if you miss the classics

Games like C&C Renegade

What people miss about Renegade is not the campaign. It is C&C mode: two bases, a purchase terminal, an economy you can shoot, and a war you win by walking into the other side’s buildings. Here is what still does that.

Command & Conquer: Renegade came out in 2002, the year before Westwood was closed, and it is remembered strangely. Its single-player campaign — Havoc, one commando, a lot of one-liners — was a reasonable shooter of its year. Its multiplayer was something else, and people are still searching for it two decades later.

C&C mode took the RTS and put you inside it. Each team had a real base: a refinery with a harvester driving ore home, a power plant, a barracks, a factory, base defences. Credits came in, you spent them at a purchase terminal on a better soldier or a tank, and you won by destroying every building — usually by getting inside one and putting C4 on its Master Control Terminal. Kill their power and everything they bought cost double. Kill their factory and they walked for the rest of the game.

Very few games have copied that exactly. A few have copied half of it very well. The list is ordered by how much of the base war survives.

Renegade itself, and the games built on it

Renegade X

The obvious first answer. A free fan remake of Renegade’s multiplayer on Unreal Engine 3 by Totem Arts, released in 2014 and still played. Same maps, same factions, same buildings and terminals, with modern rendering, better hit registration and a lot of love. If you want Renegade as you remember it rather than as it was, this is it.

What to expect: it is a Windows download, it is purely online, and the population is a dedicated community rather than a crowd. Evenings and weekends are when it is busiest.

The original, via the Ultimate Collection

Renegade ships as part of EA’s Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection. The official servers are long gone, but the community has patched the game and kept it online. It is a 2002 game on the W3D engine and it looks and moves like one — which, if you were there, is the point.

The W3D Hub games

W3D Hub is the community that kept building on Renegade’s engine. Its two best-known projects are standalone and free: Red Alert: A Path Beyond, which is Renegade’s C&C mode set in Red Alert — Allies and Soviets, tesla coils and Mammoth tanks — and Tiberian Sun: Reborn, which does the same for Tiberian Sun. If the thing you miss is the base war rather than GDI and Nod in particular, these may be closer than anything else on this page.

The FPS–RTS hybrids

These put a commander on each side — one player in a top-down RTS view, building and directing, while everyone else fights in first or third person. It is a different game from Renegade, where nobody is in charge and the base just works, but it scratches the same itch: a shooter where the economy and the buildings decide who wins.

Battlezone (1998, and Battlezone 98 Redux)

The ancestor. You are the commander and you are in the tank, building a base and ordering units from the cockpit. Rebellion remastered it as Battlezone 98 Redux, and it holds up remarkably. Single player first, multiplayer second.

Savage: The Battle for Newerth

A 2003 fantasy hybrid — humans against beasts — with a commander placing buildings and the rest of the team fighting in third person. Its sequel, Savage 2, went free. Both are better remembered than they are populated now, but the design is the closest thing to a fantasy Renegade.

Natural Selection 2

Marines and a commander against aliens who evolve. Asymmetric, tense, and still one of the best realised “one player builds the base, everyone else defends it” games ever made. More of a horror shooter than a tank game.

Silica

The modern one: a large-scale sci-fi war with an RTS commander, infantry and vehicles on a desert planet, from Bohemia Interactive Simulations. It is the closest thing to a big-budget successor this idea has had in years.

The big-map shooters

PlanetSide 2 and the Battlefield series get recommended a lot for this, and they do have the vehicles, the bases and the feeling of one soldier in an enormous war. What they lack is the economy: nobody is paying for your tank with a harvester, and no building ever dies because you got past the guards. They are adjacent, not the same.

And, since you are here: Frontline

This site has one. TANKS: Frontline is a free first-person shooter built on Renegade’s C&C mode — purchase terminals, a harvester paying for your tanks, buildings you walk into and a master control terminal you put C4 on — drawn in marker on graph paper. It is far smaller than Renegade X. It is also the only one on this page you can be playing in ten seconds, in this tab, with no install. Play it here.

Reading about it is slower than playing it.
Frontline runs in this browser tab. No download, no account, no launcher.

play Frontline 3D

Questions people actually ask

Is C&C Renegade still playable?

Yes. Renegade comes with EA’s Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection, and a community has kept its multiplayer running on fan-hosted servers since the official ones closed. Renegade X, a free fan remake on Unreal Engine 3, is the more approachable way back in.

Is Renegade X free?

Yes. Renegade X is a free, non-commercial fan remake of Renegade’s multiplayer, made by Totem Arts and released in 2014. It is a Windows download.

Is there a game like Renegade I can play in a browser?

TANKS: Frontline, on this site, is a free first-person base war that runs in a browser tab: buy infantry and tanks at a purchase terminal, drive at the enemy base and plant C4 on the master control terminal. It is single player for now — campaign and skirmish against AI squads.

What is the difference between Renegade and an FPS/RTS hybrid?

In Renegade nobody commands: every player is a soldier, and the base works on its own — the harvester runs, the terminals sell. Hybrids like Savage, Natural Selection 2 and Silica put one player in an RTS commander’s seat over everybody else. Both scratch the itch; they feel quite different.