Much like Raptor (released on the App Store in 2011), Tyrian is revered PC shoot 'em up classic from the mid-1990s, though unlike Raptor, it has aged extremely well, delivering a sweet package of nostalgia-inducing visuals and sound along with still-up-to-date gameplay. Developer Mobila Interactive has also ported Rise of the Triads over to iOS, so they know their way around bringing back DOS action classics. Still, they used the free OpenTyrian (2007) as foundation for the port, which in turn was based on the original Tyrian, instead of using the improved Tyrian 2000, which offered an additional fifth campaign.

Nonetheless, Tyrian on the iPhone is still packed to the brim, featuring more than 50 stages in four campaigns, with seven difficulty settings further increasing the replay value, although the game can initially be rather demanding even on the lower settings. This is where – in story mode – the upgrade shop comes into play. Some enemies leave behind coins when defeated, allowing you to invest them into all kinds of front and rear weapons, additional options supporting your ship, or new shields. Tyrian is simply huge, no matter how you look at it.

Another great feature is the data section, which can easily be overlooked, seeing as how non-descript it appears on the options screen. While initially only sparsely filled, certain enemies throughout the whole game drop additional text messages to be read here, ranging from useful hints to background information on the universe of Tyrian and a lot of humorously written texts about for example the choice of restaurants on a planet. You'll want to hunt down enemies more than ever before in a shooter and once you've finally found another text cube, you'll probably want to check it out as soon as possible.

This isn't to say that the action itself wasn't well designed, though. Enemies and stages are varied, with mobile and immobile ground targets on floating islands, destructible buildings amidst a jungle, fast-moving spaceships high above the clouds, asteroids blocking your path, the speed considerably increasing as you fly past indestructible, huge alien claws protruding from an unseen creature, large flying transporters setting off smaller gliders, and so on. If there was something to improve on, however, it would be the controls. The game only offers direct touch controls, without the choice of relative touch controls. Plus, the lowest end of the screen can't properly be reached, which needs some getting used to. After that, you should be able to steer your ship rather safely, though. Why most menus require the use of virtual buttons to choose upgrades for example will always remain the developer's secret.

On a final note, the music in Tyrian is a wonderful trip down memory lane for any old PC gamer. Of course it's very low-tech by today's standards, but that constitutes a great part of its charme, and it's very well composed with lots of catchy tunes. Plus, the graphics are colorful and detailed, perfectly rounding out this set of well-crafted nostalgia.

For many years now, the concept of tying together music and gameplay in genres other than the designated music game genre has proven so fascinating to developers that every so often another interesting attempt along the lines of Rez, Audiosurf and Bit.Trip is being made. Vietnam-developed Wave tries to bring frantic vertical shooting action and rhythmic beats together by allegedly spawning enemies with every beat of the music. It doesn't really manage to make the player feel the music, since the screen remains filled with enemies most of the time anyway, giving you something to shoot, no matter when anything spawns, and your actions don't have any influence on the music, so using your own music to create levels is little more than the widespread ability to listen to your iPod's music library while playing any game.

Still, sticking to the standard arcade mode and its broad range of sometimes slow, but mostly fast techno songs, generally heavy on bass, rewards you with a pleasant and unique shooter experience. Groups of standard enemies (called “cubes”) regularly appear in circular gates all over the playing field, subsequently swooping around a bit before leaving the screen at the bottom unless you destroy them beforehand. They never actively attack, but touching them will get you killed and the later in a stage you are, the more damage enemies can endure, as indicated by numerous color swaps. Other than this, a few orange “special cubes” also appear from time to time, either just dodging your attacks (and dropping powerful weapon upgrades), or shooting at you or splitting up into numerous cogs upon being destroyed. Boss fights are scarce, but spectacular as a giant eyeball hurls itself across the screen, guarding itself with dozens of small cubes or raising a head to spew a curtain of bullets.

