Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• It always seems a bit unfair when ya play a shooter and ya have to kill endless numbers of enemies, while being super limited in ships yourself.  Why can't the good guys ever use their resources to construct some sort of assembly line for Good Guy Ships, and fight fire with fire?  Z0rly's Return to Tyrian examines this clever notion, evening up the battlefield by giving the player a near endless horde of ships.

  Return to Tyrian's music tracks are quite good, they have a neat ethereal quality and set the space shooter mood nicely.  The synths match up well to the original's instrumentation, nice work with 'em!  The visuals are solid, very evocative of the original Tyrian's aesthetic, which as a shooter that was primarily on early PCs has a fairly unique style.  The stage backgrounds are interesting and well-done, but unfortunately don't seem to have much impact on gameplay and can add a lot of visual confusion when there's already so many ships and projectiles filling the screen.  And all these overlapping sprites lead to the core issue I have with this entry:

  It's hard to know what the heck is going on!  The moment you start your first level, there's an immediate difficulty in understanding how to play, let alone play well.  A little bit of tutorialization at the start of gameplay, at the very least showing the controls again, would go a long way.

  Sadly the controls are not ideal, feeling fairly cumbersome given the strategies that seem to work best.  The player is generally reliant on holding units in place and setting up shields to keep them alive, and the auto spam of bullets will let the player ships win out.  But if enemy forces get a good start / build up in mass, there's often no possible way to recover.  Having some form of screen reset, such as a limited bomb ability, would be a nice way to allow players to salvage bad scenarios.

  Return to Tyrien is rough and fairly difficult to play, which is a bummer because the visuals and music going into it are quite strong.  But I do think it's a good start towards a concept that has a lot of promise!  It'd be neat to explore the player calling different types of unit waves, or maybe allowing them to switch between flying patterns, so understanding which ones do best against enemy types and attack formations becomes a key strategic choice.  I'd definitely like to see continued work on this, since I think ya've made a good effort in a direction that has a lot of possibilities and intrinsic conceptual appeal.