Video Game / Command & Conquer: Renegade

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Command & Conquer: Renegade is an 2002 FPS spin off from the popular Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series of video games. Taking place during the events of the first game, you play the role of a loose cannon commando named Havoc. As such, you get to have fun shooting plenty of Nod soldiers and blowing up buildings with C4.

Character tropes of the game are in a subsection of this page.

EA released Renegade's source code in 2025 under GPL 3.0.

Please note that this page is for tropes that feature in this game only. Please add tropes relating to other games as well on the main Tiberian Series page.

This game contains examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo: The Tiberium Flechette gun fires Tiberium shards, and the Tiberium Auto-rifle shoots more-or-less paintballs filled with Tiberium gas.
• Accidentally Beneficial Attack: Tiberium weapons occasionally mutate enemies into Visceroids. They also heal said mutant, and the Super Soldiers Nod is working on.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Enemies will only ever drop one item on death, but the game has an innovative-for-its-day system where what item they're likely to drop is determined by your character's status: low health tends to make them drop medkits, low armor makes them drop armor pickups more often, and low ammo means they're more likely to drop their gun.
• Arbitrary Gun Power:
  • In the boot camp level, Sydney demonstrates the difference in health lost with and without armor by shooting you in the gut with the pistol. Without armor, it takes you from full health to one-quarter in a single shot; after healing up and grabbing some armor, the second shot "only" brings both down to half. The only respectable damage you can get out of that same weapon is via headshots (Nod technicians in buildings who attack you with it can't even get that), and having armor at any point past that tutorial makes it practically impossible to take health damage until it's depleted.
  • The inverse happens in a cutscene near the end of "Armored Assault". Normally, the sniper rifle not only kills most infantry in one bullet, but also pierces through them to hit anyone else behind them. In that cutscene, however, when Havoc takes a shot at Mendoza with the sniper rifle, he fails to kill him because a random mook passed in front of his crosshair at the wrong time and completely stopped the bullet.
• Armor Meter: There's a gauge representing armor of a growing row of shields, with the exact number of Armor Points displayed on the last shield.
• Armor Points: The Armor Meter is a set of shield icons, with the precise armor value being numbered on the last one.
• The Artifact:
  • In Raveshaw's mansion, two Nod soldiers can be overheard talking about Raveshaw's Railgun Rifle, a weapon which was since removed from the level (it only appears in multiplayer for players who choose to play as Raveshaw). When the player gets to the spot they were talking about (it's also hinted at on the loading screen^note "The key to knowledge can be found in books.") they will find four laser rifles instead.
  • When Raveshaw is first introduced, Havoc claims that "Peewee and I have already met", referencing an event that didn't happen in the released game.
  • Mendoza, in turn, wears an outfit incredibly similar to that of Seth from the original game because his model was originally supposed to be Raveshaw's.
  • A couple of weapons seem to have had their models abruptly changed late into development, made apparent by pre-rendered cutscenes occasionally featuring completely different armaments from what's available to the player - the pistol is slimmer and longer (highly resembling the H&K MP7), the sniper rifle is even more boxy with a noticeably longer barrel, and Nod soldiers are seen carrying M16s with attached grenade launchers like they were noted as using in the original game instead of the pulse rifle copy everyone uses in gameplay.
  • In-universe, the "Dead Six" commando team are still named as such despite one member defecting to Nod and another refusing to work with any sort of team anymore.
• Artificial Stupidity: The AI isn't very bright, especially the allies.
  Audio comment: What the hell's wrong with these guys? They're just freaking humping the wall!
  • Stealth Troopers invert this, at least in open maps, where they will approach and stalk the player until they're isolated and then attack at close range with laser rifles.
• Artistic License – Military: Locke says he's a brigadier general, but he has four stars, which should make him just a general (brigadier generals are one-star).
• Badass Bookworm: During his Escort Mission, Mobius don't hesitate to fight along Havoc, wearing a Powered Armor and wielding a laser chaingun. Too bad his AI is so bad.
• Badass Crew: Havoc's former team, the Dead Six.
• Beam Spam: The Laser Chaingun.
• BFG: Many of the weapons, including the chainguns and the Merlin Personal Ion Cannon.
• Big Bad: Dr. Petrova.
• Bilingual Bonus: In the 'Deadly Reunion' mission, one optional objective tasks you with rescuing the resistance leader, Babushka. "Babushka" is Russian for grandmother.
