Reply To: First impressions

[rnlf]

#1505

The shield regenerates when you have full energy. So if you make sure to always get the best generator, you can also fire and still recharge your shield.

I tried using your QWE input scheme, but sadly my trusty old Cherry keyboard doesn’t seem to have reliable four-key rollover and jams when I use fire, left+right sidekick and try to move backwards at the same time (which is basically all the time when you just keep all three fire buttons down).

I changed to Alt+Z+X and that works reasonable well.

As for the gameplay, after the first level I thought the game was at least as good as Raptor, but that opinion changed as I went through episode one. It’s often just a ton of enemies thrown at you, without much thought. One level near the end features basically 20s of mostly huge missilies filling the screen.

The boss fights have been mostly boring to me so far. There have been two possible outcomes for me: Either the boss moves and hits my ship, pushes it around and destroys it, or the boss doesn’t push my ship around and their weapons are mostly useless.

Then there is the thing with the Bonus levels… I must say I really dislike them. The normal Bonus levels are okay I guess, but still kill every bit of immersion. In those you just shoot a ton of stuff for extra money.

The other kind though… It almost ruins the game for me. You suddenly get a 4-screen long text explaining to you how the beer of some space dude was stolen and that you have to recover it. Then you get a completely different ship with a horribly weak weapon and start shooting ships and collecting beer glasses, all while southern German brass music plays in the background.

I mean, wtf? You can skip this bonus level, but man. I think they tried to be funny but it kills every single bit of the narrative and immersion they had built up.

BTW, I tried the “Wild Game Detail” mode and I think all it adds on top of the “Pentium” mode is a quite okay looking but useless and destracting shadow-wave effect on the background.

I also have a problem with some of the other design things. For example, there’s one level on a lava planet. The lava is obviously glowing hot and the hot hair is refracting the light and all. But still for some reason you get headlights in this level and cannot see much outside of their range.

And another thing: It looks cool that there are level parts that your ship goes below, but so do your bullets. But sometimes there’s stuff on those floating islands which explodes despite you having shot below their island… a bit weird, eh?

The enemies are a bit generic sometimes, I feel. And the same type of enemy ship seems to be used with wildly different attacks. There are two very small ships that sometimes just fly across the screen. But later on they stop and produce a truckload of bullets. This makes the enemies much less memorable than in Raptor.

Also the music is quite repetetive, I think. I don’t remember thiking that when I last played Raptor, which has a much better sound theme overall.

I don’t think Tyrian is a bad game, but Raptor has many advantages compared to it.