Renegade Ops Review

A top-down vehicle shooter that has some annoyances but is fun overall

Posted by Christian Sorrell on October 13, 2011 - 1:12am EST

The game features nine missions, each taking about a half-hour to play through on normal difficulty so there’s a decent amount of bang for your buck with this one. Unfortunately, these lengthy missions can be as much of an annoyance as they are a strength considering the random spikes in difficulty and ability to run out of lives and fail the mission entirely. At no point during my playtime with Renegade Ops did I desire to replay a mission. By the seventh mission or so, I was beginning to feel weary of completing the game as the missions do not vary all that much from one to the other (until the final level). The inclusion of a helicopter power-up changes things up momentarily but ultimately, you are just flying your default vehicle that can now go over cliffs and doesn’t have its secondary weapon or special character power (both are replaced with missile flares). If you are a big fan of what the game is offering gameplay-wise, you’ll have plenty of it to enjoy, but for those of you not totally sold on the concept entirely, be wary of growing tired of the grind here before the game’s conclusion.

Multiplayer is a fully-fledged aspect of Renegade Ops featuring two-player split screen as well as four-player online play. The four-player mode is a blast (both literally and figuratively) that cranks up the chaos and plays up the open world aspects of each level’s map, allowing different players to go after the primary and secondary objectives as they see fit. It’s fun to have two people branch off to collect all of the items required for one objective while the other two set off to conquer the primary objective before time runs out. That said, the two-player split screen can be more frustrating than fun. Although the game does include a dynamic split screen option that will place both players on one screen when close enough together, more often than not, you find yourself with too little screen real estate to see what you need to see and do what you need to do. Couple this with the fact that the location of respawns seems to be random and erratic when in multiplayer and you have a more frustrating experience than Renegade Ops otherwise provides.

Renegade Ops is an upsettingly mixed bag. At its core, the gameplay and presentation are relatively top-notch. The action has all of the weight and impact of Just Cause 2’s most powerful explosions and high speed chases. Unfortunately, spikes in difficulty, frustrating driving controls, and performance issues will have you dying more often than you’d like and occasionally having to restart entire missions, an infuriating experience to say the least. The split screen and online co-op is great to have and in many ways, feels like the way the game was meant to be played, but stuttering frame rate issues, audio glitches, and the game’s overall lack of direction makes things more chaotic and broken than is desirable. That said, Renegade Ops is a fun game overall but it comes with a price of admission that will have you paying with your patience, your time, and your former nostalgia for the genre.