Renegade Ops

I put on Renegade Ops expecting a throwaway arcade distraction and spent the next five hours skidding a heavily armed buggy into enemy compounds at full speed. That probably tells you everything. This is a top-down twin-stick vehicular shooter built on the Just Cause 2 engine, which means the physics feel punchy, the destructible environments actually collapse when you drive through them, and Avalanche's signature sandbox sensibility bleeds through every map even at a bird's-eye angle. It is not subtle and it does not try to be. The four core characters - Roxy with her airstrike buggy, Gunnar's heavy gun platform, Diz's EMP armored truck, and Armand's shield-deploying APC - each sit on their own skill tree split into health, weapons, and special ability upgrades. You level them separately, which gives replay runs some actual structure. The special abilities have real tactical texture: Diz's EMP can be upgraded to deal damage rather than just stun, and Gunnar's heavy gun can eventually shoot down incoming rockets mid-air. Roxy's cluster airstrike remains the strongest single ability through the normal campaign, but harder difficulty forces you to think about Armand's timed shield block against missile volleys. Character balance is not perfectly even, but it's close enough that picking based on playstyle holds up. The Coldstrike DLC adds two more renegades and a snowy three-mission campaign with its own boss encounter, the mechanized Panzer Wyrm, which is exactly as stupid and fun as that sounds. The nine base missions run about five hours. That's the honest number. There's no padding it. Primary objectives come with a clock, secondary objectives redirect spawn pressure if you bother with them, and one mission is literally just 'outrun a nuclear blast across a collapsing bridge.' The level variety across the main campaign is serviceable but not deep - tropical islands and industrial compounds do start blurring together by mission six. The normal difficulty is also annoyingly binary: you get five lives and lose all gun upgrades on death, which punishes aggression hard, while casual hands out infinite lives and strips the RPG layer entirely. There is no middle ground, and you cannot change difficulty between missions, which is a genuine design stumble. Where the game earns its reputation is four-player online co-op. Running four armed vehicles simultaneously across a wide map, each with distinct specials and converging on the same target, is chaotic in the right way. Steam players reported some connection issues at launch, but the underlying netcode holds together well enough once you are in a session. Two-player local split-screen also works cleanly for couch sessions. Leaderboards add a scoring competition layer on top of the co-op, which keeps things from feeling purely casual. Online population in 2025 is thin - you will need friends rather than relying on matchmaking - but if you have three people ready, this is a very good two-session game. On the PC side, Renegade Ops runs on hardware from over a decade ago and needs no tuning. Controller support is solid and honestly the preferred input for the twin-stick scheme. There are occasional crash reports in the Steam community pointing to an AVA_Main error, which is an old bug that never got patched out. It did not hit me, but it is worth knowing. The game sits at 76 on Metacritic and 85% positive across close to a thousand Steam reviews, which is a fair representation: this is a tight, focused arcade experience that delivers exactly what it promises and no more. It is not trying to compete with anything released in the last five years. It is trying to be Jackal with experience points and physics, and on that specific brief it succeeds.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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