Tempest Rising Review – Single-Player Campaign

Note: This review specifically covers the single-player campaigns of Tempest Rising. For thoughts on multiplayer, stand by until after launch.

It was only a matter of time before someone got tired of waiting for EA to announce a new Command & Conquer real-time strategy game without canceling it a few months later, and finally, Danish developer Slipgate Ironworks has become the one to take matters into its own hands. Tempest Rising plays like a C&C game with the serial number filed off, and it does a fairly good job of scratching the itch for this style of fast-paced action with two very traditional but well-made campaigns set to the tune of a familiar soundtrack partly composed by distinctive C&C composer Frank Klepacki. Given how closely it follows that template, though, it’s a little disappointing that it didn’t have more fun building personality and atmosphere between missions.

How closely, exactly? Aside from how it replicates the plate-spinning gameplay and basic tech tree (as many have done over the past 30 years), you could easily just change a few names – GDF to GDI and Tempest to Tiberium, for example – and Tempest Rising would be fairly indistinguishable from a C&C iteration as you’re harvesting resources, building a base, and cranking out infantry, tanks, and aircraft that die in seconds if you’re not paying close attention when they encounter the enemy. Some of the similarities are amusingly on the nose: The Nod-like Dynasty faction’s barracks structure is shaped like giant hands reaching up from the ground, and they didn’t bother changing the name of the Mobile Construction Vehicle (MCV) that expands into your base’s central Construction Yard building at all. So yes, it’s pretty close!

The campaigns’ story is treated in much the same lovingly derivative way, reframing the GDI/Nod conflict as between the good guy Global Defense Initiative Force and the paramilitary Dynasty faction fighting for territory in Europe and northern Africa, though here it’s set in the aftermath of a Cuban Missile Crisis where things went much worse than they did for us. You wouldn’t really know that it’s a post-World War 3 world, though, because other than some wrecked roads on the battlefields, the regional maps in the briefings look pretty normal, and none of the missions take place anywhere recognizable. But more importantly, it’s missing a few of C&C’s secret ingredients – chief among them a good villain.

So much of the personality of the classic C&C games came from the evil Nod faction and its mysteriously ageless leader, Kane (played with wild-eyed zeal by Joe Kucan). Granted, the Dynasty leaders who brief you before every mission have more character than the generic, gruff-voiced general of the GDF, but the constantly sneering Aleks can’t hold a candle to Kane. You can’t build a cult of personality around a grumpy guy in a beret, and beyond being black leather fetishists, the Dynasty doesn’t have a lot going on ideologically – they’re not even explicitly framed as fascist bad guys out for global domination (especially when compared to the shadowy council pulling the GDF’s strings) so we don’t get any good mustache-twirling villain moments like attacking the Pentagon or Eiffel Tower. Without something like that to get invested in – and coupled with some instances of comically poor voice acting – I was unmotivated to sit through the multiple strings of optional dialogue that give you more bland background on the lore but nothing else.

In a day and age when anyone with a smartphone can replace their Zoom background with a high-tech command center or dark and ominous paramilitary headquarters, I’m sad Slipgate wasn’t granted the resources to do C&C-style live-action cutscenes and get someone to follow in Tim Curry’s legendary footsteps by chewing the virtual scenery to pieces. These generic animated characters just can’t compete, especially when there was clearly no budget to even match mouth movements to dialogue on most of them (conspicuously, both factions have lieutenants who give you orders through gas masks for no reason).

When it comes to actual real-time strategy, though, Tempest Rising fares much better. It may be playing within the constraints of a very defined genre and style, but it looks nice, runs well (it only crashed on me when loading a specific saved game), its interface is modern and friendly, and it’s pretty good at finding ways to be inventive with its faction design. Once you get past basic infantry, just about everything has a special ability or a twist to it that you’ll want to spend some time learning to use and decide if it’s worth your time to micromanage, as opposed to selecting everything and sending it into the attack-move meat grinder. There are too many to list, but the GDF’s heavy use of drone controller units is a fun one: you can control them independently to scout within a radius, you can pack their pilots into an APC or transport chopper and they’ll still fly around and shoot, and if they’re destroyed they simply respawn for free in a few seconds. It’s also a nice touch to generate resources for special abilities by taking the extra step of marking a target before destroying it – it’s a good reward for a little bit of extra micro-management in small engagements.

