Matterfall Review – Short ‘n’ sweet, but a little sour

What do you get when you combine the side scrolling action of Mighty No. 9 and Metroid’s sci-fi alien action, adding a dash of electro-funk rock music? You get Matterfall. Developers Housemarque have made some rather memorable games in the past like Resogun and Dead Nation, so while I was going in to this review blind, I had high hopes. My verdict is a mixed bag of pros and cons that has me battling with the gamer inside me. I wanted to enjoy it but there was just a lot of niggling issues I couldn’t quite push to the back of my mind.

Matterfall starts rather abruptly, after a quick rundown of the game’s story by the main character Avalon Darrow. She is gun-for-hire that has been tasked with destroying “Smart Matter”, a sentient alien lifeform that has taken over the city. With little else to go off I was instantly thrust into the game and forced to master the battle mechanics with more speed than I was intending to. Matterfall doesn’t do you the favour of holding your hand, giving you only a swift introduction on how to play in its first level tutorial, but for anyone who hasplayed a side-scroller this isn’t too hard to understand.

This is where things became complicated. As I progressed through the game, saving humans and destroying smart matter, I realised you required some phenomenal dexterity if you wanted to avoid being hit. The control’s commands, while simple enough to learn, were very hard to master, especially when you have literally a second to dodge enemies from all sides while I was still learning how to jump properly.

Also, the fact that you are limited to only four directions to dash made movement harder and caused me unnecessary frustration time after time. Dashing was made all the more important as you progressed, but its cool down period of two seconds made for some choice mini-rage moments, where I could have defended, but was unable due to my lack of a barrier. Further on down the track upgrades did help with this issue, but it felt a bit like too little, too late.

While most of the niggling issues I’ve mentioned so far can be forgiven, what I felt was less than appropriate were Matterfall’s loading times for stages. I understand that, yes, loading in a game is sometimes necessary, but not when you’ve downloaded the whole game already onto your PS4. Being a short game, as it is, you would also want Matterfall to at least have some kind of replay appeal, but here’s where the game really falters, as there is little to none. Sure, you can go back and play on a higher difficulty and improve your scores but there’s no real driving force encouraging you to do so.