DreadStar: The Quest for Revenge

DreadStar is a French indie shoot-'em-up clearly inspired by Tyrian, with a pretty decent soundtrack. Unfortunately, the dev's idea of Tyrian's RPG-like progression was to only have six stages and a painful difficulty hump near the start, such that you end up having to grind the first level a lot in order to get anywhere, and once you get past the difficulty hump, completing the remaining stages and higher difficulties are all easy. This is not helped by the fact the hardest level is the 4th out of 6, with the last two being very easy in comparison. Meh, not recommended, especially for the price, since most of the game length is made up of grinding rather than content or gitting gud. Play Tyrian or Raptor or Jets'n'Guns or something instead.

The game looks, feels, and sounds basic, and progress is an absolute slog. "Oh, you beat the first stage and made *some* money? Well, you have to repair your ship, so maybe you can afford a new weapon after your next run."

Fun old school style game. Controls occasionally freeze on first ship, but that might be intentional by designers of game so it is more fun to upgrade ship later. Is rather short, but that is kind of the point.

The problem with finding good games isn't the lack of good games, it is the massive junk heap of worthless games like this making it hard to find decent ones.

A classic-style shoot-em-up, clearly inspired by classics like Tyrian. The gameplay is tight, the visuals and the music are nice. Unfortunately, there are just 5 stages, and you need to replay them again and again to farm money for the upgrades, and once you've built a half decent ship and blazed through the final level there's not much left to do. DreadStar provides a couple evenings of nice oldschool fun, but little more than that.

Pretty good shmup with some light rpg mechanics