izigame.me

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.