Tempest Rising is a loving tribute to Command & Conquer, weirdness and all

We live in the age of the revival. You know the story: a really excellent series of video games doesn’t exist anymore, or a whole genre basically doesn’t exist anymore, and everyone’s pretty sad about it, but the publisher that owns that franchise doesn’t really think it will make money anymore, so it’s dead aside from the occasional remaster. And it languishes, sometimes for a really long time, until another studio, tired of waiting, says “Fine, we’ll do it ourselves.” That’s exactly what seems to have happened with Tempest Rising.

Tempest Rising is, according to the developers at Slipgate Ironworks, explicitly inspired by “RTS greats of the 90s and 2000s,” and by RTS greats what I really mean is Command & Conquer. Tempest Rising is Command & Conquer. This isn’t a bad thing; aside from the excellent remaster of the original and Command & Conquer: Red Alert released about five years ago, EA hasn’t done anything with Command & Conquer aside from a couple mobile game since 2010’s Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight which itself received mixed reviews. It has been a rough decade and a half for C&C sickos. But if you’ve ever played the series, dropping into Tempest Rising might feel like a tall glass of water after walking through a desert.

Tempest Rising is set in an alternate 1997 in a universe where the Cuban Missile Crisis spiraled into World War III. The fallout resulted in strange Tempest vines sprouting all over the world. The vines contain an enormous amount of energy, and like all things that contain massive amounts of energy, humanity promptly starts fighting over it. There will be three factions in the final game, but there are only two in the multiplayer-only demo I played: the Tempest Dynasty, an alliance of Eastern European and Asian nations hardest hit by World War 3. Since Tempest naturally occurs in those countries as a result, they view it as their birthright. On the other side, there’s the Global Defense Force, which is a team-up between the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, countries that have never ever invaded other nations to steal their oil.

Both factions will also have 11 mission campaigns to play through at release, but wasn’t part of the demo I played. Once you get into a game, it operates like Command & Conquer, right down to the all-encompassing menu on the right side of the screen that does everything from build structures to recruit units. If you’re coming from the Blizzard school of RTS, this is going to seem odd, but controlling everything from a single menu has its perks. The other big thing to know is that, like Command & Conquer, the Tempest Dynasty and the GDF are more like different variations of the same food than a whole new meal like, say, the Terran, Protoss, and Zerg are in StarCraft. They share many of the same structures and both have units like tanks and infantry.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t have fun little eccentricities: the Tempest Dynasty builds their buildings in the background before plopping them down, and they generally have fewer buildings and units. They’ve also got Plans, which activate one of three specific bonuses: Security, Logistics, and Martial. The first cuts your costs to produce units, improves your Repair function, and boosts your Radar vision. Logistics, on the other hand, speeds up building production and resource harvesting. Martial gives you a ton of bonuses to combat. They can also swap their power plants into Distribution mode, which damages their buildings while boosting unit production. Even its gathering units are flexible; instead of Harvesters, they have Tempest Rigs which can drive to Tempest fields, deploy little mini-harvesters that function as wheels, and gather from there, no buildings required.

To mix it up, the GDF has more specialized units, and is more traditional. Your Harvesters must return their Tempest to buildings; you get tanks sooner, and your units have the ability to Mark enemies. Marked enemies drop intel, which you’ll need for more advanced units. The GDF is all about cooperation on the battlefield, using advanced comms to coordinate attacks, and special units to boost that coordination. 

What really sets them apart are the tech trees you can upgrade. Each side gets three, and whether you’re dumping resources into it, it matters. For the Dynasty, that means specializing in one of their Plans. As the GDF, it also means opting into things like better Comms or Marking that buffs your units and debuffs your enemies. It means there’s a lot of variety, even with only two factions, and matches can play out in a lot of ways.

While the version I played didn’t support team play with other players, I was impressed by how fast matches were and how clever Tempest Rising’s AI is. They’re aggressive, will attack from multiple angles, attempt to cripple your economy, and will exploit any weakness you’ve got. They’ll also build to defeat whatever you’re cooking up, so it can be challenging until you’re comfortable with your faction.

The RTS has been in kind of a weird place for the last decade, but games like Tempest Rising give me hope that it might finally be back on the rise. Tempest Rising’s inspiration is obvious, but it knows what it wants to do and seems poised to deliver on it. That ain’t a bad place to be. I’m just a little sad it (probably) won’t have something like Tim Curry talking about escaping to space, though the opening cutscene is appropriately campy. And as long as there’s hope, we can always dream.

This preview is based on a demo build provided by the publisher. You can download a multiplayer demo for Tempest Rising on Steam now, and play it through February 3rd, 2025. Tempest Rising releases on PC on April 24th, 2025.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.