Avalanche Studios, the developers behind Renegade Ops, know a little something about making action-packed games, with their Just Cause series delivering free-roaming destruction and a healthy level of explosions and vehicular action. With Renegade Ops, they compress that formula into a downloadable dual stick shooter, which gives you control of one of four different vehicles with their own unique powers and abilities.
Told by comic book style cutscenes, Renegade Ops starts off with bang as the terrorist Inferno destroys large city in, well, an inferno, prompting General Bryant to tear off his military rank in disgust as a UN council decides that their best chance for survival is to negotiate with Inferno. In response, Bryant forms Renegade Ops, his not-so-covert strike team that takes a page out of 80s action movies with gruff heroes, bad one liners, and plenty of explosions.
At its heart, the concept behind Renegade Ops is simple you pick one of four different vehicles and traverse through the environment from a top down perspective using one stick to control your car, and one stick to fire your weapon. The missions always follow the same path youre tasked with moving to various checkpoints and more or less blowing things up while encountering the occasional secondary fetch quest. While moving to spot X and blowing up Y way can begin to become repetitive, Renegade Ops mixes things up by including various set pieces in the missions. You might take control of a helicopter, battle against a platoon of tanks, or even try to outrun an explosion, which helps keep the action fresh.
Gameplay wise, Avalanche gives Renegade Ops plenty of unique elements to help it stand out. First up is the controls while you may not think the steering would be a huge draw in a dual stick shooter game, Renegade Ops has a full physics system. This means you can crash through destructible buildings, boost over ramps, and even flip over if youre not careful. Handling is tight, and once you get the hang of it, youll be running around enemy tanks and avoiding heat seeking missiles. Its enjoyable just zooming around the levels and then gleefully ploughing into an enemy base before they even know what hit them.
Another standout feature is the vehicles themselves. Not only does each vehicle have a unique ability ranging from setting off an EMP charge to calling down airstrikes, but they can pick up various secondary weapons from the map, giving access to railguns, rocket launchers, and flamethrowers, meaning your little buggy can become a potent doomsday weapon of its own. Not only that, the vehicles can also level up, which grants access to three different skill trees. These trees can improve your unique weapon, give you access to secondary weapons, or just help your vehicles chance of withstanding a beating. These trees also give access to unlockable abilities, of which your vehicle can equip up to four as you level up, giving even further customizability to your vehicle.
Graphically, the game is gorgeous, and packs some of the best visuals on Xbox Live Arcade. The levels themselves are large and detailed, and have nice little touches, like birds flying overhead, or buildings exploding in a shower of wooden splinters as you drive right through them. Equally as impressive are the games particle effects, which are displayed often with the games generous amount of explosions. Best of all, the engine holds up even when playing local splitscreen, delivering all the action with no slowdown or hitches.
However, the game does have its flaws. The story and voice acting are so melodramatic that it impossible to tell if it was written to be intentionally cheesy, or if it is just plain bad, with its use of clichd lines spouted by characters and their terrible one liners and plot twists you can see coming from a mile away. It is the type of story that youre far more likely to enjoy if goofy, over the top action is your sort of thing. The games checkpoint system can also be infuriating the campaign doesnt really have one. Once youve used up your lives, you get a mission failed message and are returned back to the main title screen. While experience earned and levels gained by your characters are tracked and saved even in the event of a mission failure, dying on a final boss and having to repeat 30-45 minutes of the same level to get back to where you were can be an infuriating process.
If youre looking for some explosive fun on Xbox Live, it is hard to go wrong with Renegade Ops. The gameplay is tight, the experience polished, and the game plays out like a 80s action movie. Lasting roughly 6 hours in total, the game also encourages multiplayer play and competition with two player split-screen coop, four person online cooperative play, and leaderboards for each mission, as well as the draw of four unique vehicles and their respective abilities to use, giving the game a fair bang for its buck.
