Renegade X

That SO FEW mods get picked up on by the general public is a great shame. There are the obvious ones that capture the imagination of enough players that they gain regulars who begat more regulars who... well, you get the idea.

At the moment, Renegade X isn't one of those mods, despite oozing a sheen and quality that few possess. It's still only on beta 0.4, but its vistas are impressive, its gameplay is probably about correct (with, no doubt some balancing issues to sort out), and its concept tried, tested and beloved by more than you'd imagine. But, at the time that we tested it, no bugger was playing it.

As far as I'm able to tell - having played, but not being an experienced veteran, of the original Command & Conquer: Renegade FPS that was released way back in 2002 - this is a near-faithful reproduction, except with flashier whiz-bang visuals and a nicer Hand of Nod.

The levels are pretty huge and as I couldn't find an sprint button, it takes a while to traverse them. They naturally feel empty when you're literally the only person in the world playing the game, but if you squint and try to use your imagination a lot, you can just imagine 64 players duking it out with tanks, flamethrowers, and such.

Every time you spawn, you start off as a regular grunt, but if your team has managed to protect its Harvester, you'll see your battle funds account slowly ticking over. Going into one of the 1 buildings at your base and accessing a computer brings up a list of units to purchase using these funds.

All the classic C&C vehicles and classes are there and - again with the help of our imagination - it'll look rather spectacular when a full-blooded battle is raging. There's one gripe we do have with the units, though. The cloaking system for stealth units doesn't seem to be too effective. My cloaked vehicle moved within targeting range of the enemy base and was fired upon by the automated defences. So much for the element of surprise.

One other thing that becomes apparent, from having nobody to play with, is that teamwork will be vital if you're to succeed. Vehicles and buildings take an absolute age to destroy with just a solitary minigun or rocket launcher whittling down the damage metre. With a Nod buggy's light machine gun, it took us about five minutes to destroy a opposing Harvester, so the help of others is crucial.

To use a footballer's cliche, at the end of the day all we can do is point at Renegade X and say "Play it, play it now!" a lot. There's no reason why it shouldn't be a success, as it is stable, looks good and has that Battlefield feeling of grand combat. But until we actually find a substantial number of players on at least one server, it's difficult to make an actual judgement call on this mod's quality.

Still, there's a lot of time to go and improvements to be made before we'll consider righting it off. It's your job to make sure we don't have to.