Although every level appears to be designed exactly like the one before it, Wave offers a decent amount of variety already through its different objectives. In one stage you might have to destroy 1,000 cubes and in another one you need to pick up 200 stars, which appear only if you manage to destroy a whole formation of cubes. Another way of breaking up any potential monotony lies in the three special modes activated during gameplay. Every so often a red and a green circle appear for roughly ten seconds and if you safely fly into one of these, they either trigger the fever mode or drive mode. In fever mode you control two invincible ships using two fingers simultaneously, whereas driver mode lets you see through the eyes of the ship's pilot and dodge metal blades in a pseudo-3D-view. Dying in the endless survival mode further triggers sudden death mode, where successful dodging of falling metal blades gets you back into the game, circumventing the game over.

Wave is a relatively easy game, both on casual and core difficulty, usually dishing out enough power-ups during the peaceful beginning of a stage for the player to build up an arsenal strong enough to survive against the ever-growing hordes of cubes. Its beauty thus lies in the combination of powerful music, heaps of visual shenanigans like lasers, explosions and differently colored enemies, lots of shooting, and yet at the same time the possibility to relax, adding up to a thoroughly meditative and soothing experience. As you sway left and right you begin to open up your mind and basically soak in the music, so in the end you do finally (potentially) feel the music, although not quite as it was intended by the developer and I have to admit that probably a lot of people would call me crazy and/or pretentious for my evaluation here. I guess, Wave is one of the best examples for the good old phrase “your mileage may vary”. The controls, meanwhile, leave nothing to be desired. The relative touch controls are perfectly suited for any situation.

Wave isn't free of faults, though. The special modes for example can get in the way of your mission goal, like when you need to dispose of 80 special cubes and they don't appear in fever mode, which means that going through the hassle of entering a special mode can completely screw up your rating given after beating a stage. What's more, the driver mode is terribly misconceived. It's never quite discernible which metal blades are going to hit or miss and who buys a 2D-shooter to suddenly be forced tilting his iPhone to steer in a first person view? Another pesky nuisance is the poor explanation of the six stage's mission objective. You are told to “keep out 100 cubes away black holes”...while it sounds like you might be supposed to keep enemies from being sucked into the two black holes, the counter seems to go down during the stage for no apparent reason, leaving you puzzled as of what to do.

Space Ship Ion is the perfect example of how great visual design can elevate a game well above the sum of its other parts. Make no mistake, SSI has no real flaws to bemoan, but the one area where it truly shines is the borderline disgusting enemy design in combination with a sterile sci-fi setting and fitting music. Most enemies are insects (mites, moths, etc.) and while some of these already look nice enough, they sometimes tend to be a tad too small or lacking animation, plus, the bosses are where it's at. Huge weevils, other insects and even the odd reptile (chameleon) all impress with their sheer size, ugly and nearly photo-realistic details, terrifyingly animated feelers, claws and mouths and everyone's favorite: Tons of destructible parts.

Backgrounds are recruited from standard sci-fi tropes only. This, surprisingly, works in the game's favor as asteroid belts, human space stations and the moon's surface look spacey without being all too disconnected from what mankind has already experienced. In SSI you pilot through somewhat familiar-feeling scenarios overrun by horrible enemies that share this familiar feel, thanks to being based on creatures everybody knows and most people would never want to meet up close. It's a remarkably tangible setting that evenly balances out its sci-fi roots and a certain credibility. The only thing missing here is some sort of life to the backdrops. They are completely static, not even featuring the slightest parallax scrolling.

The music and sound effects are also intertwined with the rest of the design in a highly commendable way. While traversing the more down-to-earth (no pun intended) stages, fighting smaller enemies, you are treated with an orchestra, delivering your standard – albeit great – action flick score, but as soon as you face off against the bigger invertebrates (i.e. bosses), the music becomes more out of this world, with calm melodies and unsettling jarring and buzzing.

Gameplay-wise SSI plays it safe for the most part. Enemy formations are rarely spectacular, as usually a couple of minor popcorn enemies join forces with the occasional bigger foe, resorting to old-school amounts of bullets. Defeated enemies drop blue and red crystals that can be used to purchase weapons and shields, afterwards installed in your ship's six slots. Weapon variety isn't exactly the highest in the genre, but it's still a neat feature to have and prices also aren't too high, allowing for constant rearrangements and tweaking. Apparently, the Malaysian developers at iniGames have played at least one entry in Taito's renown Ray-series (RayForce, RayStorm, RayCrisis), since said series' signature lock-on attack makes an appearance here, spicing up standard battles a bit. Well ahead of your ship is a crosshair just waiting to be placed upon an alien to automatically unleash a powerful homing missile.

