Renegade

Copyright : Kuma Computers | Reviewed by : Ritchardo

Breach a complex and guarded maze to recover a rare jewel and make it back with the precious mineral and yourself in one piece.

Battle through ten levels and back again, shooting and avoiding the robot sentries whose only existence is geared around stopping you in your tracks.

Graphics

Anyone hoping for a conversion of the arcade coin-op is in for a wee disappointment here (you?re looking for the other Renegade, by Imagine)? presumably everyone will have stopped reading by now but just in case allow me to explain why you should?ve?

Kuma?s Renegade looks like it escaped from the type-in section of the 464 User Guide and is as unimpressive looking a game as you?ll find.

Basic and blocky, Renegade?s main character plods around the screen in a confusing pseudo 3D perspective that makes you think you?re in line with something you?re shooting at when in fact you?re nowhere near it? The backgrounds are poor with little window dressing to help hide the games? obvious deficiencies.

Sound

Lightweight and uninspiring, once again the whole enterprise screams BASIC, and there?s nothing here to capture the imagination. From the sound that accompanies the character?s footsteps to the light pinging of your gun, you can see and hear what they?ve tried to do but they haven?t got it arcadey enough to pull it off.

Gameplay

Fast-paced, exciting, frenetic. None of these words can be used in an accurate review of Kuma?s Renegade except by liars, lunatics and overly optimistic fools.

No, instead what you get is a dull plod about some crudely drawn rooms, shooting or avoiding some crudely drawn nasty creatures and picking up some crudely drawn objects and dropping them again on some crudely drawn flashing objects. And that?s it. The pace never gets above slow, the action never gets above dull and the game never gets above boring.

To add insult to injury, a game that is already uninteresting is given a further kick by an unnecessarily fiddly control system. Rather than the conventional method of pressing a button to move in a desired direction, Renegade requires the user to move clockwise or anti-clockwise to choose a direction and use a separate button to move forward, this would work well in a quick game with lots going on but it just adds to the pointlessness of the game in the end.

Contrary to popular belief I don?t actually like to stick the knife in to games but Renegade uses the term as loosely as any I?ve come across in a long time. There really is no kind of challenge to the game and even the most incompetent of children could master the game within ten minutes if they could stomach to play it that long.