• Body Armor as Hit Points:
  • The game uses a dual-bar system, one for armor plates, the other for plain old HP, and with very rare exceptions, until your armor is depleted nothing is touching your health. This system is for both Havoc on foot and for his vehicles.
• Body Horror:
  • Tiberium has a tendency to do this to humans. Assuming you survive exposure to Tiberium at all, the best case scenario is you spend the rest of your life as a deformed mutant. In the worst case, you become a horrible blob of flesh and mouths, called a visceroid.
  • Nod's Project ReGenesis attempts to use a controlled form of Tiberium mutation to create Super Soldiers. The results are nasty, but effective.
• Bond One-Liner:
  • Havoc drops one after emerging from a Nod minisub he stowed away on.
    Nod Soldier: [looking at the sub] Impressive. Are they armed?
    Havoc: [pops out of the hatch and shoots the soldier and his buddy in the head] This one is!
• Boring, but Practical: In the "Obelisk of Oppression" mission, the easiest and safest way of destroying said Obelisk (which is an optional mission objective) is to shoot it with a captured Nod light tank while staying out of its range; it also works with any personal weapons (rockets, personal ion cannon, etc), but vehicles have infinite ammunition. The normal method (blowing the main frame in the bowel of the structure) also works, but the problem there is entering the structure without dying (it is an automatic defense tower shooting very powerful lasers at any enemy entering its range; there's a reason why the earlier "Armored Assault" more or less tells you not to bother with the Obelisk until you've taken a detour to blow its power plant).
• Boss Remix:
  • The song Act on Instinct from Tiberian Dawn is remixed and is the boss theme for Awakened Raveshaw.
  • Mendoza's cut boss theme is a remix of Fight, Win, Prevail.
  • The fight against Sakura's Comanche chopper is a subtle remix of Full Stop.
  • As much as a Zerg Rush of several infantry and vehicles counts as a boss, the finale for "Deadly Reunion" is set to a remix of In the Line of Fire.
• Call-Forward:
  • Nod personnel don combat gear and uniforms which, though still recognizably modern-day, are reminiscent of their general appearance in Tiberian Sun.
  • The protective "Mobius suit" eventually evolves into the potent Powered Armor donned by Zone Troopers by the events of Tiberium Wars.
• Came from the Sky:
  • Level three has a Tiberium meteorite in a cave, surrounded by three machines of mysterious function, which you're tasked with destroying.
  • In the penultimate mission, there is a crashed UFO, presumably of Scrin origin, in the ruins. It is locked with a Level Three Security Door and contains a "Black Widow" Volt Auto Rifle.
• Chef of Iron: You can sometimes find chefs in the mess halls of Nod bases, who will attack you with flamethrowers. And most of whom you can't kill in self-defense without getting a What the Hell, Hero? from your CO, because they're still counted as civilians for some reason, probably because the NPC has an internal flag saying it's a neutral civilian but the game assigns it to Nod's side.
• Cherry Tapping: With enough patience and dodging, it is possible to destroy a tank with the pistol. Or a building with the machine gun of a Humvee.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The cutscene before the second mission contains a number of these to the original game, from the obvious (a display showing gameplay directly from the first game before shifting to a 3D rendition) to the subtle (part of the video for installing the original game can be made out on a different display before it's overlaid with maps).
  • The Temple of Nod where the final level takes place contains the green screen studio where Greg Burdette made his fake news reports in the first game, the hacker bay used to take control of GDI's ion cannon network, the preserved corpse of Seth, and other temple locations taken from cutscenes in Tiberian Dawn. Also, after the ion cannon strike, you hear the Temple's AI mention damage to a "Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform."
• Convenient Enemy Base: Captain Nick "Havoc" Parker gets shot down after hijacking a plane from a Nod airstrip. He grabs a parachute, jumps out, and lands right on a conveniently placed beachhead that leads to a convenient enemy base.
• Cosmetically Advanced Prequel: Downplayed. While the game is relatively consistent with Tiberian Dawn, being set during the First Tiberium War, there's a bit more in the way of futuristic tech present, befitting the 20 Minutes into the Future setup. Meanwhile Nod uniforms, while still somewhat reminiscent of modern military gear, are redesigned to resemble what they'd evolve into by Tiberian Sun.
