Shatter Review (PSN)

When the Xbox 360 first launched, Bizarre Creations released the twin stick shooter, Geometry Wars on Xbox Live Arcade. At a $10 price point, the reimaging of asteroids featured flashy simple graphics, techno music, and highly competitive gameplay that kept people coming back for more and more. Geometry Wars defined what XBLA games should b and ever since the Playstation Network has been seeking an answer. With Shatter, the search is over.

Shatter is a reimaging of Arkanoid or Breakout in the same way that Geometry Wars is a reimagining of Asteroids. In Shatter, just like Arkanoid or Breakout, you’ll use a paddle to hit balls against bricks. Once all the bricks are destroyed, you move onto the next level. However, because this is a reimagining, they’ve added a bunch of new mechanics.

Shatter features a full physics engine allowing bricks to bounce off each other and react to gravity in the playing field. The player can alter the gravity in the playing field by sucking things towards the paddle or pushing them away. This works for the various types of bricks on the playing field, power-ups, and shards.

Power ups range from things like increasing your score multiplier, giving you extra lives, and more. Shards are used to charge up your power gauge for a super attack where you unleash a firestorm on the playing field or to power your shield to protect your paddle/ship from bricks that might hit it. Your ship/paddle also can fire multiple balls onto the playing field. This increases the speed at which the game moves as well as increases the difficulty.

Even Shatter’s playing fields are updated. The classic breakout/arkanoid layout exists where you control the paddle in a horizontal manner and hit the ball towards the top of the screen, but some of the stages will also have you moving the paddle up and down and hitting the ball left to right and other stages are circular with the paddle moving along the lower arc of the stage.

After about 6 or 7 stages, you’ll fight a boss for that world where you’ll need to use all of your abilities to hit a weak spot on the boss to destroy them. The game features 10 worlds, but should only take you about five or six hours to conquer. Once you beat the game, you can revisit any of the game’s worlds or play the special bonus stages between each world or a Boss attack mode. The special stages have you reflecting three balls of dramatically increasing speed as your multiplier increases as you reflect each ball.

The game uses 3d graphics on a 2d plain and a distinct futuristic visual flair. Even more impressive then the visual presentation is the 90 minutes of music the game is set to. It always seems to sync up with the visual coordination of each stage in a fashion almost resembling the old Dreamcast title (and recently XBLAed) Rez.

Shatter is addictive, just like Geometry Wars. It has the power to draw you in and make you lose track of time, with compelling level after compelling level; but it’s a different sort of addiction then Geometry Wars. The beauty of Geometry Wars was that you were your own worst enemy – you always seemed to lose through overwhelming odds or your own mistakes. Shatter never gets to the point of being overly difficult and a steady stream of lives and continues that only reset your score, lessen its difficulty. Furthermore, once you finish Shatter, unless you’re going to compete on the leaderboards, you might not find yourself coming back to it.

Shatter is by no means perfect, but it is certainly one of the better PSN titles and gives even plenty of XBLA titles a run for their money. At $8, it’s a lot of fun and you’ll likely get plenty of bounce for your buck.

The Good

Electric Boogaloo: The 90 minutes of music in Shatter fits the action beautifully. It has a very Rez quality to it – it truly enhances the experience.

Choose your difficulty: Shatter has a very unique quality that lets you modify the difficulty on the fly by letting you choose how many balls you fire at a time. It’s a novel mechanic that lets you tailor the game to how you want to play.

Picture Perfect: Shatter is a pretty solid melding of older style gameplay, new flash graphics, and a butt thumping sound track.

Price: This is a package better than most XBLA titles and for a couple bucks less too. This is a pretty rad deal and a solid triple A downloadable game.

The Bad

All Too Easy: Shatter’s biggest issue is that it’s a bit too easy. You get a few too many lives and the game seems to hold your hand somewhat. Great for beginners, but the more expierenced player will have to be content for competing for the highest score possible.

Light weight: Shatter also ends up being a bit light on features. No multiplayer features of any kind and just a couple extra minor gameplay modes don’t extend the life of this game nearly enough. Even a mirror mode of the existing levels would be kinda neat.

The Ugly

Short Shot: Shatter is such a good game – my only gripe is that it didn’t last longer and I don’t see myself replaying it like I did geometry wars. It’s a shame, but this is where some good DLC could give this game legs.

Recommendation: If you’ve got a PS3, do yourself a favor and pickup Shatter. It’s a solid game for the right price. You’ll likely find yourself playing it now and in between other games, but once you stop playing, you’ll likely lose track of time. It’s that good.