It's here at last! The much awaited Command & Conquer: Renegade has at last seem the light of day! I've always wondered what the world of CnC would look like if you were actually on the ground, and now we're getting the chance to find out for ourselves!

After much playing of the Multiplayer Demo, I was so looking forward to finally getting my paws on the retail release. Eagerly unwrapped the game, inserted it gently into my drive, loaded it.... And crashed. Repeatedly. Apparently I'm among the lucky ones though, at least I could get it loaded. If you read the Westwood forums, it seems to me that about 30% of the complaints. The others seem to be a mind boggling array of bugs problems and crashes. Personally I don't understand how Westwood could release a game in this kind of shape, and there's no way in hell that they were not aware that the game was not ready for public consumption.

Anyhows, we'll get into the bugs and problems we had a little later in this review. For the moment, here's our feature presentation.

Backstory

For those of you unfamiliar with the CnC universe, a huge Quasi-Religious/Terrorist organization has come into existence, led by the oh-so-not nice Kane. This organization, known as the Brotherhood of Nod is a combination of the Borg, COBRA (Remember GI Joe?) and the old USSR all rolled into one. They've started a world domination tour, and only G.D.I. (Think the UN, but they're actually useful) can stop them. In the original games (Which were all Real Time Strategies (RTS)) you control either NOD or GDI in the battle to conquer earth. (Or in the case of GDI, to NOT conquer earth.) In Renegade single player you take on the role of Havoc, a GDI trained smart ass commando, as you face off against the forces of NOD in an attempt to rescue GDI's top Tiberium (the source of money in CnC) researchers, Dr. Mobius and his daughter.

The story is given to you by in game movies, and is actually pretty well done, involving treachery, love, colorful characters (most of whom are not very nice individuals) and lots and lots of things exploding. Hmmmm. Explosions.... You missions are given to you by your controlling officer, both as pre-mission briefings and in game updates... There's tons of secondary and tertiary missions that you will be informed about in the middle of a mission.

Gameplay

It's your basic shooter. Grab a gun, kill everything that moves. Get into vehicles, kill other vehicles. Collect a huge number of different weapons and ammo for them. Kill more things. Get armor. Rescue a few hostages. Kill more. You get the idea.

The dev team obviously put some thought into the hud, as it's excellent. There's tons of detail, all of it easy to find and keep track of. When you get hit, an indicator in the middle of your screen flashes in the direction you are taking fire from, your weapons are displayed across the top when you switch guns, and I LOVE the ammo indicator. When you are firing it pops up in the middle right area and displays ammunition and magazine counts where they're easy to see when you're concentrating on winning that fire fight.

Graphics

As was mentioned on the first page of this review, and also in the quick review of the multiplayer demo, I wasn't too impressed with the graphics in Renegade. They're pretty decent and they do get the point across. It's very sweet to look around and recognize the buildings you've seen before, and they really so look like you imagined they would. The graphics engine reminds me a great deal of the Half Life engine, and it looks very similar. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you do expect a lot more eye candy from a modern game. The in-game movies look very old school, with terrible blockiness on faces and hands. Weapon effects and explosions look pretty good, but again.. eh, nothing too, too fancy.

The vehicles are the exception to the mediocre graphics, as are the player models. Both of them look excellent, with sweet textures and animation. Hell, the vehicles even have suspension and when you back up in third person you look over your shoulder, which shows some nice attention to detail.