Written by Jonathan Lee, September 8, 2016, at 12:30 p.m.
In 1995, developed by World Tree Games and published by Epic Games (Yes, the makers of the Unreal Engine), Tyrian 2000 was a vertical shooter where you took off in your spaceship, fought an evil corporation, and blasted your way through planets of bullet-hell. And it was glorious fun!
Evil, corporate-owned space ships? Shoot’em down! Giant mining craft doing nothing wrong but floating your way? Tear them apart! Giant spikes coming out of the wall because who-the-heck-knows? Destroy them!
Planetary exodus and everyone’s fleeing? Blast them anyways because you want money! Madness-inducing Cthulhu-ish-Crab-Xenomorph Beast Boss Creature? Well, since you can’t run away from it—KILL IT!!
And there were all the hidden goodies and secret ships, too. You could even pilot a flying carrot and blow enemies up with high-explosive hot dogs, banana bombs, and orbital drone oranges!
The Tyrian 2000 Story
You play as Trent Hawkins. A space engineer who’s gone to a planet called Tyrian for a terraforming survey assignment. But there’s a secret that Tyrian holds that will bring chaos to the planet and its surrounding sectors: Gravitium, an ore mineral that can control and defy gravity.
In what seems like a random attack, Trent’s lizard-like alien buddy, Buce, is killed because he knew of the strange mineral. Soon, Trent finds out that the attack was the work of none other than the evil MicroSol Corporation.
And so Trent sets off to dodge MicroSol while reaching out to the free worlds to find help and get to the bottom of the whole Gravitium case.
Through five episodes with missions taking you through all sorts of worlds and asteroid fields, you’re going to be blazing through plenty of baddies and taking on various big bosses. And they’re not all ships.
Sure there’s your big bad space ship, and then you have maybe a runaway hover train that’s lobbing a gazillion bullets at you, but you’ll also run into sentient robot space rocks, giant spider-crab-Lovecraftian abominations, and a strange construction lifter with three glowing balls.
Gameplay
It’s your usual scrolling-background vertical shooter. You zoom around, you dodge enemy fire, you shoot down your foes, and you tackle humongous bosses. What makes it stand apart is the ability to customize your ship before each mission, the variety of ships (and hidden ships!), and the amount of story that you can get out of this game by picking up the datacubes strewn about in each level. It makes for a game that engages you beyond just the usual joys of a bullet hell scrolling shooter.
Weapon-wise, you have your front guns that shoot straight-ahead. You have your rear-weapons that can shoot diagonally, sideways, or a forwards as well. To make things more fun, you can also purchase two “sidekicks” that add their own firepower to your ship, providing even more bullets-galore goodness!
And you don’t just die from getting hit once or twice. You have shields and armor. You can take hits because you’re going to need to—this game doesn’t like you going through levels unscathed! Your damage tolerance can be upgraded by purchasing better ships and shields. And you’ll have to upgrade your generator too to keep your weapons firing at optimal rates. For its time, Tyrian 2000 had a lot that its peers didn’t have.
Final Thoughts
Tyrian 2000 was a very fun game back when I first played it, and it’s still a fun little distraction today. It’s an entertaining reminder of when PC Gaming was still young, when shareware was still the “thing”, and you were still getting demo CDs with your favorite gaming magazines.
And maybe… it’s a reminder of how some of our biggest names in game developers and publishers today came from humble beginnings.
Was Tyrian the best scrolling shooter of its time? Probably not. But it didn’t need to be. It was made fun in all the right places, adding some extras here and there, and that’s how a game makes itself special and memorable.
You can find Tyrian 2000 for free right now on GOG.com! Go grab it!
