Renegade Ops – Hands-on Preview and Gameplay Vid (360)

With its lush tropical rainforest setting and my armoured car somersaulting off another huge jump before crashing through some handily placed straw huts, Renegade Ops has more than a whiff of Just Cause 2 about it. This is hardly surprising since that was the last game from Avalanche Studios.

What struck me right from the off is that I had to concentrate on driving safely as well as avoiding the onslaughts of enemy bullets and rockets. The developers have done a great job in designing the environments, with danger lurking around almost every corner. Cliffs, deep ravines and rivers were all lying in wait to inflict pain if I wasn’t careful where I put my vehicle’s wheels.

On more than one occasion I ended up totalling my vehicle as I desperately tried to blow up another bit of enemy hardware. Each time this meant I was a sitting duck for what seemed an eternity before my vehicle had righted itself. If I’d set the difficulty level to hardcore these would have been fatal mistakes. Even on normal difficulty the enemy put up quite a challenge and quickly removed large portions of my energy bar.

Gameplay is geared around completing primary objectives within a time limit. Fail any primary objective and it’s game over. With optional secondary objectives that can be completed at the same time, I was faced with making a judgement call. Do I risk finishing the secondary objective and getting lots of lovely bonus points added to my score or chill out and just complete the primary objective? Well, in the first mission, I spent a lot of time saving the hostages (secondary objective), racking up the points and then rushing around like a banshee to blow up the missile launchers in time. Which I just managed to do. The large countdown clock at the bottom of screen became very mesmerising when I was running out of time.

Here are a couple of minutes of Xbox 360 gameplay footage from the first mission:

With its great graphics and environments packed with action that provided me with some tense gameplay moments as I rushed to complete all the objectives against the clock, Renegade Ops is well worth a look.

Renegade Ops is due for release on the 14th Sep 2011 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Screenshots