I have to do my best to remove my Nostalgia Googles when talking about this game as it was one of the first games I got to play on the PC and in DOS. For starters there are a few things that set Tyrian apart from other similar games. The first is that it has a story! What a story in a vertical-shooter? Sure why not! Before each mission in the game you can check your Data Cubes that contain the basic plot of the game and some contain hints as to what you can expect in the next level, to make things even more interesting, some Data Cubes are hidden in the levels, some are rather tricky to find. But besides story a few of the Cubes are joke cubes that are in-game spam and advertisement, they'll get a giggle or chuckle out of you at least once. The second thing that's unique to Tyrian is the fact that almost every ship can pull off special moves (called Super Weapon Twiddles) that have to be input similar to combo moves in fighting games, eg. to get temporary Invulnerability on one of the first ships you need to press Down, Up, Down, Hold Fire, Up, this will make you temporary Invulnerable BUT at the price of draining all your Shields (Shield recharges after a while but without it you are much more vulnerable) Since the game can be played with both the mouse and keyboard mouse users can sometimes accidentally pull off a Twiddle. But despite that I do recommend playing with a mouse as it makes dodging enemy ships and fire much easier and yes you will need it for some harder parts of the game. Tyrian also has a surprising amount of replayability: The first part of it comes from the wide variety of wepons: Front Gun, Rear Gun, and two 'Sidekicks', side mounted guns that generally(but not always) use Ammo while Front and Rear use Power generated by your ships generator. It's fun to experiment with different gun combinations on different playthroughs of the game, once you finish a game you get to keep the ship, guns and money you collected on your previous playthrough. The other part comes from the game having a TON of hidden pickups and secrets, there are several Secret Levels, some of which are very hard to unlock. Personally I haven't tried the Ship Editor tool, but from custom ships that I'v seen on the Internet it seems to give you some decent freedom in creating a fun lookign ship. The only thing I can say at the end is that if Tyrian wasn't free, it would be a 5.99$ game on GoG's catalogue and like most GoG games it would be well worth much more then that. If you love oldschool vertical-shooters you should definitely give Tyrian a try, you won't regret it.
