Excellent new control scheme and features to make the 1994 FPS classic seem relevant today. My only gripe is how the level designers took a little too much liberty with the hacking puzzles and with Cyberspace. I prefer the Tron-like wireframe aesthetic of Cyberspace in the original game. It's completely redone now, and just looks like a generic colorful aeriall shooter.
Higher screen resolutions and the addition of mouselook would have been enough. But there are additional options to explore, like the addition of new missions and mods. Worth playing through yet again.
This game was released in 1996, so as you might have guessed, it was Sierra's answer to Myst. Unlike Myst and similar titles, I don't feel immersed by the 3D-rendered scenes, Sierra's intended selling point. They do not have the same photorealistic quality, and look like they were rendered with "over-the-counter" software. As for the gameplay, it is ruined by the clumsy interface. I couldn't enjoy the scenery, because every few steps, there was another puzzle to solve. Most of the puzzles are of the high-dexterity variety, where you often have to search through bric-a-brac in various workshops to build or repair motors, or assemble quirky gadgets yourself before you could use them to solve another puzzle somewhere else. It is not uncommon to know exactly what you're supposed to do, and then not be able to do it because where you are supposed to click has such a small pixel margin. Sierra had tried to address the "guess where to click" issue by releasing an update that added an option to highlight the cursor in places of interest. That update caused fatal bugs, and so Sierra fixed the bugs and prominently re-released the game as "version 2.0." I admit I completed the game only by using a UHF file. Even then, I constantly had to read and re-read all the hints to see what I was doing wrong, and often backtrack because I misapplied an earlier step. At one point, I had to reload an earlier file because I missed my one chance to capture one of the bad guys, a robotic "workshop assistant" birdman that had gone buggy. All throughout the game, I really had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, save for the main plot: rescue a kidnapped baby from a "dark being" in an alien world. At the risk of spoiling anything, the purpose of each area is to find a key item that is used - you guessed it - to assemble a larger device of some kind for later use. Bottom line, you'll probably enjoy it more if you watch a full playthrough online and then move on to another game.
Epic Megagames was on a roll in the '90s even before Unreal. All of their games were guaranteed to be worth the money. I had already purchased the full versions of Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097 when Tyrian was released, along with Radix, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Extreme Pinball. Out of all these games, Tyrian is the one I spent the most time playing. Since it is now free, I have OpenTyrian on my Caanoo. I have many fond memories of exploring all the levels and using the Carrot ship and attacking with hot dogs, oranges, and bananas. The game had a lot of reply value and plenty of secrets to discover, like the DESTRUCT mini game. I also love the soundtrack. Tyrian 2000 was a necessary evil because the original Tyrian would not run on newer versions of Windows. It added new levels which spun the story line in a cheesy direction. The ship editor is cool, but there is a transparency glitch with one of the built-in ships. The Beer mini-game is only fun if you like very early shooters such as Galaxian. Also, the color palette in the new levels contains a few out-of-range values, so you start seeing rainbows if you play the game with the detail level set to Wild. All having been said, this is definitely worth playing, all the more so because it is free. I hope GOG releases OMF:2097 soon, which also is freeware since 1999.
I played the shareware version of this game in fall 1994 on a shareware compilation CD that I bought for $5. It was love at first sight! The shareware version contains 9 levels, so I got plenty of play out of this before I found the full version for sale at a local retail store. The music is great. The difficulty is just right - challenging at times, but not frustrating like Gradius or Ikaruga. There are just enough powerups to add to the fun, but not too much as to be distracting. The only thing this game might have suffered from was the timing of its launch. Doom was taking the gaming world by storm then, so this is a sleeper hit IMO.
