Hey peoples, so let's start with some background on this crazy thing. If you are looking for some more flashy reasons as to why you might wanna give this (free! No money for anything ever!) game a shot, feel free to skip to the videos! You can grab the game from the website. I like to describe it as "the bastard child of Unreal Tournament & Battlefield", except the original came out before Battlefield so the parentage gets... weird. Or if someone made an actually good GI Joe multiplayer game (c'mon, the Nod are basically Cobra) with a different brand, if that does it for you.
Back in 2002(!) Westwood Studios created their one and only attempt to spinoff the classic Command & Conquer RTS universe into a different genre: the sadly most forgotten Command & Conquer: Renegade, an FPS with a wildly ambitious multiplayer component that fused in elements of standard C&C RTS gameplay in unique and really cool ways, though the single player campaign was generally considered only fair to middling for its time.
Myself, I never did play the full game. However, I spent a hell of a lot of time with the demo back in the day, and even today it contains many neat ideas and elements nobody had ever really tried before. This uniqueness led to a small but dedicated community who stuck to the game long after it was forgotten by most, some of whom eventually banded together under the label "Totem Arts" decided to undertake the insane task of updating the gameplay for modern engine technology.
Flash forward to Feb. 26, 2014, when this small team's labour of love was finally released for all to download as an open beta, completely free: Renegade X! Made in UE3 and clocking in at less than 2 gigs, it's an absolutely fantastic-looking, shockingly polished fanwork that has it share of bugs still left to work out but is still crazy fun. I have been playing it since I saw the notice of release and thought, "hey, that original game's demo was fun, I should give this a try" and just loving it.
Like I alluded to, the game plays like an FPS with RTS mechanics in a unique way that not even anything else in the tiny FPS/RTS genre (like the brilliant Natural Selection 2) does. It really does play, work, and feel like a match of the classic RTS, except people are playing all the units, there's no commander and instead the resources your team's Harvester are collecting are going to all the players so that they can purchase better units/vehicles, all in the service of nuking the enemy's base. Literally, in the Nod's case.
The GDI do it from orbit.
This is the official video giving you a rough overview of how the game plays:
Anyway, the gameplay is fast and fairly arcadey, with a ton of different units/characters/vehicles with their own completely unique, really fun weapons and capabilities, the interplay of which being a huge part it the essential S part you expect from the RTS element. However, this also means that all the choices of what you should spend your hard-harvested credits on is pretty overwhelming at first, especially for those of us that have grown accustomed to the heavily... let's charitably called it "streamlined" selection of classes most current FPSs offer. I think you'll be more likely to get excited about it if you can see what these crazy guns can do, so with that in mind, I've created a few videos to give a basic, hopefully entertaining look at all the things what with you can blow ups dudes/dudettes. I think they came out pretty well!
I've had a lot of fun making these, and I'll be hopefully adding a look at the vehicles sometime soon. I'd love to hear feedback/suggestions/hot tipz from any 'n all. One thing: yeah, I know the titles were kinda hard to read in that first vid. I think I sorted it pretty well for the Nod one though.
Most important though, I hope this gets you trying out the beta and helping make it even better. Nothing to lose but about a gig and a half of downloading!
See you in the Tiberium fields! As skeletons.
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