Games like Command & Conquer in 2026
Where to get the C&C feeling now: the remasters and the open-sourced originals, two free re-implementations, the new game that finally nailed it, what is coming next — and where a browser RTS like Steel Tide fits.
Command & Conquer taught a generation what a real-time strategy game feels like: a sidebar you build from, harvesters trundling out to the Tiberium field, a base that grows outward one power plant at a time, and a superweapon timer at the top of the screen that everybody is watching. The last mainline release was 2010. The feeling never went anywhere, and in 2026 there are more ways to get it than there were a decade ago.
Here they are, checked in September 2026, with Steel Tide at the end held to the same standard.
The originals, properly
Command & Conquer Remastered Collection (June 2020) is Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert with redrawn art, the original music re-recorded, and a switch that flips back to the 1995 pixels mid-game. EA released the remasters' source code alongside it so the modding scene could build on them.
Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection came to Steam in March 2024 with the whole series and, at the community's request, the level editors. If you want Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, Generals and the rest in one place, this is the place.
The source code itself. In February 2025 EA open-sourced the original Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Generals, Zero Hour and Renegade. For a franchise whose fans have kept it alive through mods for twenty-five years, that is the most important C&C release of the decade, even though it is not a game.
The free ones
OpenRA is an open-source re-implementation of the classic engine — Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn and Dune 2000 fully playable, Tiberian Sun in development — with modern controls, replays and an observer mode, on Windows, macOS, Linux and FreeBSD. The original assets were released for free long ago, so OpenRA costs nothing and plays like the games you remember with the rough edges filed off.
Chrono Divide is Red Alert 2 running in a web browser. It re-implements the original engine against the original game's files, which you supply yourself, and it has cross-platform multiplayer on the original maps with a ranked ladder. One developer, still in beta, and a genuinely astonishing thing to see load in a tab.
The new one
Tempest Rising (April 2025) is the game this post exists for. Slipgate Ironworks and 2B Games, published by 3D Realms and Knights Peak, on Unreal Engine 5: two factions with a harvester economy and a sidebar, a campaign with the right kind of swagger, and a third faction, the Veti, added for single-player. It holds 87% positive across nearly twelve thousand Steam reviews and was nominated for Best Sim/Strategy at The Game Awards 2025. If you stopped playing RTS when Westwood closed, this is the reason to come back.
On the horizon
Two C&C-shaped games were on the 2026 release calendar when we checked: D.O.R.F. Real-Time Strategic Conflict, with retro sprites and LAN multiplayer, and Global Conflagration, with three asymmetrical factions. Neither had a firm date. Wishlist, do not pre-order.
On a phone
Command & Conquer: Rivals (December 2018) is still on the App Store, still free-to-play with purchases, and still a one-lane, one-minute version of the idea rather than the idea itself. It is fine. It is not what you came here for.
Where Steel Tide fits
Steel Tide has the sidebar. It has a base that grows one power plant at a time, and a power deficit that slows everything down until you fix it. It has a nuclear silo with a timer everyone watches, and — a thing C&C never had — a point-defence building that can shoot the warhead down. It has thirty-two units across land, sea and air on a single counter table, so a Mammoth-sized tank is beaten by the right missile rather than by a bigger tank.
Where it departs from Westwood: there are no harvesters. Metal comes from extractors placed on deposits, so expanding means claiming ground rather than sending trucks, and the only builder is an Engineer you have to keep alive. That is the Total Annihilation half of its parentage, and we wrote about it separately.
And it runs in a browser, free, with no install and no account, with a dedicated server you can put up in one command. If Tempest Rising is what you want and your machine cannot run Unreal Engine 5, this is what you can play in the meantime.