Rez is weird, but only in its visual design and use of music; from a gameplay perspective it's pretty straightforward. To put it plainly, it's a rail shooter - you hold the A button, hover a cursor over the enemies/objects you want to shoot, and release to fire, all the while being guided on a predetermined path that never changes. Shooting red power-ups give you the ability to use an Overdrive, which, when activated, automatically shoots everything on-screen and is useful for the more hectic parts of the game when you have dozens of things flying toward you. Shooting blue power-ups (known as Progress Nodes) fill up your "life" meter, in which you level up into the next form when full. These forms basically act as your health bar, with every hit you take devolving you into the previous form, and the game ending if you get hit at form 0. I'm glad I watched the tutorial video before playing, as none of this information is given in the actual game. It took me until my second playthrough of Area 2 to fully understand everything. I remember thinking during the Area 1 boss fight, "I don't know what's going on but apparently I'm doing good!" as I watched its health bar drop. I hadn't even known that I had to be hit by things to devolve, thinking that maybe it was based on how many enemies I failed to shoot as they flew past me.
Well, actually, there was one thing I didn't realize until completing the first four areas. Feeling like something was missing, I did a quick search to find out I had to get 100% analyzation on every level to unlock Area 5, the game's last level. See, each Area consists of 10 layers, and to travel to the next layer, you can either shoot the Password Protectors (in the form of a cube) that appear, which are what give you the analyzation points, or you can do nothing and wait a little longer to travel to the next layer automatically, gaining nothing. I thought that the Password Protectors were just a way to jump ahead more quickly, not realizing they were necessary to complete the game.
The lack of explanation goes for the story, too, with everything told through text on a separate menu outside of any gameplay. Rez is about your infiltration of a network run by Eden, an A.I. that has recently become self-aware and shut herself down. Your goal is to bypass Eden's security, find her, and reboot the system. It's slightly more complicated than that (and I really mean only slightly) but that's the gist of it.
Even with the confusion the game wasn't very challenging, as I only failed and needed to restart an area three times throughout the whole game. They were all for dumb reasons, too. On Area 2 it was because I didn't realize I needed to turn around when the boss came out of its shell, on Area 3 it was because I didn't use Overdrives correctly on the final stage of its boss, and it also happened right before finishing the game at Area 5; I used all my Overdrives at the beginning of the encounter with Eden, not realizing that it was a total boss rush. It makes complete sense that a boss rush would be in there, actually, but I thought I was defeating her for good right then and there. The game doesn't have any checkpoints, but the areas are all fairly short, so having to replay them wasn't a big deal. I actually enjoyed it, as it gave me more time with an otherwise brief game. I've never been into score attack modes or anything like that, so I knew that the story mode and the few extras I unlocked after beating it was all I would get out of it.
