I've been replaying Tyrian 2000 to see if it actually holds up as a shmup despite bearing the dreaded moniker of a euroshmup. I think most people who dickride arcade shmups are too insular and pass over otherwise fine games because they don't have a very specific type of gameplay or design.
I played through the first episode, which took about an hour. I remember having more fun with it when I first played it seven or eight years ago. Returning to it, even with the intention of being sympathetic, has shown me the game's real problems. Movement is muddy due to acceleration and a parallax scrolling effect on the stage - this gives it depth and makes it feel like you're really controlling a ship, but dodging becomes unreliable. Mouse control helps alleviate this, but I'd still prefer to have the acceleration turned off.
Enemy patterns are kind of all over the place, and there's a lot of veering from one side of the stage to another with barely enough time to shoot down major enemies. There's no scoring system except for coins/jewels that are dropped by certain enemies, or certain lines of enemies, which isn't very compelling; I don't care about picking up a 50-point coin when I reliably get 10,000+ points for clearing a level and every meaningful upgrade costs thousands or tens of thousands of points.
Enemies can be hard to distinguish from the background, and their shots can also be hard to make out. It's also very tough to know what kind of shots can be destroyed by your own weapons vs which ones have to be avoided entirely. Enemies deal damage on contact, which means they can and will drag you to your death in an instant if you get wedged up against a more durable one. There's no indication you get hit at all when your shield takes damage, which almost makes sense because there's no penalty for it, but recharging your shields cuts into the power going to your weapons, so taking damage can affect how you have to fire so you should know about it through an audio cue or something.
The strongest thing the game has going for it is the atmosphere and style since it's a very obvious product of the 90s MS-DOS era: the bad guys are called MicroSol, every piece of technology is knobbly brown-gray, the humor is very cynical and jaded - that sort of thing.
It was a fun little distraction but I don't think I'll bother finishing it. Once you get to the point of stacking hugely upgraded weapons on your ship and melting almost everything in your path the first time through a level, there isn't much to do.