with.  Most certainly not true, but you never know.

Command & Conquer: Renegade ("Renegade") was a first/third-person action game released in 2002 by Westwood Studios, and according to the Internet, it was also Westwood's second to last developed game (not counting the re-release of Lands of Lore in 2011).  Small box only, dear friends.  I don't believe it was ever released in a big box.  It is, as far as I can tell, the only time Command & Conquer strayed from its RTS roots.  So how does it fare?

I don't mind saying that I've had a hankering to play Renegade for a good long while, ever since I bought the game, really.  You collectors know what I mean by this, right?  Collector buys game, collector places game on shelf, and then collector ignores game for fourteen years.  Anyway, I was a little at a loss for content this month and decided if I couldn't get the game running on my Windows 8 laptop, I would find something else.  And you know what?  The game installed!  Guess that means commitment, right?  And just in time for Valentinstag weekend.

Renegade follows the exploits of Nick "Havoc" Parker, the titular Commando I was talking about earlier, and whom some of us have grown to enjoy ordering around a battlefield.  Turns out the guy is quite the renegade, and goes about as if he is a one man army...which, I guess he is.  Havoc's immediate superior in this game is Brigadier General Adam Locke, who shares some of the same renegade qualities as Havoc, but with a little more "call me sir, soldier" attitude.  Their relationship is often quite amusing, sometimes edging towards the atmosphere of a 70's cop drama, with Havoc as the rough, but lovable cop and Locke playing the angry, but grateful police Chief.


Anyhoo, the game takes place during the first Command & Conquer game, and runs parallel with it, though now at the micro level.  As a fan of the first game, I have to applaud this touch, especially during a mission brief when the original (pic above) map from the first Command & Conquer game zooms in until you are looking through the eyes (or over the shoulder) of Havoc.  There are also a bunch of other nice touches and call-backs to the original RTS game, such as the "C&C" voice, announcing not only that reinforcements have arrived, but also warning you of incoming enemy units.  Everyone (save Havoc) has the same [count] unit life bars from the first game, which deplete very fast under your sites. They even managed to get just how awesome and powerful the Commando unit is, so much that the game at times seems comically easy as you mow down scores of Nod soldiers with your basic machine gun.  At times, it becomes almost comical, especially when the game throws ten or more elite soldiers at you simultaneously and they line up all in a row without ducking, ripe for headshots. Now I'm not complaining about that, because if Havoc wasn't powerful at all, it just wouldn't feel right.  Westwood did right in this respect, I think.

But despite this praise, I don't think I can recommend the game whole-heartily, there are a few things I'd like to point out, especially where I felt the wheels fell completely off, so much that it nearly ruined the fun for me.  The first is just how disappointing the Nod bases are.  Remember just how easily the Commando blew things up?  Where with a simple click, structures fell under his application of C4?  Not so much in Renegade.  The first structure you enter takes a scant minute or two to destroy, but only two missions later you will spend upwards of twenty minutes navigating the inside of formerly small Nod structures.  It completely kills the pacing, which leads into my second dig with Renegade - the uneven mission structure.  You start each mission with a primary and secondary mission (and sometimes tertiary), each which must be accomplished in order to proceed.  As the level progresses, objectives get added and altered in the game, but there are also times when you get far too many secondary mission objectives, which will stall any sort of story progress until you find the exact spot the game wants you to be in.  For example, the third mission took me almost eighty minutes to get through, and that was with a minimal amount of dying.  I swear I got a flashback of some of the later missions in the original Wolfenstein 3D, where the amount of backtracking was painful and dizzying.  I wanted to quit right there and then, but eventually talked myself back into the game.  I soon learned that each mission has its own quirks, ranging from pacing problems to structures that appear to confound enemy AI. 

The levels are massive and often complex, in some moments delighting me with its open NOD bases full of details just waiting to be discovered, then rubbing against my nerves when a large map was used to simply make me walk from one end of to the other - twice (and then again two levels later).  I could have lived with all of these problems if not for the wasted potential.  I feel that Renegade had such a chance at greatness, if only they could have married the tactics of C&C with the action of a FPS, then maybe things could been great.  But alas, in my opinion the single player campaign of Renegade fails on that attempt to innovate, simply choosing to take the easy way out by toeing the same line that so many other mediocre FPS have done before them.  It really is a shame.


Where the single player game disappointed me, the multiplayer impressed.  At first blush, it appears to be nothing more than a C&C themed Team Fortress clone, which would have been cool on its own, if not for the extra features.  Where the single player campaign is a FPS/TPS with some C&C callbacks, the multiplayer game is a team-played FPS/TPS with C&C themed RTS elements.  You pick either GDI or NOD and attempt to annihilate your enemy.  You start out as a basic soldier, but are able to "buy" more advanced units as well as vehicles as your harvester gathers tiberium (just like the main RTS game).  What is interesting is that each team has multiple structures to protect from different methods of destruction (be it destruction from vehicles or from within by a Commando-style attack).  Lose your Weapons Factory and no more Medium Tanks for you.  Lose your Tiberium Refinery and you lose your ability to make money to buy vehicles, upgrade units, and repair structures.  While I was unable to play online with other humans, there are still regular updates from the fan community as well as servers for playing on. Renegade also ships with a "Tutorial" level with bots, and you know what?  It was fun, and with one small little caveat (listed in the next paragraph), would be entirely worth the price of admission.

This finally brings me to the Renegade X titles, which are EA approved fan-made games that take the Renegade multiplayer and coats it with more features, Unreal Engine 3 engine, and ease of use.  Yum.  The main one you want to play is Renegade X: Multiplayer, which is basically the original Renegade's multiplayer, but with up to forty players simultaneously, it's easy to connect to game servers, and has improved graphics and gameplay elements.  There are also two other titles, Renegade X: Black Dawn and Renegade X Multiplayer UT3.  Black Dawn contains a short single player campaign, as well as some multiplayer, and Multiplayer is pure multiplayer, but being a Unreal Tournament 3 mod, it requires that game to play it.

Command & Conquer: Renegade was a great idea and at times a passable game, but the slow pacing really puts a kink in the fun factor, in my opinion, making it feel less like an FPS from 2002 and more like an FPS from 1997.  While this isn't bad, I can't imagine having paid full price for this game and being happy, especailly seeing the amount of fun FPS games released in 2002.  I think that fans of the early C&C series story will find some entertainment here, but not enough to get them through the single player campaign. The multiplayer is innovative and a lot of fun, but since one can play Renegade X: Multiplayer for free, why bother, right?  For C&C series completionists, the boxed game goes for around $10 USD on ebay, and as far as I can tell, is the only non-digital way to get the game, although there are a ton of C&C collections and compilations out there, so I could be wrong.

Well, that was my slight detour from DOS for this month.  Back on track for March for the next Ultima article...hopefully.  Just in case, I picked up a new comp notebook for notes and fresh graph paper for dungeons.  I'll see y'all next month.  Thanks for reading!

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