Drought. Glut. Drought. Glut. Why do computer games seem to come in cycles of feast and famine like this? We went for months without a good new space shooter rearing its head, and then we get four major combat titles vying for our dollars in less than eight months. Granted, this doesn't compare to the amount of, say, adventure game sequels that are out there, but let's say that space jockeys won't be pulling old copies of Mantis out of the closet for a while. First LucasArts got TIE Fighter off the launching pad, then Take 2 served up Star Crusader, then Origin bestowed the mighty Wing Commander III upon our unworthy personages. Now SSI is springing Renegade: Battle for Jacob's Star on us and expecting us to just go out and play the damn thing. So I did. I wrenched myself away from a serious Warlords II jag to try out this new shooter. (You know you've been playing Warlords II too long when someone walks into the room and you try to right click on them to see what they're stacked with.) I was glad I did. I have to go back to Warlords II now (it's a moral imperative thing, you see), but Renegade is a lot of fun. I blew a lot of things up. It was a good, positive experience, one I'd recommend to my friends and loved ones. And humans, too.
Renegade: Battle for Jacob's Star is a first-person space combat game, with a play style very similar to Origin's Wing Commander series. I could throw around phrases like "interactive movie" or "multimedia interactive branching plotline" ("Sedagive?!"), but you probably know the drill by now: you see some plot, fly a mission (blow up some stuff), see some more plot. The cinematics of this CD-ROM game are smooth and very pretty in the game's 640x480x256 SVGA resolution. The characters are drawn in a comic book style, which suits the voice acting perfectly. The voices are a little hammy and overblown, but you get the feeling that's exactly the way they were meant to be. A good example of this is your commanding officer. His callsign is "Mother," and after your first talk with him you'll agree that there's a second word that should be added to his name. He's bullying and obnoxious (like your boss), but if you can sift through the abuse you just might realize that he's giving you some good advice.
One of Renegade's best features, the one that makes it stand apart from the competition, is that it puts you in charge. You're a talented but undisciplined pilot, so you've cultivated the great joy of being assigned to the backwater station at Jacob's Star. Your first sorties with Mother produce warning signs of a full-scale invasion by the Terran Overlord Government (TOG), and when Mother is shot down and declared MIA, the station falls into your hands. From that point on, you receive mission briefings from Crucible Command, but it's up to you to carry the orders out. It's your responsibility to select the pilots who will accompany you (Renegade allows a squadron of up to six fighters), what ships they will fly, and even what type of missiles they will be equipped with. You have a limited amount of both machines and pilots, and if they don't come back from a mission you can find yourself short-handed in a hurry. Each pilot also has their own stats which affect their performance, and one of your tasks will be to hone the rookies into pilots worthy of fighting alongside the few old guard warriors you'll have at your disposal.
Renegade is a good fast-paced action game with a lot going for it, but it does have a couple of limitations. The in-flight graphics are a mixed bag. Your cockpit is good looking and easy to understand, and the enemy ships look fantastic, especially up close; however, the explosions certainly aren't going to put the bit-mapped fireballs of Wing Commander III to shame any time soon. There's a small flash, and then the ship breaks into many bits of space junk; the junk is good, but I would have liked more pyrotechnics to accompany it.
My biggest complaint about Renegade doesn't deal with the gameplay, but with the handling of saved games. Instead of going to the menu between missions to save your game, the game is saved automatically for you at the end of each mission. (You can have as many pilots on your hard drive as you have room for, but you only get one saved game slot for each of them.) I thought that would be a good system, until I failed to come back from a mission. When I loaded my saved game to retry the mission I was shown a cinematic of the Jacob's Star base exploding. The game actually saved my failure, thus overwriting my previous saves and forcing me to start the game over again. This is a problem that should have jumped out and hit the playtesters over the head with a shovel, and frankly I'm amazed that a company that specializes in role playing games would allow such a nasty game saving error to make its way into a finished product. You actually have to drop to DOS and backup your saved game after every mission to ensure that you'll be able to pick up where you left off. Unbelievable.
Yes, it has a couple of flaws, but Renegade: Battle for Jacob's Star is a lot of fun. Actually, it's much better than I thought it would be. It's hard to compete with games like Wing Commander III, but Renegade will find its niche of the market, and it should do especially well among those who like the idea of assembling the mission squadrons themselves. Renegade is a solid entry into the space combat market. You'll get your money's worth on this one.
