I, like many others, am patiently waiting for
Tempest Rising since it looks like a nice shot at doing a revival for the RTS genre. But who is even making this game? I sat on the loo and decided to check out some info on the phone about the game as you do, and I quickly noticed that it has two different developers. Not a great start I would say, a game split between two devs – how does that even work design-wise? Is it collaboration through and through, or one design, and the other do the technical?
The devs behind the game are
Slipgate Ironworks and
2B Games. Slipgate Ironworks have four releases under their belt, but only two with positive reviews on Steam –
Ghostrunner, and
Rad Rodgers: World One. The issue here is that Ghostrunner while having a good rating it’s another collaborative game, and Rad Rodgers only has 77 votes at an 82% rating, which makes it not exactly popular. Then they have
Graven which is an Early Access title that sits on mixed reviews. It does look awesome, and it has caught my eye before, but it seems to have serious trouble when it comes to gameplay. It might just be me, but shouldn’t stuff be finished before you start working on new titles? Anyway, the other one is called
Bombshell, and I remember it being marketed as some kind of Duke Nukem thing, but with a female protagonist. It was all a bit cringe, and it rests at 60% with 183 votes. So, not the most impressive track record, unfortunately. However, it does show they can make games, but not make them very exciting to play, except for Ghostrunner. We have no idea what they worked on here, though, and they are ranked third place over devs that worked on the game.
This is not the most concerning thing when it comes to Slipgate. While they have one Early Access game in the works currently, their Steam page is filled with upcoming games, Tempest Rising included. They have seven whole games listed there with Steam pages, and most are set to come out soon, or this year. I’m getting shovelware vibes here, which does not fill with me confidence that they truly want to make the best RTS since forever. I would love to be proven wrong, but having the devs scattered on so many projects can’t be good.
What about 2B Games? They have not released anything on Steam yet, but are listed for two games, Tempest Rising and
Warpaws. And wouldn’t you know it! Warpaws is one of the seven games Slipgate is working on. From checking out their website you get greeted by the usual – multi years veterans, and so on, but the studio does not seem to have any shipped games. The best game of the titles they are listing as their devs have worked on is
Seven. While an entertaining game, who knows who and how many worked on that? The rest of the games are everything from poor to mediocre.
Now, I don’t want to come off as an asshole here and say the game is doomed, or anything like that. But, you would think, to revive a semi-dead genre, it would require a little more than being one game out of seven currently in the works on what looks like a Russian shovelware list. I hope to be proven wrong here, I want something epic to play, and from what I have seen it looks great. However, I think my personal hype took a bit hit here. I honestly thought it was made by a dev with only one game in focus, as in a serious attempt at a revival… But I guess we will see.