Tyrian (OpenTyrian v2.1.20221123)

[DF]

I need to start writing down when I start thinking of games to play. When did whim strike me this time?

I have no idea what my run time was on this, but it took a good few hours to get to the end.

What is Tyrian?

It's a vertical scrolling shoot 'em up game from 1995. It's pretty old, but it's still good! It was never ported away from PC, but there were ports for the Nintendo GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance in the works at some point that never saw a full release.

What is OpenTyrian?

Here it is.[github.com] It's an open-source port of the original game. You don't need to run DOSBOX to get the game to work with this! This was actually available in the Discover Store on the Steam Deck, so that was easy installation.

There's another version of OpenTyrian for Tyrian 2000, the original game's updated rerelease, too.[github.com]

Setting

It's the far, far, far far far future. In the year 20,031, you're a pilot that unfortunately gets dragged into a nearly endless war as the Microsol gigacorporation makes its moves to conquer the galaxy. While you aren't the only person standing against them, it's hard to ignore the fact that you're the only one trying not to get crushed, shot, or vaporized in the sky! Constantly!

You'll visit a variety of planets over the course of your journey. From a planet with giant floating islands to industrial worlds to a lush forested planet with dragons bigger than your ship to diving into the core of another world, you'll see quite a few different sights!

Gameplay

Like most any vertical scrolling shoot 'em up game, the screen automatically scrolls, bringing in waves of enemies from all sides of the screen. You move your ship around, blasting foes and picking up items, then you likely fight a boss at the end of the level. Destroying it lets you go on to the next. Pretty basic, right?

In this game, there's a shop before each level. Using your money built up from destroying enemies and picking up coins or gems they may leave behind, you can trade out your old gear for something new and hopefully better! You have a ship body, forward and rear guns, a shield, a generator, and two sidekicks. You can trade in your old gear at full value, so you lose nothing by experimenting. Each planet offers a different selection of goods, so you may come across something rare...or sell off something rare and need to wait to see it again. Your front and rear guns have a Power Level stat that goes up to 11, and every additional level over 1 changes the weapon in some way. It may fire faster, fire more projectiles in one go, start spreading, and so on. A significant portion of your funds will go towards your guns. Sidekicks don't have a Power Level setting, but there are two flavors: One fires with your ship and has no ammo cost, another has an ammo cost and only fires when you press its button. Ammo thankfully regenerates slowly while playing, so alpha striking won't leave you high and dry forever.

But watch out for your power use! The generator constantly produces energy that powers everything else, but it's still possible to have a loadout that eats more than the generator produces. At least when you're in the shop, you'll see a preview of all of your weapons firing at once to see how the generator holds up. You may need to trade out some weapons or even scale them back to avoid running dry since if the generator is constantly bottomed-out, that also means your shields aren't going to regenerate.

Sometimes enemies will leave behind things when they're destroyed. They might be coins or gems or fruit(?!) that give money when collected. Sometimes there are grey pods that power up your front or rear guns. And rarely, there'll be a big orange sphere that takes you to a secret level, but how do you get those to appear? Some enemies will drop glowing cubes, and these Data boxes can be read after you complete the level. They might be related to the plot happening...or they might be fluff like in-universe advertising or even out-of-universe ads!

Very rarely, you get the choice of two stages to play next. These are just forks in the road, so you can't do one first and then the second. The game is very linear, so even though there's a map screen that shows the various planets in the area, you're not able to actually pick from them. It's just window dressing.

There are four Episodes in the original game, and the fourth is very long. At least stages tend to be relatively short, few minute affairs.

Gameplay Modes, Minigames, and Character Classes

There's a Full Game that's the standard four Episode jaunt through the galaxy. There's also a two-player mode that, from what I've read, can either have two ships playing simultaneously or they can combine so one player controls steering and the other can freely gun. Sounds neat!

