I wasn't sure if I wanted Command and conquer return. Some things are simply a thing of the past, a product of their time, your love for them due to some ephemeral ability or limitation, long stretched out or hammered in by time, and, in the case of games, a variety of fresher and more convenient alternatives.
But Growing Storm This isn't C&C again. Even though I've summarized it as such in several emails, given the clear similarities in its design and settings. It feels more like an original work created using modern tools by a second team in roughly the same area of ​​expertise, and while I don't like it, I enjoy and respect it much more than a simple remake.
Tempest Rising creates its own identity. Two factions (a third, AI-exclusive one, is currently in playtest) will go head to head in a near, possibly apocalyptic future. The NATO-style Global Defense Force corresponds to the GDI C&C, and the Tempest Dynasty is a rather fanatical resistance army based in Eastern Europe and Asia that has suffered from nuclear war. Tiberium crystals are replaced with storm; sinister aggressive tentacles and pods that produce valuable juice. Of course, there is a war going on because of this.
Tempest works a little differently than you might think. Crossing it slows down most vehicles, creating an “overcharge” unless dispersed, which neutralizes and slowly kills them. Dynasty, which feels right at home among all this, has several weapons that instantly destroy overloaded machines. They are also a bit more repair oriented and can run their power plants idle to produce units faster. However, they mostly work by hitting harder and switching between three “battle planes” to speed up building, harvesting, or attacking, for some flexibility.
GDF are the fancier pants, with shiny lasers and unit abilities based on stealth, suppression, passive bonus radius, and a secondary resource gained primarily by tagging and killing enemies. There are more differences between factions, especially in how they place buildings. None of this is particularly outlandish (though I do like the audacity of Dynasty's vans/recycling centers, which can turn unwary enemy vehicles back into cash), but they do seem different enough.
Much of GDF's play revolves around selecting targets to mark and weaken, moving perhaps a little faster and more opportunistically, while Dynasty is suited to hard shock attacks. Or at least I think so. In practice, some of the details seemed too cumbersome to me; While there is some rock/paper/scissors interaction that keeps things mixed and free, managing individual units' active abilities feels cumbersome.
GDF jeep stuff can tag enemies, but you have to tell them to switch to dedicated ammo for that and then switch back to fighting infantry because the units are bad at targeting (and often kite themselves unless told to stay put when I mostly want something in between). Scouts can throw a mine, but you have to manually command it for each of them. Technicians can set up tiny minefields, but then stand next to them and get shot at without a babysitter. The specialists have obvious utility, but they take too much attention away from the segments dedicated to them (helped by their introductory briefing implying that I'd be fined if they died, so of course I did the StarCraftian thing of parking them in a safe corner and learning to get by without them).
Trying to find one technician with a ready cooldown is also difficult since Tempest Rising has a problem with unit differentiation. I understand that units can belong to multiple control groups at the same time, but the infantry is tiny and dies in droves, and while everything looks great in motion (explosions and laser effects in particular), there are a lot of gray tanks and massive gray armored cars. The silliest car is a charming 1940s War Department guy scowling around a giant cigar sphere that rolls above you, and even that is mostly grey. This is not uglyand there are exceptions (Dynasty's refineries are machines that transport small harvesters), but the units don't feel like the characters they should be. What's more, they're harder to spot at first glance and easier to toss into a pile instead of bothering with something clever.
I never got upset though. At least not in terms of finishing the game. Several challenging parts of the campaign are more surmountable than they seemed with my mediocre keystroke skills, and none of the levels feel like you're being scammed or set up to trick you. Frustration isn't necessarily a bad thing in a real-time strategy game like this. Levels that seem impossible, situations in which it seems that you have reached a hopeless situation, but in reality Noperhaps there is something to strive for. While I wouldn't say Tempest Rising enjoys them, it's exactly the kind of disappointment—a good one—that fried me at some points.
