Rez Infinite
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Experience 360 degrees of mind-blowing synesthesia as you blast through waves of enemies and massive transforming bosses, with colors and sounds that sync and blend to the beat of Rez’s legendary techno soundtrack. Whether you’re an old fan of the original Sega classic or never heard of Rez before, whether you’re playing on your TV or your PS VR headset, whether you’re looking for a quick diversion or a deeper game you can lose yourself in for hours at a time — you owe it to your senses to experience Rez Infinite.
Steam User 14
Rez is a cult classic and one of my favorite games. This is a good way to play it, but I have a couple misgivings.
First and foremost, the mouse (as opposed to analog stick) is an absolute cheat code. Beating the game this way is not a challenge, at all, period. A lot of the challenge of the original version came from the slow-moving cursor -- you had to put a lot of thought into crosshair placement between enemy waves, and plan out smooth paths between enemies from moment to moment. Maybe it sounds like artificial difficulty, but after playing the game over and over I really improved with the stick and it felt good; I was able to get over 95% shot down in all levels and eventually I could get the white butterfly ending consistently. With the mouse, I can just scribble all over the screen while barely paying attention and still beat my old scores.
(That said, it brings the elusive "100% shot-down" rating back to the realm of possibility for us mere mortals. I have always wanted to see the pink butterfly ending for myself, but doing that on a PS2 controller requires superhuman abilities. Now...maybe there's a chance.)
The mouse movement is a little screwy, too. Some kind of filtering, but not like typical mouse smoothing -- maybe because it's mapped into 3D space instead of moving around the screen in 2D? It takes a little adjustment but doesn't really matter, since there's no need to be precise anyway.
I also noticed a few things that are just slightly off. For instance, when you beat each stage of the first boss, there's supposed to be a sound effect (rising-pitch vocal sample), but it's either really, really quiet or it's just not there. A first-time player wouldn't know anything is missing, but for me, the moment that sound plays used to be the highlight of the whole stage, which makes it kind of disappointing each time. There are a few other things like this, such as the exact colors/shading of the 3D environment, how certain things line up to the music. It's so subtle but I can tell it's just off .
The difficulty seems to have been tweaked as well. One boss, which used to take me 2-3 cycles to finish, I can now one-cycle every time; in a different boss fight, enemies that used to never hit me seem to always hit me now; I have to play with a totally different strategy to avoid it. It hardly ruins the game or anything, but why change the balance at all? It took a while to memorize all these subtleties, and now I have to memorize them again.
The game's art style has aged very well, and it looks good on modern displays. However, I think it looks best at 640x480 on a CRT monitor. The dreamcast could do 480p30, and the PS2 could do 480i60, but this is the only way to play Rez at 480p60 and it looks quite nice. I think it looks better this way with the anti-aliasing turned off. Unfortunately, the horizontal FOV gets narrower with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which makes the game much harder to play since enemies and projectiles will show up offscreen.
The new area (Area X) looks quite nice, but there's no real substance there. Only a few enemies, no challenging patterns, 10 minutes all-in, no scoring, no serious bosses, etc. There are supposedly two endings, but there's really no difference between them as far as I can tell, even with a high shot-down rate. It's a cool little bonus distraction but not even on par with a single typical Rez stage in my opinion. The music is good at least; it reminds me of Child of Eden, might be the same artist.
This may sound like a negative review, but that's only because I'm comparing it to what I consider an all-time great, even perfect game. If you're so inclined, I'd suggest to dig out the PS2 from your attic, buy some cheap component video cables from ebay, and play the 2001 release on a period-correct CRT TV for the absolute best experience. But, for everyone else, just ignore my gripes and get this version. We're lucky that such a precious game is so accessible.
Steam User 9
Only played this game for 34 minutes and it felt like I played for 2 hours, Talk about an audio-visual experience.
Steam User 11
the children yearn for techno
Steam User 5
TLDR: REALLY cool Y2K-styled game, sleek style and music, simple gameplay, just not that much content.
