Yoshiki Okamoto's second arcade shooter at Konami after the fantastic Time Pilot is an early "tube shooter", reminding of Atari's Tempest. Despite its impressive looks for an early 80s game, Gyruss is actually pretty simple: it's basically Galaga in "3D". Enemies appear in formation behind you, following a specific pattern, until they settle at a distance in the center of the screen. Once they all appeared, they will come to attack by shooting or trying to ram into your spaceship. There's also other obstacles like force fields and very annoying asteroids you can't shoot down, and once per stage a trio of space stations will turn up. If you shoot down the one in the middle, you'll gain the only power-up in the game, a precious double-shot. It's basically a must-have since the basic weapon is terrible.
Every few stages, it's (once more) Galaga all over again since you're treated to a very inspired bonus stage where you need to shoot down enemies formations "dancing" around before they get away.

Controls can take some time to get used to since Gyruss uses a joystick and not a spinner like Tempest. But once you do, it's a great pick-up and play experience, like all good arcade games of that period. Stages are short and intense, and the 3D perspective give the genre a nice twist (even if it makes precise dodging more difficult than it should). After a dozen of stages the difficulty and speed will spike, so be ready to memorize enemy formations if you want to go far because pure reflexes won't be enough to cut it.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the game is its soundtrack, a blasting remix of Bach's Toccata and Fugue that perfectly fits the frantic gameplay.
While I wouldn't call Gyruss an absolute must-play (unlike Time Pilot) it's still a fine arcade game from the golden age era and definitely worth a look.