Tyrian 2000

I had a blast reliving the glory days and blasting enemies out of the sky! An absolute classic game with an awesome soundtrack.

This is a top-down vertical space shooter that has good writing, good soundtrack, an impressive source port, comes with so much guns that it might as well be classified as "Texas: The Game", gives you a multitude of defense options so that you don't die in one hit, has an arcade mode as well as a story mode, as well as support for both manual and automatic saves. And it's free.

This is one of the games I truly loved as child (I played shareware version of Tyrian many years ago) and I truly love it even now. It's amazing how game so rich in content: lots of weapons, ships, mini-games, different game modes, episodes of story mode and bonuses, can be also FREE. I will forever remember the first time I discovered carrot ship, hot dog weapons and some other stuff I don't want to spoil for everyone :-) If you want to jump into SHMUP genre, or if you are a fan of it but you are looking for something great, you MUST play Tyrian.

I was looking for an arcade space shooting game and this one is terrific. It is so much better than some of the other paid alternatives. The steps by 'alejandronova' made it run much smoother as well.

A great vertical scroller. Its got some RPG elements like story and the ability to get stronger over time. Its fun to keep upgrading your ship and finding out which combination of weapons work out best. Its got some unique elements that takes some trial-and-error to work out, like how the energy bar relates to the shield and armor, or how the money system and weapon power levels work. On the other hand, the graphics are very choppy and disappointing especially for its time when it came out in 1999 (even for its time, there were much better looking 2D games). The controls are a bit floatly, where it seems like there's a bit of a delay after pressing a key for the ship to stop moving in that direction. These things are easily overlooked since the game is just fun and fast-paced, and not require any big time commitments.