Renegade Ops + Viking: Battle for Asgard + SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics (Gunstar Heroes)

I went in expecting Renegade Ops to be the star here, and it mostly earns that billing. Developed by Avalanche Studios on the same engine as Just Cause 2, it is an isometric vehicular twin-stick shooter where you pick one of four drivers, each with their own special weapon, and tear across vast open maps blowing up tanks, collapsing buildings by driving through them, and racing against timed primary objectives. The destructibility is genuinely satisfying, and four-player co-op online pushes the mayhem into territory that feels almost unreasonably fun. The caveats are real though: nine missions is a short run, the story is knowingly cheesy comic-book nonsense about stopping a villain named Inferno, the upgrade system feels underpowered by the back half, and the difficulty curve has an awkward gap between Casual (too easy, no RPG progression) and Normal (checkpointless maps, lose your gun upgrades on death). Play it with friends and a controller; play it alone on a keyboard and you will feel the rougher edges fast. Viking: Battle for Asgard is the bundle's wildcard. Creative Assembly, better known for Total War, built a third-person hack-and-slash around Norse mythology where you play Skarin, champion of Freya, liberating islands from the underworld forces of Hel. The pitch is solid: open areas to explore, Viking warriors to free and recruit, large-scale army clashes that few games of its era attempted at that scale. Combat runs on light and heavy attack combos, blocks, dodges, and mana-draining elemental power-ups, plus QTE finishers for bigger enemies and some light stealth sections for infiltration missions. The execution is uneven. Boss fights feel like oversized regular enemies rather than proper encounters, the PC frame rate is notoriously capped at thirty, and the soundtrack barely shows up outside of combat. It lands in that honest middle zone: mediocre by objective measure, but the sheer spectacle of a full army clash makes it worth at least one playthrough if Norse action-adventure is your thing. Gunstar Heroes is the bundle's trump card and the reason retro fans should pay attention. Treasure's 1993 Mega Drive classic, delivered here through SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics, is a run-and-gun that still holds up with almost no asterisks. You pick one of two brothers, combine weapons from a pool that includes flame-throwers, homing shots, and lightning blasters into fused combinations, and blast through stages that each do something completely different: a mine-cart gravity-flip section, a board-game dice level, a scrolling shooter segment, and boss encounters including the legendary Seven Force, which transforms through seven distinct attack forms. Two-player co-op is supported. The pace is relentless and the sprite work pushed the Genesis hardware harder than almost anything else on the platform. If you have never played it, this is as easy an entry point as exists. As a bundle the value spread is lopsided in an interesting way. Renegade Ops is a reliable co-op session game with a short ceiling. Viking is a rough-around-the-edges curiosity that Norse mythology fans will find worth the time despite its flaws. Gunstar Heroes alone would justify the cost of entry for anyone who missed it the first time around. Three games, three different genres, one clear standout, and one hidden gem depending on your tolerance for imperfect ports.

Alex · Scout Team

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