You spend ten minutes prepping your gear. You step through a door shaped portal, and drop into a different timeline. You appear outside a ruined house. Footsteps off to your left, but nothing visually there. You are attacked by an invisible creature that appears before swiping at you with claws. It takes 30 rounds, but you kill it. You extract its Active Matter. Then you turn around just in time to see a Ball of Lightning strike you. You’re 30 feet in the air, sailing over the ruined house. You land on the ground in a heap of bones and blood, and promptly die. You giggle as you respawn in The Shelter.
Finding our Bearings
Active Matter is a First Person PvPvE Extraction Shooter from the mind of Matter Team, a subsidiary of Gaijin Entertainment. Compared to both Tarkov and Stalker, Active Matter sets you as a time looping Agent of The Agency, an enigmatic group that recruits you to venture into quantum-unstable realities attached to your fractured Multiverse. The long and short of it, is that you dropped into a zone where some weird shit is actively occurring.
Gravity anomalies that have you standing on the ceiling, gravity traps that throw you into the roof, Ball Lightning that throws you over small buildings, things that were once human, and The Devourer, on top of other Agents/Players who may or may not be friendly are all stacked against you. You gotta drop in, complete objectives, loot peoples junk drawers and weapons caches, and safely extract to The Shelter, a safe space outside of time for you to recoup and re-gear.
What do you kill stuff with?
At your disposal is a large arsenal of many different cold war weapons, as well as some modern conveniences like Drones. Rounding out the gear closet are various backpacks, safe packs, pouches, armor plates, helmets, and flashlights to kit yourself out with. Don’t forget a health pack, that doesn’t go well, and bring grenades for the drone. Now, you could purchase this gear for credits, you get them from breaking down items in the replicator. Alternatively, and more lucratively, you can replicate the gear.
Replicating gear requires items from raids, but it doesn’t cost credits. Now, those of you with big muscly brains might be thinking “But Aj, isn’t that an infinite money glitch then?” As TheRussianBadger said in his review, yes, but actually no. The items you replicate are replicas, and are worth one, maybe two credits. Weapons from the zone are worth hundreds if not thousands, and if you can replicate that gun its best to refine for credits.
So why should I play Active Matter?
Now, I gotta be straight with you chief, i haven’t had a lot of time with this game. A short turnaround window and personal family junk, i just had a baby, meant I haven’t had a lot of hands on here. That being said, here’s why I think you might like this game. Active Matter controls incredibly well, the guns have weight, the movements feel intentional, and the controls are intuitive. The zones are visually stunning, not just graphically but also in scale. Some zones have airplanes suspended in the sky, pieces of earth ripped up and sticking out at a 90 degree angle ala inception, and they all have the feel of a Soviet Army occupation gone wrong.
Tanks and Military trucks litter the zone, Turned Soldiers attack anything that moves, and sometimes you walk on walls or the roof with zero to little warning. Layer on incredible ambience, directional sounds for gunshots and footsteps, and satisfying cracks when you hit a nearby enemy, this game is incredibly well done. Killing things, crawling through buildings, and dying are all actually fun, especially when balls of lightning send you soaring over nearby buildings. Overall, this is the first 10/10 game I’ve played. Nothing in this experience was bad in the slightest. I’m excited to see what Matter Team does with this franchise in the future.
With Total Apex Entertainment, this is Aj Day, signing off. Be sure to follow all my socials for more Gaming and Entertainment news. https://beacons.ai/ajday
For something completely else from someone else, how about this article? https://totalapexentertainment.com/valor-mortis-review/
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