Tempest Rising is always going to be compared to Command and Conquer. It’s set in the ‘90s, Frank Klepacki does the music, and there are two campaigns where you play as two different factions. Even the finer details, like the talking head cutscenes, and the fact that the Tempest itself is an energy-rich, alien-esque crystal, just like Tiberium – I can imagine the pitch meeting where somebody said ‘Westwood and EA aren’t making Command and Conquer anymore, so we’re going to do it’. But Slipgate’s RTS game is way more than an homage; it’s not just Command and Conquer for a post Command and Conquer world. Available to play right now, Tempest Rising has the potential to rise higher than its influences.
Right from the start, Tempest Rising is tough – it’s an RTS game where you’re constantly in motion, where you feel like a chef in a busy kitchen, cranking the dials on eight different stoves trying to keep everything in equilibrium. You can play as either the GDF (surely a tribute to C&C’s GDI) or the Nod-like Tempest Dynasty. I picked the GDF, and even though I know Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert back to front, the second campaign mission had me against the ropes. I mean this as a good thing. Tempest Rising assumes you know your Obelisks from your Tesla Coils, and doesn’t waste energy going over the fundamentals.
So, at its core, this is an RTS as you know it – harvest Tempest, build factories, defenses, and units, and then launch an assault on the enemy base. But like lead designer Brandon Casteel told us last July, the key to Tempest Rising is in the nuances, and all the ways it’s not like Command and Conquer.
In C&C, it often feels like you can win via brute force. As long as you have more cash and more tanks than the enemy, you’ll be fine. Battles also have a straightforward, rock-paper-scissors-type governance: vehicles beat turrets, turrets beat infantry, infantry beats vehicles. Tempest Rising feels more complex. I attacked with my tried-and-true Command and Conquer tactics, and all I got was a casualty report the length of a book.
You’ve got to be smart in Tempest Rising, and it gives you the tools to execute complex strategies. Drone operators, for example, can fight on the ground, toe-to-toe, using their flying turret gun companions for automated defense. But if you hold them back from the frontline and set the drones to manual, you can take out vehicles and perimeter walls from a distance without risking your troops, or coughing up bags of Tempest to pay for bombers.
You can also be more tactical with where you build. Of course, you have your central base, but in some instances you can air drop a beacon and anything you build within the beacon’s radius – before it runs out of energy – will stay there permanently. In that brutal, second GDF mission, one of my Tempest harvesters had to drive a long way from the main base to get resources, and kept being hammered by the enemy. Trying to defend it with soldiers and tanks was costing too many lives, so I dropped a beacon and quickly set up a perimeter of gatling turrets. Problem solved.
And then Tempest Rising has all these nice little tweaks and quality-of-life ideas. If you build an engineer you don’t have to assign them specific units and buildings to repair – they’ll just automatically repair everything within a certain radius, meaning you can deploy them alongside the rest of your army, and even during a live firefight they’ll start working to keep your tanks intact.
You can also assign one unit or group of units to defend another, so if you attach an infantry platoon to a formation of tanks, they’ll move as one. These aren’t all features that are exclusive to Tempest Rising, but they’re an example of how the game finds a sweet spot. It’s streamlined and lean and has the stylistic energy of the old Command and Conquer games, but with a lot of the later-era improvements and additions – there’s more, but not too much more.
It’s pretty grisly, too. There’s blood. There are death animations. The explosions really pop. Maybe it’s the jaded old virtual general in me, but I don’t really feel anything when I send a division of GDI soldiers to their deaths anymore. ‘100 infantry dead in two minutes? Oh well. At least we captured that guard tower.’
In Tempest Rising, though, I was doing something unprecedented – I was ordering people to pull back. And it’s not because I needed them. It’s because I didn’t want to see them die. Not enough strategy games commit to the raw brutality that’s inherent to the genre. Tempest Rising feels like it’s more in touch with that core nastiness.
If you want to try it for yourself, the new Tempest Rising demo is out today, Monday February 24, and it lets you play the first two missions of both the GDF and the Dynasty campaigns. You can get it here. The full Tempest Rising release date is slated for Friday April 25.
In the meantime, you might want to try some of the best grand strategy games, or maybe the best 4X games on PC today.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or join our community Discord to stay in the know.