Rez Infinite on PlayStation VR: The Perfect VR Game

It’s still the first phase of VR game development. However, one thing everybody can agree on is you need to build games from the ground up — porting the 2D games to headsets hardly works well. However, Rez Infinite is an exception that does not so much prove this rule but tears it up into small pieces and buries the debris in the sand.

The PlayStation VR-enabled model of Rez, the 2001 Dreamcast title can be considered the favorite game of a lot of PlayStation enthusiasts. Rez Infinite is a lot better than most of us hoped. After spending experiencing it firsthand at Tokyo Game Show, it feels like the perfect version of this game.

If you aren’t familiar with Rez, it is a plain shooting game where the user moves along an already defined path taking out the enemies as you move. The twist here is that this game is based around songs: you start each stage with a cool techno beat, and that track builds up with time as you act. By the time you get deeper into every stage, you will be orchestrating a wild mixture of music and light as the controller shakes in your hands.

This feature works incredibly well in Virtual Real, and there are a couple of reasons why.

One is the controls. PlayStation VR Rez Infinite is a rail shooter, implying you do not have complete control of your own character — only your aim. The character movement in Sony VR is a huge problem for a lot of VR developers since it’s difficult to avoid nausea if you have the full 3D movement. However, it is not an issue here. The player can look around and also shoot with a stick, but your crosshair is tied to your head movement. But Rez is not really a game which requires precision — the player can sit back and forget all about the controls. It is a PlayStation VR game where the regular controller is adequate.

Another is the visuals. Rez is an excellent game whether you are playing it on a PlayStation 2 or an Xbox 360, and that’s because of its uniquely uncluttered wireframe art style. It is also perfect for VR headsets, which have to push 3D visuals at very high resolutions as well as frame rates. Rez Infinite looks awesome without taxing the hardware strongly. And Sony’s pick of display for the PlayStation VR works out excellently for Rez — even though it’s lower in resolution than the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, its RGB subpixel arrangement lets for a cleaner image, and this makes Rez Infinite’s blunt, colorful lines really pop.

The last is the experience. The story is not all that, but it’s worth stating that Rez is a game which concerns jacking into a computer realm — wearing a VR headset and playing feels suitable in a way that it does not for Fruit Ninja. And Rez Infinite is all about the audiovisual presentation; it is a fun shooter, yes, but you would never want to play the game with the sound off. Virtual Real adds to the experience inestimably.

Rez Infinite will be available for both PS4 and PS VR by October 13^th