• Crew of One: You can somehow pilot any vehicle all on your lonesome. Even the Mammoth Tank, which according to in-universe fluff normally takes a crew of eight. However, in multiplayer, it is possible for a second player to jump into your tank and take control of the turret for you (though this is disabled in almost all games).
• Dark Action Girl: Sakura.
• Deadly Gas:
  • The Chemical Sprayer used by Chem Warriors and the player. It loads three canisters of toxic waste into a huge squirtgun. Since it uses Tiberium, it's effective against vehicles as well as footsoldiers; the latter of which occasionally mutate into Visceroids, who also attack by spraying Tiberium gas. Nod Supersoldiers (Initiates, Acolytes, and Templars) also heal when shot with the weapon.
  • The Tiberium Autorifle is an assault rifle that fires pellets filled with a concentrated form of the same Tiberium vapor the Chem Sprayer, um, sprays.
• Deadpan Snarker: Captain Nick "Havoc" Parker.
• The Dragon: Gideon Raveshaw.
• Double-Meaning Title: Not officially but many fans listing the soundtrack often retitle the "Act On Instinct Remix" as "Raveshaw's Act On Instinct" to refer to his mutations rendering him a mindless brute, leaving him to literally act on instinct.
• Drought Level of Doom: "All Brains, No Brawn". A level which starts immediately after a Boss Fight (so, ammunition supplies are already somewhat depleted) and involves mostly Tiberium mutants, which are equipped with Tiberium weapons. So, when killed, they drop ammo for weapons unable to hurt them.
• Duck!: During a cutscene, while Havoc and Sydney are arguing in a truck, Havoc simply says:
  Havoc: Cow.
  Sydney: Pig!
  Havoc: (points forward) No, Cow!
  Cow: Moo.
• Eating the Eye Candy:
  • When Havoc tosses Sydney a pistol in the intro to "Obelisk of Oppression", he warns her to try not to shoot him in the butt before walking away. The camera switches to Sydney's point-of-view, panning down to said asset before cutting to Sydney's face.
  • Havoc partakes in this himself in a mid-level cutscene from "Armored Assault", checking out Sakura's rear through the scope of his sniper rifle before catching Mendoza patting it.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Most of the interior parts of the building's in single player that you infiltrate. Completely averted in multiplayer.
• Elemental Absorption: Tiberium mutants and visceroids are healed by Tiberium-based weapons, like the Chemical Sprayer, as well as by walking through usually-harmful Tiberium fields. Flamethrower and chemical troopers are a downplayed example, wearing outfits that make them immune to their own weapons.
• Elite Mooks: The Black Hand, and later, the mutants created by Project ReGenesis.
• Escort Mission: A couple of them, usually in the "escorting Too Dumb to Live NPCs" flavour. Escortees don't follow Havoc but have scripted paths with waypoints linked to specific areas crossed by the player. So, the escortees stay still until Havoc reaches a specific area, then rush to their next waypoint no matter if there are hostile units in the area or not. The Dr. Mobius escort mission is especially guilty of this (of course, he's wearing Powered Armor and packin' a BFG, so he can be forgiven for being slightly... over-eager).
• Evilutionary Biologist: Dr. Petrova.
• Expy: The standard assault rifle is basically the M41A pulse rifle, minus a working grenade launcher. It even has the same ridiculous 100-round magazine capacity, though with a much-enlarged magazine.
• Faceless Goons: Most Nod mooks wear face concealing masks. Some GDI troops also wear masks, while others wear goggles or shades.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • Whenever you speak to Kane (via the communications centers in various levels) he's always polite to you. Of course, anyone who knows Kane knows he is anything but friendly.
  • In one level you infiltrate one of Nod's battleships. The ship computer commenting on your actions over the intercom speaks to you in a friendly manner, although it clearly does want you dead.
  Ship Intercom: Positive Intruder Identification: Captain Nick Parker. Welcome aboard, Captain! Please remain where you are, security will be there to greet your shortly.
• Final Boss: The Mole, Dr. Petrova.
• Forced Tutorial: The game is a strange example of the trope. There is an actual (entirely optional) tutorial, but the two first missions of the campaign have several gameplay tips appearing on screen, continuing the tutorial (or replacing it if the player skipped it).
• Gaiden Game: An FPS spin-off from the Real-Time Strategy series, set concurrently to the first game in the series.
