Tempest Rising is truly an RTS worth your time for C&C fans

Tempest Rising is a thoroughly great RTS that's worth picking up, giving us a modern classic that all Command & Conquer fans will love. Disclosure: key provided by the developer.

Especially me! After growing up with Command & Conquer, Red Alert and Tiberian Sun I was itching to play through Tempest Rising and when it comes to the single-player it does not disappoint. Thanks to Valve's Proton, it also runs just perfectly on Desktop Linux. A true love letter to the classics, welcoming to newcomers and veterans of the genre alike that's crammed full of action. With an easy to understand UI, along with a campaign that starts slow to ease you in with the controls.

All parts of it truly feel like they took the original Command & Conquer series, and just made it a whole lot more modern with a familiar but still unique story. I could go on and on about how it looks and feels like C&C and that to me is a good thing, it's a genre that just isn't anywhere near as popular as it once was, and many developers have tried to mix up the gameplay mechanics and often fail. Here it just feels like home to me.

YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences.
Accept Cookies & Show   Direct Link

Set in an alternate timeline (of course it is) and now in 1997 where the world has been torn apart by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which just kept escalating and so plenty of nukes were fired. What you get is a post World War 3 era that is now being overrun by a mysterious thing called the "Tempest". It looks like a plant, appears to spread like one, but it's not and it has some rather peculiar properties. I don't want to spoil too much of it, but it again goes back to the C&C roots with a bit of mystery and eventually someone else comes knocking at Earth's door.

There's even various optional mission intro cut-scenes, but no real-life actors like the cheesiness from the classics. The animated characters do look great though, the developers did a good job on them but they're not overly interesting or attention-grabbing. However, I did like that you can talking to them and ask a few questions to get a bit more insight into the lore of the world. Thankfully, the actual gameplay is a real blast. I do like the distinctness of the sides too from the units to the cut-scenes, they're very different feeling.

With a clear gameplay loop of base-building, harvesting resources and then sending off your units to go destroy the enemy, it's all very clear-cut in the missions. Like any good base-building RTS, it starts off rather simply as it introduces you to the mechanics but will rapidly expand your arsenal and you'll have a lot to think about.

Partly due to all the different unit abilities and the population cap you have to keep an eye one when building units, sprinkling in a little Starcraft into the mixture which really does add nicely to the experience, and will ensure it constantly keeps your undivided attention. The construction system is a nice touch on it too, instead of clicking through buildings in the side-panel and waiting to place them once money has been put into them, you can place them right away and they'll build one after the other in order as your money ticks down. So you can do a little planning.

With thanks to all the unit abilities, it's not just a straight up attack-move into combat game. It does take time to learn how to best use each individual type of unit, so there's more actual strategy to it all. Rather than just click, move and wait it's more about searching your surroundings and thinking on what unit and abilities will work best - so it's just that bit more interesting. However, that said, it's also not even strictly necessary, you can still treat it like a meat-grinder if you wish, it just might take a bit longer to get through.

On a technical level, the game does perform really well. Surprisingly so for an Unreal Engine game too. It's not a particularly intense looking game graphically, but don't get me wrong the overall design is fantastic. Performance has not been an issue with it smoothly sailing over 100FPS for me on the highest settings. No issues at all with Proton 9.0-4.

I haven't tested online play these thoughts are just from the solo campaign.

With two different campaigns to play through that give quite a number of hours of gaming, Tempest Rising is fun and explosive base-building strategy in pure form and I loved every second of it.

Highlights:

• Classic RTS base building with fast and fluid hard-hitting combat.
• 3 asymmetrical factions, (2 playable at launch), each featuring distinct economy and play styles.
• Each faction offers a unique roster of units.
• 2 epic single player campaigns with between-mission cutscenes.
• Skirmish, custom games, and ranked multiplayer matchmaking with Glicko-2 rating.