Renegade Ops

A madman named Inferno begins nuking cities. As politicians plan to negotiate, General Bryant throws down his insignias, and declares war with his renegade team in order to stop the destruction before it's too late.

The game is a vehicular combat, twin-stick shooter. You drive with the left stick while shooting with the right stick, pulling the L trigger to activate your abilities and R trigger to fire your secondary weapons. You can boost with A to either escape from harm or quickly cover ground to get to the next objective.

The nine stages will see you blasting your way through thousands of enemies as you work towards your Primary and Secondary objectives. The primary objective is timed and failing the time means you have to replay the entire level. If you wish to achieve the Secondary objectives, you must do these quickly and not devote too much time to them. The levels take around 15-25 minutes, so losing all your lives or failing the Primary objective is a fairly harsh punishment. On the plus side, this time pressure keeps the game action packed, rather than allowing you to stroll through at a leisurely pace.

Your amount of lives depends on the difficulty level. Easy gives you infinite, Normal difficulty gives you 5, and the Hard difficulty gives you 3. Losing all these means you have to restart the entire level; there is no scope for saving mid-game.

The objectives you are given just involve reaching an area, destroying certain vehicles or driving into a building. Either way you will be destroying everything in your path to get there. The maps are fairly open, with many branching paths, so often there's a lot of scope for attacking your targets in a different order. To guide you, an on-screen red arrow points to your Primary objective, and a black one points to your Secondary objective. I was very impressed with this feature. I found the arrows very accurate and responsive; they instantly pointed in the direction of an alternative route if you missed the turning, or pointed to a different target, as opposed to telling you to turn around or sending you on a wild goose chase.

Enemies are a mix of soldiers, tanks, small vehicles and helicopters. There's plenty of sentry towers guarding the roads and fortifications. Your vehicle can deal damage by ramming sentry towers and other buildings. There's not much scope for applying different strategies. You just keep moving and usually drive in circles to avoid gunfire and to keep in range of your targets. Defeated enemies often drop health restoration items or ammo upgrades, so its always a case of destroying them, then circling back to pick up your rewards. As you destroy enemies in rapid succession, you build up a score multiplier which goes towards levelling up your vehicle.

You can play as four different characters which you need to upgrade separately (levelling up earns rewards for that character only). When you level up, you gain a certain amount of points to unlock new abilities, although only 4 of these can be equipped at once. Each character has a unique special ability activated with the Left Trigger. Armand has a shield; Diz has an EMP; Roxy calls in an air strike; and Gunnar has a heavy gun. The vehicles all have a machine gun as the primary weapon, with secondary weapons being equipped from special pick-ups that may appear from defeated enemies. These include rocket launchers, flame-throwers, and rail guns. There are also pick ups that upgrade your machine gun which resets when you lose a life.

There are also a few missions where you can switch to a helicopter during part of a mission. This adds a bit of variety to the game-play, but you can employ similar strategies, even if the vehicle handles differently.

It's a fairly short game, but there's a few missions that you will be forced to re-attempt them. This will be because they are pretty challenging if you don't play them with great care, or choose the more advantageous upgrades for that mission, or run out of time on a Primary objective because you didn't show enough urgency. During this time, it can feel frustrating, but overall I found Renegade Ops to be surprisingly satisfying and addictive, so I kept on coming back.