YMMV page for the overall series:
Renegade:
- Awesome Music: "Got a Present for Ya!", the track that plays during "Obelisk of Oppression", is usually seen as this game's signature song. The 2020 remaster of Tiberian Dawn includes a remix of it.
- Demonic Spiders: Renegade is a game best described as consisting of almost nothing but these. The only mooks who aren't incredibly dangerous, heavily-armored soldiers who can kill you in seconds are the basic Nod infantry (who disappear after the fourth mission), the technicians, and the engineers.
- Fridge Brilliance: Heart Containers take the form of medals. In the RTS games, getting a field promotion increases a unit's HP.
- Game-Breaker: Anything that causes fire, since these weapons will Stun Lock EVERYTHING that isn't a Nod Flamethrower soldier, and those guys can be eliminated by literally everything else. The Tarantula laser chaingun deserves an even higher mention, because not only is it a fire weapon, it deals ridiculous base damage to infantry, vehicles and structures alike, fires as fast as any automatic weapon (600 rounds per minute), reloads in the blink of an eye, and in the penultimate mission Nod officers start carrying them, so there's abundant ammo around.
- Good Bad Bugs:
- Havoc can reload his weapons even when their magazines are full. Nothing useful, but entertaining and rather unique, as it's practically unheard of in most FPS games. This even carries over to the multiplayer of Renegade X.
- The ragdolls in Renegade X are a bit bugged and tend to spaz out, especially if your dead character plays an animation such as from a headshot and dying to tank fire tends to send them rocketing across the area. Sometimes they'll even get distorted, which can be creepy when something like this
happens.
- Harsher in Hindsight: In-universe. While most of the Nod propaganda broadcast in the civilian internment camp is obviously and blatantly false, later games in the Tiberian series would show that one of them (GDI planning to dissolve national governments and become the One World Order) was absolutely true. However, it's probably fairer to surmise that GDI took over those governments because of rapid Tiberian expansion that required a collective response to ensure human survival, mixed with those governments outright collapsing, rather than GDI actually planning to do so, especially this early in the timeline.
- Nightmare Fuel: During the two missions that take place in a town that's under siege by Nod, you can hear people screaming and crying from inside the buildings (including an infant baby who's apparently been abandoned).
- Nightmare Retardant: In the last mission, the catacombs beneath the Temple of Nod (filled with skulls, Tiberium mutants, and a green fog) can feel a bit creepy. Until you hear the radio announcer of the Temple saying: "Attention. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy".
- Scrappy Weapon: Tiberium weapons tend to get a lot of scorn in the campaign for a variety of reasons. While they all do decent damage, they also carry the caveat of mutating enemies into visceroids, which results in another enemy to kill. Said creatures and the various Tiberium-mutated soldiers you end up meeting in later levels are completely immune to Tiberium damage, getting healed by them (in addition to the Tiberium troopers which are simply incredibly resistant to said damage). It doesn't help that these weapons continue to be commonplace in later levels, which ends up being counterintuitive given said enemy types' presence. The worst example would be the Mantis Tiberium Rifle, which only carries 50 rounds (compared to the 100 round magazines of most other weapons), has a projectile flight time (as opposed to being a more reliable hitscan weapon), and a reduced ammo capacity. And those elite Tiberium troopers continue to carry them! The Talon SMG is another dubious example; it's only available in the final mission. Guess what kinds of enemies fill the level to the brim with? The only reliable upside is that they are effective against vehicles; if you need to use up ammo on a damage sponge, use a Tiberium weapon first.
- That One Level: "All Brains, No Brawn". An Escort Mission involving a stupid AI who moves only along specific waypoints when Havoc reaches specific places (understand: "seems to randomly run from far behind Havoc to far in front of him") and then uses his weapon against Nod troops. Even if the waypoint places him in point blank range from the enemies. On top of that, two third of the encountered enemies are Tiberium mutants (who only drop ammunitions for weapons they are immunized against), an a great part of the other ones are Black Hand soldiers (the ones that are mostly invisible unless they start shooting). Oh, and for more frustration, the area is a Remixed Level of the previous mission with a lot more ceiling guns than before. To be fair, this level has several advantages. First of all it's quite short. The escorted character is Made of Iron, to the point that letting him run ahead to draw all the enemy fire is a perfectly valid tactic. Or, if you're lucky, you can leave him stuck behind a door or waiting for an elevator, clear out the level yourself, and then go back and get him. Finally, this is the first level where the aforementioned Tarantula shows up.
- Underused Game Mechanic:
- During the penultimate mission the basic Nod officer replaces the conventional chaingun with a laser chaingun, a deadly weapon. The final mission has no Nod officers appearing whatsoever. Given the game shows that the weapons enemies use can deviate (the final mission is schizophrenic with this; the elite Black Hand mooks carry every weapon from the usual Laser Rifle to the basic assault rifle used by the regular Nod soldiers), it was a missed opportunity for the regular Nod soldiers to continue appearing in the later levels albeit with more advanced weaponry.
- The Nod Nuke Beacon only appears in one mission, and the mission after that strips Havoc of all the weapons he's collected, meaning that it can only be really used on the Obelisk of Light and SSAM Launchers at the end of said mission.
- Vindicated by History: Renegade was initially frowned upon for its massive Genre Shift from Real-Time Strategy to First-Person Shooter, a somewhat weak campaign with bad A.I. and more than a few glitches, and an imbalanced multiplayer that generally devolved into tug-of-war with tanks. Nowadays, it's often looked upon with nostalgia as one of the best games in the series, distinct gameplay and memorable characters.