I couldn’t help but applaud when the GDF posed and then answered the question of what would happen if GDI’s Mammoth Tank and StarCraft 2’s Siege Tank loved each other very much; that’s some excellent wish fulfillment for fans of both those series. These Trebuchet hybrids deploy and un-deploy so quickly – in about a second – that it really drives home how micromanagement-heavy Tempest Rising is built to be. You don’t need to constantly flip back and forth between mobile and stationary modes, but you’ll get more firepower and range out of them if you do.

On the opposing side, the Dynasty’s Scrap Truck is a wildly powerful unit that automatically repairs every vehicle or building in a radius while it’s stationary, and it can deploy to become a turret structure with an even bigger repair range. You can then use that to expand your base building area and stock it with flame and missile turrets (Dynasty can build a structure in advance and then instantly place it, while GDF places structures and then builds them), quickly creating a vehicle repair outpost with self-healing defenses right on the enemy’s doorstep. That, combined with their ultra-long-range Porcupine missile trucks and deadly SAM launchers, makes Dynasty a fantastic offensive turtling faction. And when you want to get a bit more aggressive, they can literally roll out a giant metal ball that flattens any tanks or infantry in its path if they can’t destroy it first.

All in all, the variety of missions once you get past the first few tutorials is respectable but expected, including a lot of base-cracking, defense holdouts and last stands, and commando missions led by powerful specialist infantry, and all of them come with optional objectives for you to cross off that might encourage replays. It’s interesting that some of those objectives don’t even pop up unless you scout out the whole map – it’s a reason to go back and replay, but if you’re trying to do everything in one go it might be a little trollish. All of these missions are well done but again, quite conventional; there’s nothing here that thinks radically outside the box or effectively builds minigame modes around unit abilities the way StarCraft 2 did. They are a good time to smash through, but very few stand out.

Like nearly every RTS campaign ever made, Tempest Rising gradually gives you access to new units and airstrike support abilities as you go, but here you also choose a new global upgrade every mission from one of three linear trees – plus you can unlock and then mix-and-match upgrades to fill an expanding number of slots. Some of the upgrades are minor but useful, such as adding burn damage over time to Dynasty’s flamethrowers or stat bonuses that start units out with a veterancy level. Some feel a little exploitative, like one that increases infantry vision range by 50% (which makes them incredibly effective spotters for artillery). A few, though, are meaningful choices that I’d definitely think hard about if I were to play through again on a higher difficulty. The biggest of these for me was the “Stolen Plans” abilities that let you build some of the opposing factions’ vehicles without having to capture their buildings. Some of those, like the Trebuchet tank and Porcupine missile launcher truck, are game-changers that helped me break through tough defensive lines quickly. It’s true that leaning on these can homogenize the campaigns a bit rather than emphasizing what makes each faction unique, but I appreciate being able to customize my force. Also, the ability to re-pack the Dynasty Scrap Truck after deploying it was a huge upgrade that saved me from having to build a whole fleet of them.

It’s not spoiling anything that isn’t on the Steam page to say that late in both the campaigns, which follow the same events from opposite perspectives, the story abruptly introduces a third, technologically advanced faction tied to the glowing resource they’re all fighting over – which is a sentence I could’ve copied directly from the Wikipedia page of Command & Conquer 3. The alien (ish?) Veti don’t have a playable campaign and aren’t yet available in skirmish or multiplayer, so it’s a bit tricky to understand how they work differently, but it’s good that they’re here for variety’s sake. Fighting their heavier armies isn’t dramatically different from taking on the GDF or Dynasty in the campaign – they have similar base and defense structures, tanks, aircraft, and infantry – but they do have a few terrifying late-game units that GDF and Dynasty can’t go toe-to-toe with and required me to take an entirely different posture when one showed up.