Rez - Most of a Decade Later

Over Christmas break I happened to find a used copy of Rez (PS2) at a GameStop, and I did not hesitate even a moment before I picked it up and walked to the register with it. I knew I was lucky to find the game, but that's all I really knew about it. I'd never played it or seen it played or really even read much about it. I just knew that it's one of those games that you seize at the first opportunity.

Now I've "finished" the game, that is to say, played all of the levels included in what can liberally be called the story mode, and I think that the game is rather well worth the hype which was sufficiently positive to cause me to buy it as though programmed to do so.

For those of you who are, as I was, largely ignorant of how the game works, I would say that it is at it's core a rail shooter. Your character flies ever forward and your task is to move the targeting reticule and press the fire button to shoot down enemies that enter your field of view. Holding down the fire button while moving the target over enemies will queue up to eight shots, which will fire simultaneously when the button is released and hit all eight of the targets you selected. There is also an overdrive which, when engaged, will automatically target and fire upon all enemies on the screen for a few seconds.

And that's about it in terms of game play. The appeal of the game, however, is in the music and the sound effects. There is a pulsating beat that underlies each level, and a bit of pre-recorded tecno music running throughout the game, but the music is played largely by the player. Pressing the fire button makes a sort of synthesized clapping sound and your ammunition sounds like notes played on a synthesizer. Instead of making an exploding sound when they're shot down, enemies make the sounds of different instruments, the result of all this being that during especially pitched battles you are in effect free styling a bit of techno over the existing beat.

There is one boss fight in particular where a large disco-ball looking thing is floating around and the player shoots out the mirrors, which make an interesting sound, and sometimes missiles fly out of the top, and they sound like synth-drums when they explode, and then tentacles come out and they sound like cymbals, and when you've shot out half of them, the pre-recorded music beings to crescendo and when the last of the tentacles explodes, the music climaxes and the disco-ball reforms and the process begins again. That boss fight encapsulates, I think, what is so appealing about Rez.

It's so awesome, and it's on the XBL arcade soon, so please find a way to at least give it a try.