• Game Mod: Loads! There's even a launcher app called W3D Hub that lets you download standalone games made in the same engine, many of them turning other games into the multiplayer Renegade format such as Red Alert: A Path Beyond, Tiberian Sun: Reborn, and Red Alert 2: Apocalypse Rising.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: According to the lore information readable from the main menu, the chemical sprayer is useless against vehicles. In-game, it is very effective against them.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Nod soldiers more resemble their Tiberian Sun-era designs so that they could be this.
• Gatling Good: The bullet-firing Condor and the laser-firing Tarantula.
• Gemstone Assault: The Tiberium Flechette Gun is an SMG that fires Tiberium shards.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Kane, the leader of the Brotherhood of Nod. Havoc never meets him in person, but you can talk to his hologram in several of Nod's comm centers.
• Hazmat Suit: Flamethrower troopers have fireproof suits, which reduces the effectiveness of the flame thrower and laser rifles, and Chem Warriors have N/B/C suits which give them immunity to Tiberium exposure.
• Heart Container: Health and Armor Expansions, which take the appearance of military award medals on respectively green and blue ribbons.
• Heel–Face Turn: Sakura, after the attempted You Have Failed Me execution at the hands of Raveshaw and Mendoza.
• He Knows About Timed Hits: In the tutorial, Logan explains in-game controls to Havoc, including mentioning jump and action buttons.
• Hero Must Survive: The Escort Missions are failed if the escortees die.
• Honor Before Reason: Captain Parker disobeys orders at the start of the second mission because civilians were in trouble. It's all but stated outright that he pulls off things like this all the time, between Locke's decision to go along with it, the MPs who arrest him upon returning apologizing for doing so, and Havoc making no effort to resist. He also once decided to help a defenseless city against a Nod attack instead of retreat with Dead 6. Of course, being who he is, he can pull it off.
• I Like Those Odds: In the ship level of Renegade, a prisoner Havoc just freed asks him if he intends to take on the ship's crew alone.
  Havoc: Just don't seem fair, does it? Maybe I'll shoot left-handed.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: From easiest to hardest:
  • Recruit
  • Soldier
  • Commando
• Improvised Weapon: The Chem Sprayer is actually intended for fertilizing Tiberium fields. The vapourized Tiberium that it sprays messes up infantry but good, though, which is why it was quickly repurposed for military use.
• I Work Alone: Nick "Havoc" Parker invokes this repeatedly, outright stating the trope name at the first hint that Locke is going to send him in with his old Dead Six team. Even though his old team are all as competent as he is, he refuses to work with them initially. He's basically ordered to do so anyway... so, after he rounds them up to make sure they're safe, he orders them to sit around doing nothing while he retrieves the scientists all by himself (and screws this up), and leaves them standing on the sidelines for the rest of the game.
• Kill It with Fire: Lighting enemies up is by far the most effective combat strategy in the game: it stunlocks them and deals damage over time (the exception are flame troopers, but with the converse bonus that you get more ammo for your flamethrower from them). Double whammy since both the flamethrower and the laser weapons (the two types of weapons which cause burning) are not bad at all. It is especially effective against higher-tier Tiberium mutants carrying the Tiberium Auto-Rifle due to the fact that shooting them with ordinary weapons causes them to flinch and "accidentally" fire the weapon into the ground at their feet, which heals them. However, if they're set on fire, the "on fire" animation causes them to be unable to attack.
• Kill Sat: The Ion cannon. Havoc (and the GDI players in multiplayer game) can carry a one-use beacon which provides a Ion strike in the area after a 10-second delay. The penultimate mission ends with Havoc using such a beacon to trigger an ion cannon strike on the entrance of the Temple of Nod, in order to breach its wall and enter inside it.
• Lighter and Softer: Downplayed. Compared to Tiberian Sun, Renegade has a more gung-ho action movie tone befitting its First Tiberium War backdrop, but there are ominous hints in the background of what's in store for mankind decades down the line.
• Lightning Gun: The Black Widow Volt Auto Rifle.
• Lore Codex: Defeating enemies adds them to EVA. The same goes to meeting important NPCs.
• Lower-Deck Episode: This is the only C&C game told from the point of view of a grunt on the ground, caught up in the destruction of the tiberium wars.
• Male Gaze: The first time you see Sakura in-game, Havoc does one of these, through a sniper scope no less.
  Havoc: Looking good...
• May Contain Evil: Some locations have vending machines selling tiberium-laced soda pop. The implication being, "anyone who wants to be a guinea pig, go right ahead."
