Shatter

DLC Review from Matt - Thursday, 08 October 2009 @ 3:57pm

The game Breakout is older than me, and from the same year as my birth. This game is as well known to gamers as Pong, Space Invaders or Pacman. Even if you didn't play the original you played one of its imitators such as Arkanoid, the PC Ricochet series or Alleyway, a Gameboy launch title. It's basically a genre (known in Japan as burokkukuzushi or block destruction), and the latest entry to the genre is Shatter from New Zealand studio Sidhe.

Sidhe haven't done a whole lot you'd know but are probably best known for 2005 PSP title Gripshift, which is now also on the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade. But if Shatter is any indication of them we'll be seeing them in future.

Shatter is exclusive to the PlayStation Store, and is the sort of thing Sony need to be promoting and encouraging more to correct a perception (whether real or imagined) that the PS Store has less content than the Xbox Live Arcade.

So the first thing that needs to be looked at with a game like Shatter that is so clearly of a set genre is how does it differ from the earlier iterations. Well, the first and most obvious thing is the graphics. Shatter is a modern game, and uses a lot of PS3's inbuilt libraries to make fancy shiny effects. The result is a glorious chaos of noise and flashing lights, sparkly things and explosions, shards of shattered blocks and fire. And in there somewhere is your ball.

LOUD NOISES! There is a lot happening here.

That's not really a criticism, though it may sound it. Shatter revels in excess, and if that excess makes the game a little hard to play due to the disappearance of the little silver ball... too bad really.

Aside from the graphical gloss and Geometry Wars style light show, Shatter adds something else that I haven't seen in the genre before. The paddle can control gravity, either "sucking" or "blowing". *avoids joke*

The L1 and R1 triggers control these actions, and careful use of them changes the direction of the ball significantly. There's a tiny bit of broken-ness to this. By "blowing" constantly, it's almost impossible to lose the ball, as it just stays up there all the time, forced to the roof with all of the broken shards of destroyed blocks, often bouncing back and forth across the bit with the blocks in it, smashing them up.

The other big change is the use of these block fragments. The fragments can be collected (most easily by sucking them in) and fill up a bar at the top of the screen. If that bar is filled up it allows you to use a special move, activated with triangle. This special move is basically a giant can of candy coloured whoop-ass called a Shard Storm, a firestorm of shootery from your little ship that will destroy all of the blocks of most levels and put a world of pain into most bosses.

Shard Storm in full swing. Note the flurry of stuff going to the other stuff. Awesome.

Yes, there are bosses. 10 bosses are scattered through the game and add variety and challenge. Some of them are easy, but others are fiendish, and some (the clock boss especially) show a nice level of imagination and innovation that aren't commonly seen in this type of game.

Actually, innovation and imagination are routine in Shatter. Some of the levels are standard "bottom to top". Others are sideways. Some are even circular. These variations stop things getting boring. Some are quite standard, many have gimmicks that require you to use a degree of precision or things get harder. A simple physics engine is a welcome addition, with collision of the blocks being logical and often well used.

All in all Shatter is more than you'd expect and nothing you don't want. It's a simple and fun arcade game, and is well worth the price of admission to while away what will almost certainly be only an evening or two. The price of admission itself is a point worth talking about, and one of the reasons I wanted to review this particular title.

A boss! This is the first boss, and he's pretty easy.

The game is given something called "equal-value pricing" around the world, which means that the price is the same, merely affected by exchange rates, rather than some arbitrarily inflated number. There is, of course, some fudging for marketing numbers. No one wants to pay $11.47 for a game. Still, this deserves respect and consideration. The policy has long been to simply charge whatever the territory will pay, leading to Europe and (especially) Australia paying a premium on the US. This is not the case for the NZ based Sidhe, who have opted for a fair price for an excellent product. I highly recommend it.

Pros

A lot of fun to play, that elusive "one more go" phenomenon, fantastic graphics. Some people love the music, I've read people say that the soundtrack is worth the purchase alone. Imaginative and inventive gameplay in what seemed a stanant genre.

Cons

It's not a long game, and it's a bit shallow all in all. I wasn't keen on the soundtrack myself, it was just generic techno. Seriously, where the hell is my ball?