Tempest Rising Review (Quickdraw6)
It's good. Quite good. Not perfect - but good. And as another put it, it's like water in a desert. An RTS game that is properly a full, finished game, sans the third faction that's been delayed, but coming, and the game is still plenty fun already. For a breakout title by a team that had never published an RTS before, on a fraction of the budget of the old greats, this one certainly finds its place at a table that is by now only cluttered with dusty, forgotten bones. I'm not going to say it doesn't feel a bit generic, but one can hardly blame them for being cautious about their approach in this genre, and there's some real potential for a DLC to build on this solid foundation with something more innovative. Not to be mistaken for calling the game entirely derivative, as even though its inspirations are clear, its factions differentiate themselves from the old comparisons more than you might think.
I'm not sure what another reviewer is talking about with "snapshotting" weapons - it hasn't been my experience at all, with ballistic physics behaving about as you could expect. AoE is certainly a lot more common in this than many other RTS, though, with decent radii to boot, which might create that feeling, and pushes T1 infantry rather quickly towards irrelevance. Combined with infantry's tendency to blob up, it's a nasty combo that can lead to having a huge section of your army wiped out by just a couple aircraft rockets. But if you micro well enough, you can certainly reduce the damage of some weapons, with proper AoE range falloff and everything; getting direct hit by an artillery round would kill most infantry, but weave a little and they might only get scratched for like 4 hp.
Also Klepacki's music work is goated as ever. That man will never get a break from making music for RTS games, but one must imagine him happy.