Tempest Rising Review

2025 seems to be loaded with renewed hope for real-time strategy games, and Slipgate Ironworks’ Tempest Rising might just be the huge winner we’d been waiting for.

After some promising tests and demos plus explosive marketing backed by Saber Interactive, 3D Realms, and Knights Peak, expectations were high. Was it all style and little substance or were we really about to get a totally worthy spiritual successor to the classic Command & Conquer games? After spending some time with Tempest Rising’s two distinct campaigns and the skirmish and multiplayer modes, I can safely say C&C is back with a bang… sort of.

There’s no way to push aside comparisons when talking about an RTS that wears them so proudly. We’ve got more than a few riffs on C&C launching in the near future, but Slipgate Ironworks’ project always looked like the most promising one due to the big budget behind everything and all the modern visual flourish. While Tempest Rising’s innards faithfully honour the RTS tradition of the 2000s, its presentation and the many improvements to macro and micromanagement (as well as the UI) make it fresh enough and welcoming.

The latter is especially important while trying to reignite mainstream interest in a comatose genre. Diehards will argue RTS games never went anywhere, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s hard to say with a straight face that real-time strategy has a large following nowadays in spite of the uptick of gamers going with PC as their main platform. While Tempest Rising excels at mimicking the pace and feeling of RTS at its best and most robust, it doesn’t forget to be inviting and lend newcomers a hand before throwing everything it has at them.

The campaigns (Global Defense Force and Tempest Dynasty) do a fine job of getting everyone started and gradually unveiling new units and the mechanics associated with them, but make no mistake, they’re not walks in the park meant to teach the basics and prepare players for skirmishes and multiplayer. They stand on their own with varied and strong level and objective design, and it’s all backed by in-game cutscenes (no FMVs in this one) for debriefings and pre-rendered mission intros that could very well belong to a new EA-backed Command & Conquer release.

The downtime between missions can feel exposition-heavy at times and definitely lacks the campiness of the games mined for DNA, but there’s a solid premise in its post-1997 (and WWIII) alternate history scenario that introduces the mysterious Tempest resource, a plant-like growth that started rising to the surface after nuclear war. While dangerous, it can be harnessed to power new machines, weapons, and all sorts of advancements. It represents a gift for the fanatical Dynasty and an opportunity which must be contained nonetheless for the GDF. The world is split, the objective is clear, and you know what must be done. There are late-game twists to watch out for though.

Motivations and governing aesthetics aside, the factions play very differently from the get-go. While the GDF can plan and build in a more traditional way with blueprints, the Dynasty builds and then places down its structures. This means the latter can protect all buildings from being destroyed while they’re being built, but the downside is you must pay attention to yet another queue and do more work yourself. Differences also extend to the way Tempest energy (the only resource, which is turned into credits) works and how it can be used; for example, Dynasty can boost its buildings’ production at the risk of damaging them. Keep building out your bases and units and you’ll begin to notice the vehicles and more advanced forces all bring clear roles and abilities to the table. GDF is the familiar pick, I’d say, and Dynasty favours more advanced and involved play.

There’s the elephant in the room of the Veti, a third faction that shows up during the final act for both campaigns. Without getting into spoilers, it’s a very different group that shakes things up in a major way, yet they’re completely absent from the skirmish and multiplayer modes. Thankfully, they’re coming to the game as a playable faction later down the line, but we don’t know if they’ll get a campaign of their own too. As it stands, Tempest Rising’s biggest missed opportunity is not staying in the oven for a bit longer to launch with a third faction that would greatly help towards differentiating this title from its closest relatives.

Back to the moment-to-moment gameplay, the process of macro and micromanaging ever-expanding bases and armies, as I teased before, is pretty smooth thanks to a clean and intuitive UI, being able to build and queue units without having to pan back to the base to click on each building, and a thought-out control scheme that makes using each unit to its fullest painless and quick in the heat of battle. Whether you’re focusing on neutralizing large attacks or trying to maximize your profits, Tempest Rising reduces the clicks-per-minute as much as it realistically can.

This all coalesces into an RTS that feels both old and refreshing, very easy to pick up but hard to master. You spend less time worrying about managing an entire base and optimizing unit subgroups and more making big strategic moves and hitting the enemy fast and furious. That said, paying attention to each unit’s strengths and weaknesses is half of the key to securing an easy victory. While spamming human soldiers can be very effective early on, even the most basic vehicles equipped with flamethrowers will erase them, for example. So far, I haven’t noticed any overpowered, all-around awesome unit. Balance seems on point.

Skirmishes offer exactly what you’d expect, though there’s a four-player limit which some players might find restrictive. Don’t worry though, as battles get very big very fast. The real complaint here is the AI can be too aggressive even on the Easy difficulty setting. While veteran RTS enthusiasts won’t have much trouble defending themselves, it feels a bit overtuned for folks who want to relax and learn the ropes of a multiplayer-like scenario at their own pace. As for the online multiplayer, there are both traditional lobbies and casual matchmaking, with a ranked option coming in just a few days.

Tempest Rising simply is robust and watertight where it matters most, and it’s hard to come up with more criticisms if you’re a fan of the RTS genre. The overall polish and ‘glow’ of the presentation (including a killer original soundtrack) are the cherry on top. Moreover, I haven’t talked about the performance because it’s fantastic across a wide range of hardware. This is the sort of ambitious and rock-solid modern RTS release we haven’t had since 2021’s Age of Empires IV. It effortlessly refreshes and improves upon a dormant series under a faintly different guise and title. Just what the doctor ordered if you ask me.