• Mêlée à Trois: The "All Brains, No Brawn" mission requires the player to flee a Nod research center while experiment subjects are on the loose and occasionally fight against Nod troops.
• Military Maverick: The player character, best demonstrated when he straight-up ignores orders to wait for reinforcements in the second mission. Brigadier General Locke is a bit exasperated with this, but recognizes Havok's talents. His maverick behavior does get Havok thrown in the brig at the end of one mission.
• Mook Maker: Officers can call reinforcements.
• Name of Cain: Kane is heavily implied to be Cain in the series. The catacombs beneath the Temple of Nod in Egypt (during the last mission) contain a room with Abel's tomb.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Nod is only playable in multiplayer. This is one of only two games in the franchise where this trope applies (Kane's Wrath is the other one, inverting it as the only campaign focuses on Nod).
• No Ontological Inertia: Ion Cannon/Nuclear Strike Beacons in multiplayer can always be defused, even when the ion beams are forming or the nuclear missile is visible. In-fact, defusing a Nuclear Strike Beacon before impact simply has the missile hit the ground and disappear with no damage at all.
• Nostalgia Level: The first proper mission is set in the first mission of the first game. It even shows a transition of the 2-D overhead map into a 3-D environment seen from the ground up.
• Nothing Personal: When they first meet in the game, Sakura tells Havoc she's no longer angry at him... but since she's now on Nod's payroll, she has to kill him anyway.
• Oh, Crap!: Emitted by a random Nod chopper during "Deadly Reunion" as they learn the town's resistance is more than capable of standing up to the Brotherhood's terrorism.
  "This is Nod Supply Helo D-12: possible rooftop sighting of terrorists, quadrant 4. ... 'Those rocket launchers? EVASIVE—-"[static]
• One-Man Army: Havoc, which is in keeping with the rest of the games, wherin the Commando units were in fact more than capable of leveling a base with little or no support.
• One Riot, One Ranger: Havoc's modus operandi - even the first mission is him being sent more or less on his own to rescue a larger recon force when they get hit by Nod forces. Many later levels have him working to take care of a problem on his own as well with only whatever local forces he happens to meet up with as support, whether by design (Missions 3 through 5 have him sent alone to track the kidnapped scientists, 11 and 12 have him sent as support for a large GDI assault) or because he forces it, which usually bites him in the ass (Mission 2 he ignores orders to wait six hours for backup because Nod angered him by torturing civvies, which works but gets him thrown in the brig when he gets back; Mission 7, after being forced to work with his old team, has him basically order them to stay put while he moves ahead to rescue the scientists, which results in him only rescuing one of the three).
• One-Way Visor: Most Nod troops.
• One-Winged Angel: Raveshaw and Petrova both infuse themselves with Tiberium before confronting Havoc.
• Outrun the Fireball: Havoc and Sydney running out of the Temple of Nod while the missile is rigged to explode in the silo, during the ending cutscene.
• P.O.V. Sequel: This game is Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn from the perspective of a grunt instead of a commander.
• Powered Armor: The two Mobiuses created one called the "Mobius Suit". Sydney wears it during the opening cutscene of "Evolution of Evil" (when she is captured with Havoc). Then Mobius must find it and wear it in the beginning of the next mission to escape the base and radio for extraction. For some reason, said armor doesn't have a helmet, yet Mobius takes Scratch Damage from Tiberium-based weapons while wearing it. In multiplayer, the second Sydney character also wears this by default and an alternative costume for Mobius also lets him wear this.
• Prison Level: Parker is captured and stripped of his weapons in "Evolution of Evil", during the opening cutscene. Escaping the Nod base is the first mission objective.
• Psycho for Hire: Carlos Mendoza, General Gideon Raveshaw's personal bodyguard. According to the game's lore he was too bloodthirsty even for the most "extreme extremists." He was kicked out of a Columbian separatist movement, the Sword of Chagall, before he joined the Brotherhood of Nod. The guy laughs madly and screams threats while you fight him.
• Remixed Level:
  • "Deadly Reunion" and "Obelisk of Oppression" are set in the same town. The former is during night and features Havoc looking for his team, while the latter is during the following day and features the Dead Six escaping the town.
  • "Evolution of Evil" and "All Brains, No Brawn" are set in the same Nod base, and respectively involve entering and fleeing it.
