Tempest Citadel is a strategy game that defies a more detailed genre classification. In many ways it’s a 4X game, and yet it also infuses just enough XCOM elements into the end product that using either as an example of what to expect is ultimately misleading. There’s also a great deal of real-time strategy combat to take into consideration, though battles resolve automatically (by default—you can choose to jump in and micromanage at any point) based on the strategies you come up with beforehand. Other expectations you may have are likely to be similarly subverted. While you deal with numerous factions of varying friendliness, you’re actually given no choice but to crush most of them because this is a surprisingly story-centric game featuring a plot that requires it. That may lead you to an expectation that there’s no replay value, but that’s also not entirely accurate; the combat is fast and difficult and your tactics can make a huge difference, so cranking up the difficulty no doubt leads to a totally different experience. Really, the only thing I can state with total confidence is that I had a surprising amount of fun with Tempest Citadel’s addictive combination of player-friendly gameplay elements.

Of storms and psychopaths

You play as the captain of a ship tricked into answering the call of a faraway alien race. Basically, everyone lied and told you that the mission was one of colonization. It turns out that your home planet of Terra was gifted parts and blueprints to build a spaceship and offered technological advancements in return for their help—your help. Once you arrive, however, you stumble across hostile factions presumably drawn to the planet by the same promise of secrets. Lacking the technology required to return to Terra, you’re left with only one available option: survive until you can leapfrog (and eventually destroy) rival factions and establish your group as the planet’s dominant force.

There’s a surprising amount of text here, though it’s delivered in small enough doses that it avoids being overwhelming. Still, getting a handle on the specific things that are happening and why can occasionally be daunting given how much more advanced the technology is. For example, your ship’s “terraform drive” is stolen early on, but it’s difficult to get a sense of how important it is because that’s made-up technology. Plot happenings can occasionally feel a bit contrived for that reason, though the game makes up for this by shrouding everything in mystery. Put simply, I was so distracted by the apparent absence of whoever called all of these different factions to the same place and the strange weather phenomena that I barely even noticed the contrivances.

You’re given a small number of “senior officers” who act as mouthpieces for the five different job types since usable characters can be frozen, crippled, or killed and are therefore interchangeable. These senior officers all have their own personalities and go through several story-mandated ups and downs, and while I wouldn’t say that I got particularly attached to any of them (with the exception of Aiya, a surprisingly philosophical ship AI also known as “Sparks”), they’re nevertheless a net positive.

Endings and content gating

There are three endings that I’ve discovered, and after some experimentation I’m fairly confident that no more exist. The reason for that is the way Tempest Citadel gates off content; while later developments might seem like the direct result of your actions, those actions are mandated by the story, and further story events only arrive once you play along. You can’t ignore a mission that gets referenced as the reason for a breakdown in your relationship with another faction because failing to accept it means never obtaining any missions beyond it. Things like more characters becoming available to use (which speeds up research and engineering) and sites becoming available to conquer (which provides you with more resources to build new things) are entirely dependent on your story progress, so ignoring a story mission causes your faction to stagnate.

I thought I’d be clever and use this as an opportunity to slowly build up resources to win an “impossible” battle early on, but the result is a loss regardless of whether you won or not, and you don’t want to be wasting time. While you’re not explicitly told this, you’re given ten in-game years to finish the story before the crew stages a mutiny. The only gameplay consequence of this is being locked out of the “true” ending since you’re still calling all of the shots, but being locked out of the true ending’s 30 minutes or so of extra content probably isn’t what you want after around 11 hours of playing. Here’s a quick guide to the endings: defeating the order before taking down all of the other factions gives you the bad ending, defeating all factions after running out of time nets you the okay ending, and besting all factions before the mutiny earns you the true ending.

“Player-friendly”

There are games out there that are actively antagonistic toward the player. You know the types—they disable saving for arbitrary reasons or force you to waste your time sitting through the exact same cutscene after every failure. They’re designed in a way that forces you to deal with constant loading screens, and everything is just designed to make learning how to play as painful an experience as possible. Tempest Citadel’s greatest success is avoiding all of this. Combat takes place on a small map with between 6-16 units on each side, resolves automatically (again, unless you choose to jump in and micromanage), and you can hit the tab key to speed things up even further. You can also save at any time outside of combat, and you can load a quicksave at literally any time. That means that you can quicksave right before combat and quickload the second it becomes obvious that your tactics aren’t panning out. This makes experimenting easy and player-friendly without ever watering down the challenge. I mean, my talent for RTS gameplay is nonexistent, and even I was able to navigate through difficult battles without becoming frustrated. There are a lot of games that need to learn from this.

