If the last 25 or so years have taught us anything, it's that it's surprisingly difficult to make a true successor to 90's-style RTS games.There have been many attempts to modernize the fast-paced pleasures of resource-gathering, base-building, and blowing enemies away with battalions of miniatures, but last year, developer Slipgate Ironworks finally did it with Tempest Rising.
Tempest Rising is a crunchy, confident RTS that understands not only the pace and mechanics of the genre, but the gritty 90s-style near-future presentation of the era too. Set in the aftermath of World War 3 in alt-history 1997, the world is left in ruins and scrambling over a powerful resource called Tempest. In his review last year, PC Gamer editor Rick Lane described it as "exactly what the RTS needs right now," giving it a solid 85. It was a resounding success—enough to earn itself an expansion.
While in the base game you could play as one of two factions, the Veti's Wrath expansion flips the script to let players take control of the Veti—the strange, ritualistic faction that rose from the bowels of the Earth in the base game to become a secondary antagonist in whichever campaign you played. The Veti get their own full-sized 11-mission campaign, in which you lead them as they seek out their lost technologies, reunite their people, and rise to reclaim the planet from those pesky warmongering humans.
The Veti aren't some kind of pushover pacifists. Their strategy revolves around turning fallen enemies into brainless thralls you can either sacrifice to your troops to bolster their combat abilities or feed to your Ascension Anchors, which are used to buff your buildings. Essentially, you kill enemies to generate resources — human resources, if you will.
With the Veti economy largely driven by aggression, it makes for an interesting flow. For instance, sending out raiding parties or building forward bases to feed on enemy troops at the fringes of their territory is a viable route to strengthening your forces. The Veti also utilize Tempest — the ominous floral energy source at the heart of the game's conflict — but instead of clumsily extracting it from the field like the other factions, they cultivate it by building Refinement Altars around it. All this speaks to the Veti's uniquely symbiotic relationship with the Tempest, which seems to far predate humanity's opportunistic interest in it, and will likely become clearer as you get deeper into their campaign.
The Veti have some dimension-defying units at their disposal: flying Caretakers can establish build radiuses anywhere on the battlefield, making aggressive forward placement a key part of the faction's strategy. There are also several units capable of slipping out of spacetime altogether; the Gorgon, for instance, is an insectile mech that can "blink" around the battlefield to flank and harry enemies, while the Phantom Artillery bombards from long range by opening wormholes above its targets and chucking demolition charges through them.
So it's clear that the Veti don't play by the same technological rules as the other factions, and these are just a few of the dozens of new units and structures at their disposal.
You can see the developers took inspiration from Vedic mythology in the Veti design, but their sci-fi ziggurats also have splashes of Mesopotamian grandeur, and their ornate outfits give hints of the Ancient Egypt–coded Goa'uld from Stargate ( maybe too obscure a reference for most).
With the arrival of Veti's Wrath, Tempest Rising will be available as a Gold Edition, which includes both the base game and expansion (though the Veti will still be patched for free as a multiplayer faction into the base game). Veti's Wrath and Tempest Rising Gold Edition launch on September 29, bringing this worthy homage to the golden age of RTS to completion. You can grab the Tempest Rising base game now on Steam, and the Veti's Wrath expansion here. To keep up with the game's socials, follow Tempest Rising over on X.
