Tl;dr hesitant yes for campaign fans on sale if you enjoyed command and conquer, but it's pretty rough and the story is bad, I don't think anything here will grip you enough to carry on and play versus
I got Tempest Rising from humble choice, not exactly free but not full price. So far I've played a little of the GDF and all of the Dynasty campaign, with little interest in playing versus. The gameplay is a straightforward command and conquer style RTS with it's own takes here and there and some bits being more modern. You have a variety of units with different tools, and the two primary factions feel distinct from one another. The game to me didn't seem to require extreme micro, but you still want to help seperaate your troops to avoid AOE, and you can get far more effectiveness out of your troops by targeting the right enemies effectively, as there are a number of different damage types units use and can be resistant to, along with debuffs and the like. Overall I felt the gameplay didn't wow me with anything new, but it never truly disappointed me the way many other modern RTS have tried, I'd rather this functional, well designed game than some of the more experimental failed RTS, or worse, a blizzard clone.
The campaign, what there is of it, is pretty good, it's a classic RTS campaign experience that will make you feel like the old command and conquer games, but it has two problems, one it's kinda short, and two it's... sparse. Despite having dialogue options that allow you to ask additional questions, somehow the lore felt less clear and deep than the older command and conquer games with their linear campaigns and straightforward cutscenes, characters and factions are introduced or hinted at to have depth then.... it doesn't appear. For an example, in one mission, you are put alongside two other Dynasty commanders, one of whom has a "spotless record" that is supsicious, but throughout the mission this never ends up mattering, at the end, you "earned the loyalty of both commanders" but neither ever shows up again, when you reach the end of the "final" mission, you get another briefing as though there's one more mission, but don't get any actual ending, the game just plays credits mid story as if there had been a climax, and in terms of gameplay, you had a difficult mission, but in the story your mission was at best, a penultimate one, it resolves nothing at all. The story, despite money being spent on fancy face animations and a little dialogue menu and all this for presentation, functionally does not exist, your missions feel 100% disconnected from one another and nothing is resolved or revealed, an entire conspiracy supposedly so powerful it envelops the entire world happens OFF SCREEN with you never combatting or talking to even a single member of the conspiracy. You do get to have some special upgrades and the like unlocked between missions to help you customize your forces, this is a cool system, fairly simple but it works fine and helps you feel like you are more advanced even when a mission doesn't give you an obvious new unit or toy to play with.