It's not much, but it further polishes an already well-crafted shooter that is well worth playing through a couple of times until you've beaten all three difficulty settings and unlocked all medals, which also happen to grant access to two additional weapons. Meanwhile, the icing on this great game are the flawless relative touch controls, foregoing one of the major pitfalls for shoot 'em ups on i-devices. Useless trivia: There used to be two different demo versions of SSI, only differing very marginally, like in the earlier demo only offering one difficulty setting, whereas the second one featured all three of them. Why they would release a new demo instead of simply updating the first one, I do not know and the developers probably don't either.

If Call of Duty: Modern Warfare were a shooter, it'd surely be Alien Worm's Sky Combat. Set in a realistic, modern war-on-terror scenario, you are taken on a spectacular ride, where shiny explosions and an overall spot-on presentation are worth more than an interesting boss fight, and where the thrill of boarding different vehicles and making good use of various gadgets make up for a lack of any true innovation. Heck, even the titles are similarly generic.

It'd be hard to describe Sky Combat without the word beautiful. While the realistic jungle, desert, ocean and arctic landscapes filled with nothing but an array of real war machines might not make for an overly interesting premise, the care that went into their presentation more than makes up for this. Tanks leave behind marks in the sand, waves break in the water, your chopper clearly emits wind in all directions upon commencing its flight, explosions look gorgeous, and generally spoken, everything is simply wonderfully crisp. You'll even spot neat details like enemy jets trying to take off, ripe for you to shoot them. Hitting sturdy enemies makes them flash red, making for a rewarding feedback until the even bigger rewarding feedback (a pretty explosion) sets in. Audio-wise Sky Combat also takes note from Modern Warfare. The sound effects all fit perfectly and the music is your standard heroic army flick fanfare. While the latter works well enough, the game could have used more than just a single track.

Usually chopper wingmen are a rare breed, but in Sky Combat they're about as frequent as other standard shooter pickups, such as a higher shot frequency or a general increase in bullets fired per shot. More interesting items include homing missiles, air-strikes and missile shields. All of these need to be activated manually, using four different virtual buttons. One lets your chopper seemingly jump over bullets and missiles, the second safely detonates all enemy missiles currently on-screen, another one triggers the staple smart bomb (albeit designed as a carpet bombing jet), and the last one fires off a set of homing missiles, useful against tanks, armored transporters, turrets and other choppers.

Developer Alien Worm gives you a healthy choice of five different control schemes, ensuring there's something for anyone, although sticking to relative touch controls is probably a no-brainer as in most iOS shooters. No matter which option you settle for, however, one issue remains: Tapping the four special buttons in time is somewhat unreliable, which is especially true for the anti-missile blast, rendering it nigh useless. Firing off the often crucial homing missiles can also sometimes prove a bit fiddly, but overall the controls still work well enough and the frequent checkpoints keep frustration low, anyway, even on the highest (and really intense) difficulty setting.

A conceptually great idea, meanwhile, that does provide serious frustration, is the inclusion of tank and boat missions. During the nine missions of the campaign, you are sometimes asked to step out of the chopper and substitute it for one of these vehicles, which basically control the same as your main craft, with one major exception. They don't just move to the sides, but they need to turn into the desired direction first, making them too slow to properly dodge obstacles and bullets. They're fun to use for about a minute until you already wish to board your chopper again, rather than inevitably losing more and more health.

Fortunately Alien Worm put together a great update with an additional second campaign taking place in arctic regions, adding new gameplay elements such as surprisingly fun escort missions and bunkers that destroy your rockets when you’re close. Arguably the best change this update brought along, though, is that you are now allowed to stay in your chopper for every single mission, enabling you to completely skip the tank and the boat. The new campaign doesn't even feature them at all, suggesting that the developers have probably learned their lesson. After beating both campaigns, avid players can still collect 51 GameCenter achievements, try their hands at another difficulty setting (easy means easy as in relaxing, while hard will put you to the test), or aim for a high score in either of the two endless stages.