Tempest Rising's elusive third faction will get its own singleplayer campaign as a paid expansion, and you can play the demo right now

When the excellent Command & Conquer successor Tempest Rising released last year, it featured three factions battling for supremacy across a war-torn future Earth. But only two of those factions—the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty—were playable with their own singleplayer campaigns. The third faction, the mysterious Veti, were wholly computer controlled.

Developer Slipgate Ironworks has always said the Veti would be made playable at some point. Indeed, it has been testing the faction's multiplayer integration for some time. But the question of whether the Veti would receive any singleplayer missions has remained unanswered, until now. It turns out the Veti will be getting their own campaign, but you will have to pay extra to play it, as it's arriving in the form of an expansion.

The Veti's Wrath sees you play as Tempest Rising's third faction across 11 new campaign missions—the same size as the campaigns for both the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty. Slipgate doesn't provide many specifics about how the campaign will pan out, but it does say that the early campaign missions "will serve as a tutorial for the faction" in a similar vein to the campaigns featured in the base game.

The Veti are very different from the other two factions, an ancient race that has slumbered beneath the Earth for centuries, boasting a distinctly Ancient Egyptian aesthetic. This carries through to how they play too. Conversion and sacrifice are two major themes of the Veti's playstyle, with the faction able to raise dead enemy soldiers as "enlightened", which can then be spent as a resource to upgrade structures and provide other benefits.

While the full release won't be happening until later this year, you can also play a snippet of the campaign right now via the Tempest Rising demo. This includes the first two Veti missions, plus the first two missions for both the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty. It's also worth noting that, while you'll have to pay to play the Veti in singleplayer, they will be available as a multiplayer faction in the base game at no extra cost.

If you're an RTS fan and missed out on Tempest Rising when it launched last year, I'd strongly recommend you give it a whirl. As I explained in my Tempest Rising Review. It's a genuinely great riff on the classic C&C formula, and one of the few RTS games of recent years that really understands the importance of a strong single-player offering. It's also 30% off this weekend, meaning you can grab it for $27 (£21). That discount ends tomorrow.