Rez HD came out on Xbox Live Arcade today, and having heard a lot about the now-impossible-to-find PS2 version, I couldn’t resist picking it up. It’s a regular rail shooter in a lot of ways, but its appeal is in its trippy cyberpunk atmosphere and soundtrack.

It’s a pretty short game and I made it through the first four areas without too much trouble and unlocked the fifth one. The ‘minibosses’ in the fifth area kicked my butt though, so I’m going to need to attempt it again sometime. Part of it is just needing to learn the patterns, so you know when waves of missiles will be incoming soon so you have enough time to get them all.

There’s also a score attack mode, but I’m not sure how the scoring works yet. I went through the first area in it, and thought I did really well and performed well on the analysis/shot down/item stats, but still only got half the total score of other people on my friends list. Maybe I need to deliberately drag out the boss fight and just rack up points ‘wasting’ shots on the shields and such…