
Your ship comes equipped with four weapons systems: a Front weapon, a Rear weapon, and a pair of “sidekicks” – small independent ships that float alongside you.
Tyrian 2000 equipment gone from shop upgrade#
The real attraction of the gameplay is the amount of customization afforded to you: between stages in Tyrian‘s “full game”, you’ll visit a shop where you can replace or upgrade your ship’s equipment. Between your shields and armor, your ship can take so much damage that despite its’ large hitbox, even the the harder difficulty settings the game are still fairly easy. Tyrian‘s gameplay is significantly slower than most modern vertical shooters, and the fact that your ship has both shields (which regenerate with time) and armor (which can be recovered through pickups) makes it far more forgiving than many shooters. The game also features some frequent transparency work, used to render translucent clouds and vapor trails, colored filters, or dark stages. While the hand-drawn graphics are relatively low-resolution, they have aged fairly well, especially when compared with the early-CG-rendered style that was in vogue at the time. You’ll pilot your ship through a wide variety of vertically-scrolling, parallax-rendered environments. Set in a faraway star sector, Tyrian is a fairly generic sci-fi-themed shooter on the surface. Among these is Tyrian, a game that derives a unique charm by offering a huge amount of both customization options for your ship and bonus content in a technically solid game that at no point takes itself completely seriously. At the same time that computer gaming was taking its first faltering steps into the then-unexplored realm of 3D, some truly fantastic 2D games were released.

The mid-90s were an interesting time in computer gaming.
