I played this for game club this month, and it’s getting me into shoot-em-ups for the first time!

Made by a small team, Tyrian really took off when it got the attention of Epic MegaGames. With more staff to finish and polish it off, it became a big shareware success. Updated later to add an extra episode, then again for the Tyrian 2000 release, it was then released as freeware when their second publisher went under.

The developers make no secret that they were inspired by Compile’s Zanac. Compile shmups’ distinctive features are their variety of weapons and their varying injection of plot, characters, and worldbuilding. Tyrian takes these two aspects and turns them all the way up, with a highly involved plot mostly delivered via optional in-world text monologues between missions, and a huge range of weapons that you can freely swap between in the shop menu (and even more customisation in the arcade mode).

The story… well, I found it hard to follow but it involves hotshot rogue pilot Trent Hawkins and his many sorties in his advanced scout ship, often against the greedy and ruthless MicroSol corporation. The plot takes you all over the place, back and forth, often being coerced or manipulated by various factions. The tone is also all over the place, veering between grim and parodic. Episode 4 is much shorter than the others, and 5 (added with the 2000 release) is essentially a piss-take. What the framing is there to do, though, is take you to many locales with a nicely varied roster of enemy ships, steampunk blimps, dragons, biological horrors, and sometimes abstract shapes or flying noses. And as far as that goes it works just fine.

My favourite bit was the shop system; scoring well and picking up coins/gems/fruit/etc will let you gradually upgrade your parts, changing your armaments and defences up to suit your liking, or the situation. It’s not perfect: it can feel unbalanced at times, especially given the length of the full campaign which will leave you with hundreds of thousands left over towards the end. It can also require trial and error customisation, not to mention that every inter-mission shop screen has a different selection of parts, which can lock you out of favoured options if you experiment or can’t afford them at the time. Still, I liked how broad it was and how easy they made it to swap around with no penalty for exchanging parts.

Yes, this thing is big in scope and messy in consistency. But playing the game itself is fun, sometimes breezy and sometimes challenging but often satisfying. And there’s so much content: five episodes with maybe a dozen missions each on average, plus the other modes like arcade and all the minigames. And it’s free! It’s still a DOS game under the hood but you can easily get it with an accessible wrapper, so it’s fairly trivial to give it a go. You just might find yourself blasting a rainbow of orbs and lasers before long.