• Self-Made Myth: There are clues all over that Kane is the Cain mentioned in The Bible. Havoc dismisses these notions and accuses Kane of making all that up.
• Sequel Episode: The "Deadly Reunion" mission (level 6) is set in a town occupied by Nod. Havoc liberates it at night then goes off to rescue Sydney from a chateau. They then return in "Obelisk of Oppression (level 8) the next morning and they have to hold out against counter-attack until they get evacuated.
• Sequence Breaking: In the "Armored Assault" mission, near the end, Havoc picks a green keycard lying on a terrace of the Hand of Nod, right next to the plane he must board to complete the mission. The player is then intended to reach the airstrip through the Hand of Nod corridors (crossing doors unlocked by the keycard), encounter the first boss fight of the game against Mendoza, then reach the plane. It is actually possible to jump the terrace and slide down the wall to the plane, immediately finishing the mission. Even if you go the normal way, fighting Mendoza isn't necessary either, as you can just immediately rush to the plane.
• Shout-Out:
  • According to the in-game database, the Nod ship Havoc boards is commanded by Captain Stubing and First Mate Gilligan. They work for Nod because the Brotherhood rescued them.
  • There is a reference to The Shining during the last mission:
  Radio: Attention. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.
• Simultaneous Arcs: All but outright stated to take place during Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, complete with the second level's intro showing an overview of the opening area rendered in Tiberian Dawn's spritework before shifting to a 3D rendition. The assault on Nod's Cairo base, the infiltration of the Temple and the presence of both Seth's preserved corpse and the chamber the netwarriors used to gain access to GDI's defense network implies that the Nod campaign of the original is canon to some degree.
• Sighted Guns Are Low-Tech: More or less a completely straight example even when you ignore the inability to actually look down the sights - even the weapons that do sport visible ironsights either only have one half of a full set (the pistol and laser rifle only have rear sights, the grenade launcher only has a front sight) or two of the same half (the sniper rifle has two sets of rear sights, although it does get an honorable mention for even still having ironsights underneath the scope). And, regardless of presence of sights or not, almost every weapon in the game is perfectly accurate (those that aren't spit their respective projectiles out faster to compensate). In this case, it can be given the usual justification in that your EVA unit is helping with your aiming by providing a crosshair.
• Sniper Rifle: It is one of the strongest weapons and has a very powerful zoom, alongside a night-vision scope with a built-in directional microphone. Multiplayer features an even stronger one that fires jet-propelled bullets.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Zig-zagged.
  • For the most part your arsenal starts with the usual weak pistol and basic assault rifle, and ends with things like laser chainguns that stunlock enemies, guns that shoot Tiberium shards, and a personal Ion Cannon. By the end of the game, after a No-Gear Level, you never even get some of your earliest guns like the assault rifle back, because even basic Nod mooks upgrade to both varieties of the chaingun.
  • Some early weapons retain far more usefulness than their early appearances suggest, however. The supposedly weak pistol is still an instant kill with a headshot on non-Black Hand mooks, so if you're good at nailing those it can carry you through half the game. The flamethrower and chemical sprayer show up two and three missions in respectively, and both melt through enemies just as quickly and efficiently in the last level as they do when they're introduced. The sniper rifle never stops being your most effective option against enemies past medium range, and C4 and rockets are introduced early because they're some of your most versatile tools - you'll run out of them both sooner than you'll run out of targets that they're your best option against.
  • Conversely, the series' Revive Kills Zombie rules regarding exposure to and mutation from Tiberium hinder the wide variety of weapons that use the stuff as their ammo: the chemical sprayer is Awesome, but Impractical at best, since it's great against vehicles but there's a good chance any infantry you kill with it will mutate into a visceroid you then have to kill with another weapon, and the others are practically useless since they only start showing up once mutants who get healed if you try to shoot them with their own guns start taking over for the basic mooks.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Havoc loves that.
• Take Your Time: During Mission 4 "The Plot Erupts", Sakura's Comanche crashes into the side of the island's volcano which was supplying the power plant with geothermal energy. Locke informs you of a submarine and urges you to get off the island before the volcano erupts along with volcanic ash, occasional Screen Shake, lava bombs raining all over the place and the Nod EVA constantly warning about unstable seismic activity. Despite all that, there's no time limit to this and thus there's no hurry, especially with the fact that taking out the power plant and refinery are tertiary objectives to get the best score for the mission (and that taking out the power plant before obtaining the intel in the communications center results in mission failure).
