Tempest Rising

The real-time strategy genre has spent two decades being eulogized. Every year or so a studio announces it’s bringing back the Westwood formula — harvesters, tech trees, tiberium-analogue resource, a villain monologuing at you from a grainy video feed — and every year the result lands somewhere between an unplayable Kickstarter husk and a competent-but-soulless imitation. Tempest Rising is the first one in a long time that actually works.

Developed by Slipgate Ironworks and published by 3D Realms, it drops players into an alternate 1997 where the Cuban Missile Crisis went hot. Earth is scarred, irradiated, and threaded with Tempest vines — a creeping, energy-dense biomass that is both the world’s only viable power source and the reason everyone is shooting at each other. If that sounds like tiberium wearing a different hat, that’s the point. This is not a game hiding its influences; it’s a game that studied them, took notes, and rebuilt the machine from the schematics.

Two factions ship at launch. The Global Defense Force is the Western-aligned conventional military: tanks, air superiority, rapid-response doctrine, the reassuring competence of a well-funded army. The Tempest Dynasty improvises — salvaged, welded-together war machines and an economy built on manipulation and extraction rather than logistics. A third faction, the alien Veti, arrives through post-launch content, which is both a promise and, at release, a hole in the box.

Market position is unambiguous. This is a $39.99 premium RTS on Steam aimed squarely at people who still remember what a construction yard sounds like when it deploys. The reception reflects that: 80 on Metacritic. That is the number of a good game with visible gaps, not a masterpiece and not a disaster.

• Two full 11-mission campaigns: Each faction gets a complete, voiced, briefing-driven story arc with secondary objectives — not a tutorial and a skirmish mode wearing a trench coat.
• The plan-selection layer: Before missions, players commit to a strategic approach that materially changes how the map plays out, adding a branching decision the genre rarely bothers with.
• Doctrine trees and unit stances: Mid-match specialization. No one is locked into a build order from the first minute; an army’s entire identity can pivot around what the enemy is doing.
• Frank Klepacki’s soundtrack: The composer behind Command & Conquer and Red Alert, back on form. This is not nostalgia bait. It’s an excellent score doing real work.
• 500-unit battles with faction superweapons: Large-scale engagements capped by side-specific doomsday hardware.
• Full mod pipeline: Steam Workshop support, a bundled map editor, 144 achievements, trading cards.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is old, and Slipgate hasn’t tried to reinvent it. Deploy, build a refinery, push harvesters onto a Tempest field, convert green goo into tanks, feed the tanks into a meat grinder somewhere on the other side of the map. What separates a good version of this from a bad one is friction — how much the interface fights the player, how responsive units are designed to be when ordered somewhere, whether decisions made in minute three still matter in minute twenty.

Here, the friction is mostly in the right places. Power-plant and refinery placement are real decisions, not chores. Building close to a Tempest field speeds the economy but exposes it; the Dynasty in particular is built to punish greedy expansion, with economic manipulation tools that bleed an opponent’s income rather than their base. The GDF answers with tempo — rapid-response doctrine and air power that reward hitting first and hitting where the enemy isn’t.

Unit stances are the quiet standout. Toggling between aggressive and defensive postures, layered with field upgrades, means a squad of infantry isn’t a static stat block; it’s a tool with modes. Combined with the doctrine trees, matches develop a legible arc. Armies start generic. They commit. By the twenty-minute mark, an army has a personality, and that personality can be counter-punched.

Asymmetry That Actually Means Something

The genre’s most common failure is factions that differ cosmetically — same tank, different hat. Tempest Rising avoids this decisively. The GDF and the Dynasty want different games from the player. GDF play rewards clean logistics and combined-arms timing pushes. Dynasty play rewards improvisation, aggression, and a willingness to strangle an economy instead of storming a base. Learning one does not teach the other, which is exactly the friction a two-faction game needs when its third faction is still in the oven.

The Campaign and Its Branching Layer

Twenty-two missions across two campaigns is a substantial single-player offering — more than most of the genre’s recent revivals shipped with. The briefings are voiced, appropriately overwrought, and shot with the exact register of late-90s FMV camp that the setting demands. It commits to the bit without sneering at it.