There's also an Arcade Mode that changes quite a few things about the game:

You no longer have a shop between stages. Instead, front and rear guns and sidekicks can be collected in the stages in the form of floating bubbles from some defeated enemies. You also seem to power up your weapons by collecting the purple/gray blank bubbles that some enemies drop. The route you take through the game is predetermined, so while you didn't have many opportunities to see forked paths, you don't even get that option here. And you also have multiple lives. If you get destroyed, your weapons drop in power when you respawn. If you totally run out of lives, you're kicked back to the shop as if you never played the level.

There are also hidden Super Tyrian and Super Arcade modes that I didn't mess with. Super Tyrian is activated by typing ENGAGE on the title screen. This sets the difficulty to maximum, and you're stuck in a special ship with an unchanging weapon...and it's up to you to figure out the button combinations to get more! Super Arcade also puts you in a unique ship, but the bubbles enemies release now grant specific weapons depending on the center color of the bubble.

There are a couple of optional minigames during the course of Full Game. One has you fending off enemies that now bounce around the screen while you try to collect as much ale as you can using a fast-firing yet weak weapon. Another was kind of the same thing, but there was some kind of barrier involved.

Microtransactions/Add-On Content

There's nothing here.

That said, Tyrian 2000 adds on a fifth episode that's extremely short plus a couple of new enemies and equipment, but these weren't by the original developers or artists, so they might stick out. It's up to you if you want to stick with the original or the rerelease, of course.

How I Played

When it came to ships, shields, and generators, I just bought the most expensive when it showed up. For weapons, I experimented quite a bit, but I don't think I really came up with a favorite loadout. I really wanted to like the Guided Bombs/Guided Heavy Bombs for some reason, even though they tracked their own targets instead of what I wanted to kill sometimes.

I had plans to finish Full Game and then Arcade, but I found Arcade considerably harder than the regular game! There isn't a difficulty selection, so I'm not sure if it's one of the default three or its own flavor. I got as far as Fleet in Episode 3 before I called it quits. Trying to dodge undesirable weapons on top of everything else trying to kill you was a bit much, and dying powering down your weapons means it's easy to get into a loop of death because your guns can't kill anything fast enough.

Controls

I used a controller for this. Weirdly, I couldn't change the keybinds, but I don't know if it was some interface issue with having a controller connected to the Deck that is a controller itself or what. The Dpad or stick moves your ship around the screen. A button fires both forward and rear weapons, X and Y fire just your sidekicks. Pause with RB, bring up the options menu with LB. Some types of rear gun have an alternate firing mode, like Sonic Wave normally shooting to the sides, but you can press B to have it fire its waves in a cone pattern in front of you instead.

You can also play with just a keyboard or just a mouse if you'd prefer. Weirdly, running the game through Steam prevented most keyboard entry, meaning no putting in my name for the high score table or naming saves.

Some ships have 'twiddle' special moves triggered by inputting certain directions and pressing the fire key. These are quite important in Super Tyrian mode since you have a pitiful weapon and need to summon better ones with these twiddles...but you won't find any help for how to do them in the game!

Difficulty

There are three initial difficulty levels, Easy, Normal, and Hard. I finished Episode 1 on Hard, and plenty of enemies fired more often or more enemies were present as you'd expect. Tyrian, the first stage, even was set to dark mode with the cone of vision in front of you. There is also Suicide, Impossible, and Lord of the Game difficulties beyond Hard. I assume they add more enemies and more bullets. Your difficulty is set once you start the game, so no changing it if things get too hairy.

I played on Normal difficulty, and I had a bit of trouble with some stages. Episode 2's starting stage, Torm, was actually a wall for me for a while! I noticed quite a few bosses (Torm's especially) like to ram your ship, and you're almost guaranteed to die if that happens since you take damage so quickly that you can't get pushed out of the boss' sprite in time. Your experience naturally will vary based on your skills but also what equipment your ship carries.

