Rez remains the best rail shooter as Star Fox returns

The rail shooter feels moribund, a once-spectacular format that has seen little revival. Nintendo's remake of 1997's Star Fox 64 brings attention back to the form — an approachable, enjoyable blast through an interstellar conflict between anthropomorphic space animals.

The move is as much about the characters as it is about the genre, but it still casts a welcome spotlight on a neglected breed of game. Star Fox 64 is certainly one of the best rail shooters, but it is not the apex. You can find the genre's origins in Sega Ages Space Harrier or the N64 cult classic Sin and Punishment, yet the highest praise belongs to Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez.

Released by Sega for Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 in 2002 and available today in a modernized form on PC and PlayStation, Rez elevates the rail shooter into something transcendent. Rez pulls from club culture, Tron, synaesthesia, early vector games, music games, the Star Gate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky.

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