Matterfall

Developer Housemarque Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now

PS4

There’s a simple pleasure to be taken in a nicely crafted spot of arcade shooting, a twitchy sortie of double-jumps and airdashes through waves of bullets and urgent techno soundscapes. Finnish studio Housemarque has built a reputation on that purity of feeling, and side-scrolling shooter Matterfall is its latest attempt to distill it further. Sure enough, it’s Housemarque through and through, with just enough panache and pedigree to propel you through its three short levels before you’ve had time to think about it too much.

Not that the premise is particularly complex. Our hero Avalon has been drafted in to rid the world of an intelligent element gone wrong; naturally, this involves shooting first and entirely forgetting what a question even is, as the right stick directs bullets and a squeeze of a trigger has an energy beam materialise and dematerialise platforms. These shimmering terraces help you bounce through levels, doubling as tactical cover from enemy fire while still letting your shots through. There’s a clever economy to much of

Matterfall: a dash goes through bullets, stuns enemies and can also be comboed with a directional input to phase through matter-formed surfaces. Aim the Enemies remain fairly predictable throughout: homing-missile robots, turrets spitting orange bullets and sentries that hop in frog-like arcs. Shield-carrying foes with swift reactions, however, present a challenge energy beam, meanwhile, at Matter Bombs to quickly clear a swarm of foes, or melt purple crystals to free trapped civilians and snag some extra points. Score is everything, of course, your perfectionist replay runs in pursuit of leaderboard glory just about doing enough to offset the game’s dearth of content.

What is there, unfortunately, doesn’t have much range. The occasional zero-G section, a mere handful of enemy variations and a selection of almost wholly attritional boss fights can’t offer much creative incentive for a player packing so flexible a set of abilities. And even they aren’t beyond reproach: crucial actions are mapped to unintuitive buttons, with dash on the left bumper, jump on the right, the upgrades menu on a face button and no way to alter any of it. In the checkpoint-light chaos of later stages, an instinctive tap of X is enough to doom you as Avalon’s feet remain resolutely glued to the floor.

It never quite feels natural, and you’ll quickly find yourself pining for another recent Housemarque release, Nex Machina. Matterfall was announced back in 2015, a full year before the studio’s Eugene Jarvis hook-up was unveiled. With a short runtime, clumsy control scheme and somewhat derivative systems, it may have been in development for longer than its stablemate, but on this evidence at least, that time hardly matters.