Like I mentioned before, there are five different job types: soldiers, scavengers, engineers, researchers, and medics. Soldiers are the best combat units, but it’s also important to bring scavengers into combat to more easily obtain resources during the post-battle digging minigame. Medics are also crucial, as characters who are crippled or killed by their injuries can be saved with a “medic point” after combat, and you receive one point per medic present. I’m not entirely certain what the value of bringing researchers and engineers into combat is because the underlying systems are more complex than the simple tutorial and help section explanations would lead you to believe, but I suspect that they receive bonuses based on what scavengers unearth.

Your starting characters are randomized from a large pool, and each comes with a unique portrait and nickname. Many also have special traits that make them uniquely suited to certain tasks, so it’s easy to become attached to them in the same way you sometimes develop a fondness for random characters in XCOM. They may not have stories like the senior officers, but these are the people you’re making stories with in combat. There’s also a level-up system in place here, with characters obtaining perks at certain level thresholds that further increase their job and combat abilities.

Strategery

Then there are the tactics, which are an example of complexity arising from simplicity. Before combat, you can separate your units into groups and provide each with different instructions for how to approach, how to attack, and who to target. There are three approach styles you can select from: a cautious one that maintains distance, an aggressive one that causes units to run up close to enemies, and a balanced one that’s midway between the two. You also have three choices for attacking: an assault option that causes units to focus on area of effect attacks, a focused option that causes units to prioritize taking out enemies one at a time, and another balanced option that’s halfway between the two. As for targeting, options range from attacking the nearest enemy to the one with the most or least HP or attack strength. On top of that, there are some formation options that’ll be familiar to anyone comfortable with Infinity Engine games. You might think that these options don’t actually do much because of their relative simplicity, but you’d be dead wrong; I found myself regularly going up against enemies with a greater “threat” level (basically a quick way of determining overall strength) and getting massacred, only to reload and tear through them like tissue paper with different tactics. Enemies with explosives are best engaged in close quarters with something like a machine gun or minigun to avoid losing multiple characters to area of effect damage, enemies armed with guns are often best picked off from afar by snipers, and so on.

Each fight ends up feeling like a kind of mini-puzzle as you figure out which specific combination is best suited to the circumstances, and the ability to quickly save and load to experiment with different tactics and weapon loadouts makes this the highlight of the game (which is good, because there’s a lot of combat). You can overcome seemingly impossible odds with clever planning and the right kind of weapons, and doing so never ceases to be rewarding. Plus, traveling to spots to fight progresses time, so all of your research projects that eventually unlock flying monster units and drones and body augmentations to restore the combat functionality of crippled units is continuing on in the background and benefiting from the resources you bring back. These things provide you with even more options to experiment with, so your own units rapidly become more versatile right as enemies begin to put up a real challenge. Your widening number of combat options keeps the frequent combat encounters from ever becoming stale.

Good graphics and music with two caveats

Visually, this game looks incredibly pleasant. Your base is surrounded by clouds that billow and change colors as time passes, and all of the character portraits are well done so long as you avoid body augmentation. I respect the developer for having each character’s portrait change depending on the kind of augmentations they receive (so a character who has synthetic eyes installed will have that reflected in their portrait), and I can’t even imagine how much work went into this given the large pool of possible characters, but many of these augmentations simply don’t mesh with the art style. In some cases, this means the more realistic-looking character portraits have black lines drawn around their faces, and it looks more like they fell asleep next to a mischievous Sharpie-wielding friend than anything remotely robotic. The other problem I have with the graphics is the amount of lightning that occurs during combat maps; these storms are important to the game in a multitude of ways, but the flashing can really start to become migraine-inducing on the darker maps. Apart from those two things, though, the visuals are thoroughly pleasant, and it ran surprisingly well even on my aging 6870.

Then there’s the music, which I don’t actually have anything negative to say about. It’s difficult to be sure if if it’s memorable because of its quality or because of its repetition, but I somehow never became tired of it. Part of this boils down to its similarity to numerous other things that I found endlessly amusing. For example, the post-combat song uses a synth guitar and strings in much the same way as the animated X-Men cartoon’s intro (for the first four seasons before they changed it to a real guitar, at least). It’s even in the same key. Another song starts with a muted electric guitar, and it always sounds like the beginning of Every Breath You Take. These aren’t negative comments, mind you, and both of them are distinct enough to be their own thing, but there were enough similarities to capture my attention and kick me right in the childhood. In a good way.

*A Steam review key for Tempest Citadel was provided for the purpose of this review

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