Tempest Rising – Although it has declined since the late and early years of the 21st century, the Real Time Strategy game genre still possesses a “hardcore” fan community, especially with once legendary game series such as Command & Conquer nice Warcraft They all have extremely vibrant groups to this day.

Such as Daymare 1998 recreating the traditional “survival horror” style of the game series Resident Evil instead of the action-heavy style like the recently released versions, or like Ion Fury “simulate” the retro (nostalgic) style of 90s shooting games like DOOM nice Quakefocusing mainly on “action” rather than “extra food” elements that are somewhat excessive and redundant.

However, with the strategy game genre, there is still no game that really attracts attention.

Until recently, one of the most prominent game makers with this “restoration” movement, Danish game developer Frederik Schreiber and studio Slipgate Ironworksannounced a “gift” for longtime fans of Command & Conquer with name: Tempest Rising.

Does Tempest Rising Can create a “new breeze” for an old game series? Or does the game fail to live up to expectations and disappoint further? Let's take a look at the following review with Vietgame.Asia!

YOU WILL LIKE

A “WEIRD BUT Familiar” GAME TITLE!

First impression that Tempest Rising brings quite “close” to an upgrade of Command & Conquer (C&C) rather than an independent title.

Indeed, right from the context of the plot, fans of C&C will feel extremely familiar when the official timeline was “bent” from the mid-60s of the twentieth century along with a series of political crises and the rise of a completely new type of resource, called “Tempest”, which significantly changed the landscape of international relations, forming two factions, the Global Defense Force (GDF) and Tempest Dynasty, and then, the ancient force called Veti appeared and attacked both.

Does the motif sound “familiar”? As long as you replace the GDF faction with GDI, the Tempest Dynasty faction with Brotherhood of NOD, Veti with Scrin, and finally the Tempest energy source with Tiberium, you almost have a version C&C with modern image quality, completely built with advanced Unreal Engine 5!

Not only is the setting familiar, the gameplay is also almost “exactly” copied from the game series C&C traditional.

To describe a bit for gamers who have never come into contact with this game series, players will communicate everything through a task bar located on the right hand side of the screen, in which the operations of building, training soldiers or manufacturing tanks are all carried out sequentially, as long as you have built related projects without the need for “construction workers” like popular strategy game series that fans have become so familiar with in recent years.

You will be mining Tempest in areas filled with toxins and radiation that can cause “blood loss” for all types of combat units except for specialized mining vehicles. You still need to build enough power plants to supply other structures to operate, otherwise even something that is so “default” in most other strategy games such as maps, will not work.

Besides the plot and gameplay elements, you will easily encounter familiar units from the “C&C family” in Tempest Rising.

For example, the GDF faction will own a Hunter Tank reminiscent of the “Hunter” of the same name of the GDI faction, the Tempest Dynasty faction will own a Pillager that also has the ability to breathe fire like the Devil's Tongue of the NOD faction in C&Cor even the Voltaic Tank, the iconic battle tank of the “red side” with extremely similar mechanisms to the Laser tank in the game. C&C Generals renowned.

Saying that doesn't mean it Tempest Rising imitate the stereotype of the game genre Command & Conquer.

The development team from Slipgate Ironworks also added a number of “modern” elements to create something new for players, such as drone control units that are quite weak when facing air defense, but strong when fighting remotely in groups against tanks, or skills that temporarily increase the strength of each military unit such as “burning blood” to increase the power of the Voltaic Tank, adding “variables” to operations. microcosm of players in battle.

As for the campaign, the game design team showed that they really put effort into designing the game screen, instead of just doing it sketchily and then focusing on the multiplayer like some recent games.

Through each level, you will be guided in the right style Command & Conquer Traditionally, including the general mission assignment at the beginning of the level in the form of a dialogue that allows players to learn more deeply about the mission, the context, as well as secret missions cleverly activated in the level, helping to connect the plot extremely seamlessly and clearly, gradually revealing conflicts in the game world, even pushing it to a climax when the appearance of the Veti faction intervenes in the war.

This way of building a multi-layered plot creates depth for the world in the game, giving the feeling of a living world, not completely “closed”, difficult to develop further like many current strategy games.

With the campaign part, the game design team showed that they really put effort into the level design, instead of just doing it sketchily and then focusing on the multiplayer part like some recent games.

Finally, the image and sound quality of a modern game is also another highlight of Tempest Risingespecially when familiar fans of the C&C game series have had to “suffer” with the somewhat “old-fashioned” graphics platform of these games for a long time.

With Unreal Engine 5, the world is clear Tempest Rising Extremely vivid, realistic with detailed models and eye-catching effects!

Of course, a real-time strategy game with many units appearing at the same time will not be able to be shown in detail like action games, but at least they are not too “toys” like many other strategy games.

The “sound” part of the game is also presented quite well if considering this is an independent game, especially the track “By our blood” is quite reminiscent of the original version. C&C First, thanks to the strong rock style, creating an atmosphere that is both modern and powerful, and also increases the pace of the game.

However, it's a small pity that the music still cannot bring the “play and adventure” feeling of other series games. C&C before. Of course, this is only an assessment from the perspective of the writer – a longtime fan of this game series, but for regular gamers, this is completely unremarkable.

YOU WILL HATE

MANY “PROBLEMS” NEED TO BE SOLVED!

If considered as a game that inherits the “will” of the game series C&C, Tempest Rising has successfully completed its mission, but since then, many problems have arisen that make the player experience not really good when compared to modern real-time strategy games.

First of all, the construction and production mechanism of the game series C&C is an evolution from the tactical structure of Dune II Launched in… 1992, once again, this mechanism is the successor to the console strategy game style from the 80s for systems with extremely limited configurations.

That's why buildings can only be built sequentially (instead of building them like that in later strategy games), and military units only appear sporadically, this slows down the battle flow in the early stages and speeds up gradually in the middle and later stages, when the player has accumulated enough tactical forces for large and epic battles while friction battles continuously take place to learn the location of the enemy base and the terrain and terrain with forces. scout.

That's the theory, but many additions were made later in the versions C&C Tiberian Sun, C&C 3 and C&C 4 makes the game flow faster but also makes the game rhythm more difficult to grasp, and even more… unlucky.

The huge difference between the types of units is also another problem, making the ability to balance the strength between factions very difficult, especially when the traditional “pull – rock – paper” model of strategy games is completely broken.

Meanwhile, power-enhancing skills are added Tempest Rising Further “exacerbating” this problem, although the manufacturer continuously releases updates to micro-adjust the relative power of the units, but until now, the adjustment process probably still needs to be carried out further to reach an acceptable level of balance.

In addition, the use of Unreal Engine 5, which has many “scandals” in terms of optimization, also causes Tempest Rising encountered quite a few technical problems since launch. For example, when you start the game, sometimes you will be pushed into… a black screen, or during the game you can also suddenly crash or crash the game.

In addition, in big battles, players will sometimes feel erratic frame rates.

Although the game development team at Slipgate Ironworks has tried to continuously update patches, causing serious errors to decrease sharply over the course of several months after the game's official release, optimization issues are still there, relatively affecting the player experience.

…the use of Unreal Engine 5, which has many “scandals” in terms of optimization, also causes Tempest Rising encountered quite a few technical problems since launch