Renegade Ops is the sort of game that's so obsessively simple, it's a wonder that more games aren't able to achieve this sort of focus. The achievement is made even more notable for being from Avalanche Studios, the team behind the hilariously ADHD-riddled Just Cause 2. Despite being on its face a very brief game, Renegade Ops has also proved to be the game from Playstation Plus' Instant Game Collection that's spent the most time on my hard drive alongside Just Cause 2. Part of this is, if I'm being honest, due to its somewhat repetitive gameplay mechanics that leave me eager to get into other activities after an hour or so of play and pretty Renegade Ops-ed out for a few days or weeks afterward. After the initial novelty of brute-forcing your way through innocent villages' buildings and resources with your vehicle/bulldozer and the games' copious explosions gets diluted (it never truly gets old plowing through things, of course), it's easy to notice that all you're really doing is driving from one enemy spawn to the next and then spinning your sticks around. Circles are the ultimate theme of this game, both driving and firing. Due the way enemies target your vehicles and the nature of the bigger enemy vehicles' loadouts, it rarely behooves you to move in a straight line or sit still.
What probably makes this bit more engaging and open to resourcefulness is the multiplayer option, which is understandably watered down for me having picked the game up a year after its initial launch. I've only been able to find one online multiplayer match in my three months with the game, and since my social life consists of bars, concerts and other "people not in my apartment" pursuits I haven't found any opportunities to try the local co-op. Still, the way I play this game has really stretched out the campaign, as I only just tonight finished Chapter 9 with Diz at Level 32. The difficulty of the game, other than the first mission when you have no skills, and the last mission when all the heavies are brought out to treat you like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction, isn't very notable on Normal. You'll certainly die, but about halfway through the game I had had to restart Chapter 1 enough times that I was probably a little overpowered for the game's mid-stretch, much like the Playstation-era Final Fantasy games' lack of mid-section balance.
The diversity of the four playable characters' special abilities intrigues me, though. On paper Diz seemed like the right bet for how I generally play games like this (give me all your defense!) but now that I've seen how destructive you need to be in later levels I'm really interested to try the other games out. The gameplay definitely doesn't feel very novel anymore, but it doesn't really need to. Renegade Ops is essentially one of those old Desert/Jungle Strike games on adrenaline; there are no quiet moments in between enemy camps, no dopamine release as you drop your winch to grab power-ups and POWs. Just booms and bangs and pows and whams. As such, while one can find plenty of things to hope Avalanche improves upon in the name of variety should they give this game a sequel, due to its very surface level pleasure centers I won't mind keeping it around long to enough to beat the game with at least on other character, which at about three to five hours of gameplay for the single-player campaign stretched across a couple months is pretty perfect for a game I got for free without any prior knowledge of what it was.
Good on ya, Avalanche, for giving me your two marque titles for nothing. I'm really keen to grab whatever's next from these guys now.