Beyond the storm is a take on Tyrian, developed by one guy, which in itself is quite impressive. Much of what made Tyrian (and other games like it) great is here. The balancing act of which weapons, generators and shields should be used remains intact from the game it's copying. Unfortunately "copying" is the term, this isn't enough 'inspired' by Tyrian, it's definitely 'what if Tyrian but...': Lots of the art and weapon names are clearly taken straight from Tyrian, while the rest is jarringly the work of a much more novice artist (though some look better than others).
That theme continues into the gameplay - most of the new ideas are conceptually quite good, but fall flat: The new power juggling dynamic is basically pointless, once you fine tune the front firing guns to have enough juice (by default the game only allocates half your generator towards them, and resets whenever you upgrade the generator); The open world idea breaks up the linear flow of Tyrian to its detriment, forcing you to grind levels to have enough fuel to move to the next area; That's exacerbated by what seems to be a semi-procedural aspect - while enemies might be the same in replaying the same mission, the levels do (not always but sometimes) vary slightly; The sheer number of required levels (which is probably what is driving that procedural generation?) also means that some are outrageously short (30 seconds at most), while a couple were comically long (like 5 minutes, with the last minute being almost completely silent flying with no enemies).
Most importantly though, the open world forces three critical weaknesses. Firstly the game now NEEDS a clear story, with missions being scattered around the map, you have to have a method to pick the next place to go, and the writing (and presentation of story via dropped data-cubes) doesn't support this. Secondly, the need to travel means fuel, and that fuel (along with the data cubes that drive the story) is randomly dropped during missions, you might get 0, or you might get 7, but often you'll get just one. Since the world map routinely has you moving 9 spaces to the next mission, that means grinding the one available mission at the current location 9 times (if you try and go half way then you might get lucky and find some fuel as you go, but more likely you'll have to pay to go back to where you were when you run out of fuel). Worst of all, I ended up seemingly soft locked in what I think was the story campaign as no datacubes would drop when i reached my destination.
Finally, and most critically, the fact that you can go anywhere means that either certain areas are impossible to defeat, or that all areas are at a base difficulty level. I couldn't be sure which it was, but my sense is that nowhere is really hard, but some places are hard by the standards of a player just starting out.
Overall the result is, as others have said, a mixed bag. The Tyrian gameplay is here, but it's hidden behind some design decisions that obstruct and obscure the core of the game. Mechanically the ships work fine, but once you move to faster ships, the movement becomes too fast to get fine control (unlike the original, ship's don't accelerate up to their fastest lateral speed), which is criticised by some below. It's not awful due to the relative ease of the game, but it does mean that delicate flying around fixed objects can sometimes mean an instant death.
While I think there's potential for a game to recommend here, it's hard to be certain that the game is definitely going to get there. For me, I think I'll come back to this in a year and give the developer time to tidy some bits up. There is the core of a good game here and, for a one-man show, the product so far is pretty impressive; but the game would seriously benefit from a professional artist reviewing the new art-set (and being ruthless), dedicated translations (some of the 'database entries' are outright incomprehensible), perhaps a punchier synth mix for the soundtrack and a tighter view on the gameplay.