• Taunting the Transformed: In the midst of another attempt to rescue the kidnapped scientists, Petrova reveals she's The Mole and unveils a mutated Raveshaw. Nick is characteristically unimpressed.
  Nick: Raveshaw?
  Petrova: A new and improved version.
  Nick: Eh, at least he's taller.
  ...
  Petrova: Look at you, the ultimate assassin: loyal, strong, and mindless. You are living proof that Project ReGenesis is a success. Kane will be pleased.
  Nick: Sure, Raveshaw's a walking turnip, some success.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: Used very consistently throughout the game.
• This Is Gonna Suck: When Sakura appears in an RAH-66 Comanche helicopter after she got kicked out of a plane that Havoc hijacked, blows him a kiss, then proceeds to shoot him down.
  Havoc: Yup, she's pissed. (Sakura shoots out an engine on his plane) Real pissed!
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Crossed with Awesome, but Impractical. You come across multiple Ion Cannon beacons and a single Nod Nuclear Strike beacon, but they're overkill (and inaccurate) against mobile targets and they lack the area of effect to take out more than a single building, most of which can easily be taken out from the inside. Getting close enough for an assured kill by the strike involves getting inside the building, at which point you are a relatively short walk away from the building's Master Control Terminal, which means you can destroy it with a single C4 charge. To boot, you only come across the nuclear strike beacon near the end of the mission right before you get captured and all your gear is taken away, so you have no reason not to use it. Unfortunately, the only real target left at that point is a Nod Obelisk, so getting close is nearly impossible.
  • After the game passes out more of them than you could possibly find uses for in the early stages, C4 charges turn into this in the late game. There's next to zero of them in the late levels, and destroying Master Control Terminals without them takes an ungodly amount of ammo even if you use a BFG.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The mission on the Nod cargo ship, like most levels in the game, requires you to find a number of color-coded keycards to proceed through certain doors. One of these doors regularly spits out enemy reinforcements, which allows the player to slip through without the keycard if timed right, usually followed by killing everything behind the door. The problem is that one of the enemies behind this door is the ship's captain, who becomes a mandatory mission target once you pick up the keycard, but since he's already dead if you used the door glitch, it becomes impossible to continue the mission.
• Vader Breath: Chem Troopers and certain Project ReGenesis Super Soldiers.
• Videogame Cruelty Punishment: On the level Evolution of Evil, there are several unarmed Nod scientists who pose no threat whatsoever and yell for help if they see you. Kill one and a Black Hand Stealth Trooper will spawn nearby and immediately beeline for you, repeated for every scientist you kill.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted. The flamethrower in this game, while short-ranged, is quite ammo efficient, fairly ubiquitous due to the enemies that use them showing up early and decently often, powerful enough to even destroy tanks and light helicopters, and capable of stunlocking almost every infantry type in the game. It's only outclassed much later in the game when laser weaponry shows up that does most of what it does (dealing high damage and stunlocking infantry) at longer ranges, and even then the flamethrower is still a good fallback for large groups (since you can wash the flames over several people at once).
• Walking Armory: All ten number keys are allotted a weapon. Most even have two or three guns associated with them.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Killing civilians, even by accident, will result in an immediate lecture from your superiors. Oddly enough, killing Nod chefs usually also gets you a lecture, even though they actively attack you with flamethrowers. Probably to do with the game's scripting where the NPC is meant to be a civilian but its AI is assigned to Nod's side.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Havoc using his sniper rifle's scope to scout out Nod's runway in the third mission, during which he has a clear shot on Mendoza. Subverted in that he does take the shot, only for a random Nod soldier to walk past at just the right time to take the bullet instead.
  Havoc: [sees Mendoza pat Sakura on the rear] Oh, you are so dead. [fires, hits a passing Mook instead] Oops. Incoming...
• Worthy Opponent: When traveling through Nod communication centers the player can come across holographic displays that allow communication with Nod's leader, Kane. While Kane never quite comes around to calling Havoc a worthy opponent, he does show respect for Havoc's ability to annoy him.
• You Have Failed Me:
  • Raveshaw says this word-for-word against Sakura when she not only fails to kill Havoc, but is taken hostage by him. He promptly orders Mendoza to "Torch them both".
  • The player can also overhear a conversation between Kane and an incompetent Nod officer who is ordered to "report to Interrogation for 'faith restructuring'" in the second mission.