Each campaign mixes up the use of enemy assets a little, as well as the introduction of a third, strange faction. Success earns points that can be spent between missions on “doctrine” bonuses to slightly change up your playstyle, and “arsenal” whose items are more like role-playing game equipment, adding and turning off perks for each mission such as tougher aircraft, more energetic infantry, or access to an enemy vehicle type. The doctrines suffer from some crap choices in between the good ones, but I can be very fickle about such things.
Without just talking about “modernization” and moving on, it's hard to put into words how the building and combat in Tempest Rising threads the needle of similarities to C&C while still feeling original. Part of this is due to the fact that the unit composition is not just a 1:1 collection of backups. The second division of the GDF is the drone operator; a barely armed tiny guy whose miniature air unit outclasses cheap defenses, artillery slots, and respawns unless you kill him, so there's no reason he won't shake hands when in danger. Part of this is due to the user interface: the familiar, old-fashioned construction/training sidebar has been redesigned for modern clarity and quick tab usage. A lot of little things add up to make him feel like an independent creation of an aging design, rather than a soulless clone or a confused teenager forced to wear uncomfortable clothes.
However, where this shines most is in the storytelling. The plot of Tempest Rising, you know, is this: Great. It loses much of the campy melodrama, but there is a deliberate shift away from the overt good versus evil. Sure, C&C's Brotherhood of Nod played into the Red Menace to some degree, but it was primarily an evil cult of personality, anchored by the memorable appearance and performance of Joseph D. Kukan (also the voice actor for much of the series) as Kane. Meanwhile, the GoodIes were almost archetypal heroes of American exceptionalism, with a few sops for mild criticism of their impact on the world that were easily corrected with well-meaning zeal. The abnormal bad apple is out, problem solved.
For all its premeditation, Nod was a savvy concept: broad-based opposition to militarized global hegemony, used by egoists to form a paramilitary cult whose near-worship of the environmentally catastrophic Tiberius far outweighs any legitimate criticism of the GDI. The series never really moved forward with this, but it did make them feel a little more interesting.
Tempest Rising also doesn't delve too deeply into its themes. The campaign's missions don't feel very connected or contextualized, while its story wisely has several moving parts and doesn't waste your time pretending you're there. Its characters are unforgettable but more realistic and approachable, helped by intimate, personal mission briefings with basic dialogue options. The first thing you see in the FGZ leadership is an American who doesn't even bother to find out the name of the Icelandic region he's invading, and the dynasty who's trying to kill you expects you to just admit it's a political issue and move on with a common goal and a Slavic shrug.
In Rising, it's more plausible to see the “Western” (primarily American and landlord-dominated, let's be real) powers alternately exploiting and abandoning Eastern Europe, whose people suffered the most from the fictional nuclear war and ensuing storm, and also suffered under the USSR, and managed to unify to some extent because of it. Even the storm is less sinister than Tiberium: although it is aggressive, it reduces radiation and burns cleanly, making it perhaps an improvement and, in the eyes of the more sympathetic red faction, a resource that is rightfully theirs and not in the tenacious hands of the distant world police.
The dynasty are dressed to oppress, the bust in the background resembles Lenin, and their occasional bombastic lies or outright abuse of power are relics of Soviet power structures, but they are neither Russian nor communist. It's its own oddity, more appropriate for an era when your friend is having surgery in Armenia, you've just landed a spot on a Polish sitcom, and you've just transferred here after flirting with a Czech woman. Fewer “villains” and more politically motivated, with a membership more committed to self-determination than heroic ruler worship or hatred of the GDF, because that's what villains do. Dynasty and the game itself are reminiscent of their obvious historical influences, but at the same time differ from them, becoming something of their own. It's a hard way to go, and it probably wouldn't work if the design didn't bring a similar “same but different” energy.
Tempest Rising isn't about those things because it doesn't take itself that seriously, and it shouldn't when the goal remains pulpy sci-fi entertainment. But its setting and real-world themes resonate just enough to feel sincere and vaguely believable, making it easy to care about what's going on. Not deep, but enough to claim both its own identity and a great legacy.
