Renegade Ops Review

Avalanche Studios are the glorious developers who brought us Just Cause 2, which was one of my GOTY choices, so I was a little ticked when I heard they weren’t working on Just Cause 3 yet until I heard they were forced by the government to chill the fuck out because JC2 was just too crazy. Now they toned down the crazy into a crazy car combat game that’s fucking awesome and you should totally buy it.

Renegade Ops
Developer: Avalanche Studios
Price: $15.00
Platform: PS3 (reviewed), PC, & Xbox 360

Renegade Ops opens up with Inferno (that’s his name) destroying a city with one of his many nukes and promises to blow up more cities if the world government doesn’t pay him. General Bryant isn’t exactly the negotiating type so he rounds up his team known as the Renegades to kill Inferno. The story doesn’t get anymore in-depth than that, but this is a game built around gameplay over story (similarly to JC2). You have nine missions to go through and each level has a *somewhat* open world. You’re free to travel all over the fairly large map to kill stuff for XP or to complete the bonus objectives, but eventually a timer will pop up to tell you to hurry up and finish the main objective or else it’s game over for you. I found the timer to be a tad bit annoying sometimes since you never know which main objective could be the last one so you try to finish those bonus objectives as fast as possible for the big points you get for doing them. Each mission ends in a climactic boss battle against Inferno who pilots a new vehicle of death each time. These missions can be straight up fights or end up as multiphase bosses instead with the first mission ending with you hopping in a helicopter and taking out Inferno’s battleship. The thrills are high and the explosions plenty in this campaign.

Once you start up the game you’ll be given the option of choosing between 4 different drivers, each with their own car and abilities (PS3 owners will get 2 new cars by October due to the Play program). Armand drives a tank(ish) vehicle and has a sweet shield that makes you invincible while it’s active and can be upgraded to deflect enemy attacks back at them. Dion has an EMP blast which is fantastic for online play to support your buddies, or just to make a quick escape. Roxy has an amazing airstrike move that just obliterates everything in the area. Finally Gunnar has a heavy gun that will replace your basic attack but the downside is that you can’t move while it’s active. You might be wondering why anyone would pick anything other than the airstrike, but once you get into the later missions you’ll realize sometimes you just want to disable the enemies or drive away, plus those support drivers help out a lot online.

Each character can be leveled up by simply completing objectives, doing stunts, or just blowing shit up. I heard the max level is 45, but don’t take my word on it since I only have Armand at 30 and Roxy at 10 right now. Before you start a mission you’re prompted to spend any accumulated upgrade points you’ve gained to level up your skills in one of 3 skill trees. There’s one that focuses on health, another for secondary weapons (the rocket/flamethrower/rail gun pick-ups), and then the last is focused on your specific character. I figured each character would have the same skills in the first 2 trees, but to my surprise they don’t. As my friend was playing Roxy I noticed he got some pretty nice health upgrades that I didn’t have access to while playing Armand. The beginning skills take 3 points to unlock, but that price soon hikes up the higher you go on the tree with some skills taking 11 points. When you look over the skill tree you start to drool at how overpowered your character is going to be once you max them out, but the thing is that you can only equip 4 skills at a time. Having around a dozen skills per tree means you really have to put some thought on how you want to play that mission. You might not have done so well on a certain mission so you could take more health skills to last longer, or perhaps you know the level perfectly so go for the secondary weapon skills that replenish your ammo and bring the pain to Inferno.

The game has local (2-player only) co-op with both a dynamic and static camera. We tested out the static and that simply slices the screen in half diagonally. This works well enough, but I really would’ve preferred if it was done horizontally instead since I found myself wishing I had a bit more screen. I also felt a bit annoyed since (because it’s split diagonally for some reason) I felt the second player had the better screen since they’re given more space of important information. What I’m trying to say is most of player 1’s screen is the health-bar (top) area) where you won’t be looking most of the time while the second player gets more of the actual middle/lower screen where combat usually is. It still works, but I really would have preferred a horizontal or straight vertical split. Now the dynamic screen is a fucking pain I don’t recommend it at all. What it does is split the screen whenever you and your buddy aren’t in the same screen. Stay together and you get one nice big screen to share. Once you venture away from each other the screen not only splits, it fucking rotates. In a car combat game where you’re driving fast, keeping track of your car while not only is the split screen rotating in 360 degrees, but you also have your friend causing chaos on his screen you might get confused which screen you’re on. Seriously, don’t fucking use it.

You can also jump online for up to 4 player co-op. You could either jump into a quick-match that could toss you into any game as you’d expect, or you can get specific with which mission you want, difficulty, and amount of players. Now if you complete a mission online that you haven’t finished in the singleplayer yet it won’t unlock for you, but the nice touch is that you can bring your leveled characters online and keep any experience gained. Going online also helps grind up your characters since you won’t have all the enemies ganging on you like the singleplayer and completing optional objectives is much easier with the added players.

Overall the graphics are fantastic as you’d expect coming from the guys who just made Just Cause 2. The little effects like dust from your car when you boost, spiraling explosions, bullet damage, and just explosions in general look great. The soundtrack has a nice rock vibe to it and the sound effects from the game sound just as good.

The Final Word
You’ve got 9 missions which will last you a few hours by yourself with 4 different characters to level up which means adamant players will put quite a lot of time into this game to max out their characters or get the highscore on a level. This is definitely going to be one of the best downloadable titles of the year and should definitely be on your buy list.

– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good