Saving

There is a temporary automatic save after every level, but you have to save manually otherwise. One player and two player modes have their own sections, too. The game only updates the shop when you actually finish the current level, so there's no harm in saving and quitting when frustrations run high.

There is also a New Game Plus feature. When you finish the last stage of Episode 4, "Nose Drip" (it makes sense with context), you can start back in Episode 1...and you might even get a secret ship and guns in the process!

Graphics

Everything has a crisp pixel style from the stage terrain to the ships and shots. OpenTyrian even has options to upscale the graphics, and there are options for quality, though I figure most hardware could handle Pentium-level quality by now.

There also is a setting for how fast the game runs. Is the game too hard for you? You can slow it down by going Slow or Slower. Not enough? Turn on Slug Mode! Or if you want a challenge, you can step up the speed to Turbo to make the game run faster.

There are occasional 'cutscenes' that are text over top of an image between stages. One is of a particularly graphic decapitated head mounted on a spike. There's also one full motion video scene that's in Episode 1 for some reason. Looks straight out of a fancy screensaver from around that era.

On the UI side, the information is mostly on the right side of your screen. You have a meter for your front gun and rear gun, an indicator for your rear gun firing normally or not, the name of the current level, and a large red/orange/yellow bar for your generator. There's a blue bar for your shield and a red line showing maximum shield level. The gold bar is your armor. There's also a bar on the bottom of the screen for status updates.

When you're at critical armor, the top and bottom of the play field flash while a klaxon constantly blares.

Audio

There's no voices other than your computer pointing out danger, getting datacubes, or the like.

And here's the soundtrack link.[alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com] Hey, Alexander Brandon! He did music for Deus Ex! The music's pretty good. I liked the Savara theme ("Savara, the return") mostly because starting the stage with a barrage of missiles flying all over the screen makes a hell of an impact! There's even a jukebox option with a neat animation, but it doesn't react to the music.

Stability

I had one crash. I died at the same time as killing a boss, and the game continued for a few moments before it didn't know what to do and crashed on me.

Replay Value

There is some here. On one hand, you obviously have trying to find secret levels and/or reading a guide and then trying to trigger them, you have going through the game with different loadouts of weapons, you have Arcade and Super Tyrian and Super Arcade modes...and there's a scoreboard! Can you beat your highest score?

What Worked For Me

Free to try
I really liked that buying equipment in the shop didn't permanently cost anything and let you sell back to the shop at 100% of value instead of depreciating or whatever. It can be useful just to up the power on guns to see what they look like, too.

A pretty big variety
There are a lot of weapons, both front and rear to try out, to say nothing of sidekicks, too! The only bad thing is the very limited selection before each stage. Some stages don't even have shops at all, just the item you already have so you can tune the Power Level setting.

Secrets to be found
Tyrian is already a pretty long game, but there are quite a few secret levels to go through if you figure out or look up how to get to them. Even the opening stage has three possible secret levels!

What I Didn't Like

No rebinds?
This is probably something I'm not doing correctly, but the default bindings for controller are just okay. Trying to use sidekicks bound to X and Y while firing with A was a bit tricky, but I didn't have to worry if I had option-style sidekicks that fired with my main guns instead of subweapon-style ones with ammo counts.

Crash into me
It's pretty annoying to die to the boss of a pretty grueling stage not because of their shots, but because the boss just rammed you and due to the way damage works in this game, you pretty much instantly die. Of course, I admit this is all on me for not being wary and getting the hell out of the way beforehand! There may be a reason why you have rear guns that fire sideways...

Verdict - 4/5

This one is a really good shmup. Sure, it's pushing 30 now, but it's aged pretty well. It might be a little complex what with needing to buy weapons, try out different things, power them up, then there's the whole generator situation, but I think it nails the gameplay part of shmups quite well. This can keep you entertained for a while, and the admission cost of 'free' is a definite plus. Give it a try!