The plan-selection layer is the most genuinely novel thing in the package. Before a mission, choosing an approach reshapes objectives and pressure, which does two useful things: it gives missions replay value beyond a difficulty slider, and it makes the campaign feel like command rather than a fixed puzzle with one solution. It’s not a deep system — a small menu, not authored strategy — but it’s a smarter idea than the genre usually attempts, and one worth developing further.

Where It Wobbles

Three things drag, and they’re consistent across critical and player consensus.

Pathfinding is mediocre. Large formations through a choke bunch, stall, and take the scenic route into a defensive line. In a genre where the unit is the verb, that’s not a cosmetic flaw. It taxes attention on logistics that should be automatic.

Skirmish AI is undercooked. It plays a serviceable game against a new player and falls apart against anyone who has internalized the build orders. For a game whose multiplayer suite was thin at launch, a weak AI opponent removes the main practice surface between campaign completion and ranked ladder.

Base defenses are weak. Turrets die too readily to be a real strategic layer, which pushes matches toward aggressive army-versus-army play and quietly deletes the turtling archetype. Some will call that a healthy design decision. It reads more like a balance pass that hasn’t landed yet.

Multiplayer and the Long Game

Ranked and casual 1v1 and 2v2 with Glicko-2 rankings is a properly serious ladder implementation — Glicko-2 handles rating uncertainty far better than a naive Elo, which matters enormously for a small population. The problem at launch wasn’t the plumbing; it was everything around it. A small map pool and a bare-bones feature set gave a competitive community very little room to breathe. Workshop support and the bundled map editor are the release valve, and the health of this game eighteen months out will be decided almost entirely by whether that community shows up.

The aesthetic direction is disciplined. This is a grounded, muted, industrial 1997 — mud, rust, cold light, and the sickly green of Tempest growth cutting through it. It resists the temptation to over-stylize, and the readability benefits: at a glance, mid-battle, it’s clear what’s shooting at what. That sounds like a low bar. It isn’t. Plenty of modern RTS games render beautifully and parse terribly.

The UI is functional-first, borrowing the sidebar logic that made the Westwood games playable and cleaning up the edges. Nothing is hidden behind a submenu that should be one click away. Hotkeys are sane. Klepacki’s score deserves separate billing — industrial percussion and grinding synths that escalate with the battle, and it does more for the game’s identity than any single mechanical feature.

A 2D-leaning game of this scope is light on hardware by design, and 500-unit engagements are where RTS engines go to die — the design keeps the rendering from being the bottleneck. The simulation’s pathfinding is.

Steam-exclusive, and it uses the platform properly rather than checking boxes. Workshop integration plus a shipped map editor is the single most important post-launch decision Slipgate made — it hands the community the tool that directly addresses the game’s thinnest area, the map pool. That’s the difference between a small ladder that dies and one that regenerates its own content.

The 144 achievements are extensive to the point of being a completionist’s second campaign, and trading cards are trading cards.

The real platform caveat is genre-shaped: this is a mouse-and-keyboard game, unapologetically. Micro-managing stances, doctrine choices, and multi-front pushes demands precision and hotkey depth that no controller layout or handheld trackpad meaningfully replicates. If a Steam library lives mostly on a handheld, treat this as a desk game.

Tempest Rising is not innovative, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s a restoration project — an argument that the 1997 base-building RTS was a fundamentally sound design that got abandoned rather than outgrown. On that argument, Slipgate Ironworks largely wins. The factions are sharp, the campaigns are substantial, the presentation is confident, and the moment-to-moment play has the tactile satisfaction that a dozen imitators have failed to reproduce.

What holds it back is arithmetic. A third of the announced faction roster is missing at release. The AI needs a rewrite, the pathfinder needs a pass, and the map pool needs the community’s help. Impatience with the roadmap is a much better problem than players abandoning a broken game, but it’s a problem regardless.

Buy it for the campaigns, which are worth the price on their own. Stay for the ladder only if being early to a scene sounds appealing. This is a good game that could be an excellent one in about a year — solid but unremarkable in ways that matter today, and easy to recommend to the right audience only.