Rez Infinite is a remastered port of the 2001 Rez for the Dreamcast. It's an on-rails shooter where you don't actually move. Your actual character moves on a fixed "rail" along the stage, and your "analog stick" is simply used to move your aiming reticle. Any projectiles enemies fire at you, you're supposed to shoot down.
I SHOULD mention though; mouse controls make this game a LOT more comfy to play. This port feels SO much better to play as a result of having more control options than just a slow-ass analog stick dragging a cursor along the screen.
Hell, I was playing a lot of this with a DRAWING TABLET. And it felt GOOD to play.
The shooting mechanics aren't as direct as you'd expect, mind you; you HOLD down the fire button (the only button you use in gameplay) to lock onto enemies your cursor passes over, up to 8 targets at once, and then RELEASE to fire off everything at once.
Some enemies require multiple hits to defeat, and you can simply leave the cursor over them to rack up target "charges" to hit them multiple times when you let go.
The more locks you have in one shot, the higher your score multiplier for releasing those shots, so that's how the scoring mechanics generally work.
Here's the thing: Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING you do, is tied to the music. Not in a rhythm game way, you don't NEED to do anything to any kind of beat, but moreso in a "the music follows all your actions" way. Every possible amount of shot charges unleashed at once has its own little "sequence" of notes that quickly plays as the shots come out, that changes depending on the stage/BGM and on your "form" (how much health you have, essentially).
Bossfights get a bit chaotic/noisy because of how much shit you'll be unleashing all at once but outside of that it makes for a really satisfying gameplay loop if you're paying attention to how the music is going, and how your actions are accompanying it, always automatically adjusted to be perfectly on beat with the music through some kind of coding wizardry.
There's also the AREA X mode, which is this port's new addition. It's an extra stage!
But not just an "extra stage", it's an extra stage made in an entire whole-ass new engine (Unreal, I think?), with an entirely different artstyle and control scheme, where you actually move around in a twinstick fashion manually. It's just the one stage and little more than a novelty, but it's still an absolutely INSANE audiovisual experience.
Outside of that though... Yeah, the game doesn't have all that much meat on its bones. 5 basegame stages, plus Area X. You have side modes, but those essentially amount to just:
-Score attack (play any given stage and go for a highscore)
-Full game marathon (there's 6 different versions of this, but they're just literal recolors of the same thing)
-Some weird endless stage with no danger or real point to playing it, it's more of a trippy surreal experimental... thing?
-Boss rush
You DO get to unlock a bunch of cool little visual extras (including unlocking a Morolian skin from Space Channel 5, as this was from the same devs back in the day), but... to get those you have to grind out Score Attack mode 30 times. It gets old after the like fourth or fifth run of a stage on it.
All in all though it IS a pretty damn solid game, just... kinda lacking content-wise. I'd recommend it moreso on sale, but I'd ABSOLUTELY recommend it still. If only for the really cool experience of playing it. I love Y2K tech-y themed stuff.
Steam User 5
Criminally underrated, a must play game
Steam User 5
Classic musical arcade shooter.
Originally made for the Dreamcast and PS2, it was remastered into HD for the next generation of consoles, and Infinite here was re-remastered for the next-next generation and PC, featuring VR modes and a whole new very short campaign specifically for Rez Infinite.
Its gameplay is just a very simplistic railshooter, but the real beauty of it is how it meshes altogether with both the visuals, sound effects, and music. It's not really a rhythm game so much as it is a game that's heavily themed around its music.
As you shoot down enemies, you're practically making your own music to the point that just listening to the soundtrack alone can feel empty without the sounds that were made while you were actually playing the game. If you're skilled enough, you can actually kind of make even better sounding attacks to go along with the music.
The game has an extra campaign called "Area X" that may as well have been developed to be its own game as a sequel or something due to how it looks, sounds, and differently it plays. It's got the same spirit as the base game, but its overall vibe is far different with its beautiful visuals, somewhat different genre of music, and just outright being less of a railshooter and more a shooter-shooter.
The base game only takes just a little over an hour to beat, and the extra campaigns even less. The base price is probably a little too much for what it actually is. It's a neat experience regardless.
Steam User 7
i've only had this game in my life for a couple of days but i already know its one of my favorite games of all time