Active Matter drops military-grade gunplay into a multiverse full of anomalies that bend gravity and monsters with rules of their own, and it has the strangest, most memorable raids in the genre, along with a launch that did its newcomers no favors.
The genre’s missing ingredient was weirdness
Extraction shooters have spent years refining the same fear: the other player you did not hear, crouched in the building you have to walk past to reach the exit. It is a potent fear, and the genre has worn it thin. Active Matter keeps that tension and adds something most of its competitors never tried. The map itself is hostile in ways a rifle cannot solve, full of anomalies that twist gravity, reshape space, and corrupt anything living that wanders too close. That single addition makes it the most distinctive extraction shooter on PlayStation 5.
Gaijin Entertainment kindly provided the PlayStation 5 code for this review.
The game is developed by Matter Team and published by Gaijin Entertainment, the company behind War Thunder and Enlisted, and it runs on Gaijin’s Dagor Engine. After a paid early version on the Gaijin Store that began in September 2025, Active Matter launched in full on September 15, 2026, on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC through Steam and the Gaijin Store. I played it on PS5 across solo PvE, squad raids, and dedicated PvP, and on the current build, update 0.4.0.115, it is a genuinely good shooter with a rough first week behind it.
What the game is about
You play an operative trapped in a time loop. Each death sends you back to the same point, and the only way forward is to keep diving into quantum-unstable zones: fragments of Eastern Europe, Africa, and North America torn out of their own realities and stitched into a fractured multiverse. The substance at the heart of it all is active matter, a material that warps space and time and that you are sent in to recover.
The fiction draws openly on the SCP Foundation, the collaborative horror project built around cataloged anomalous objects and entities, and the influence is everywhere. Monsters here are less enemies than phenomena. They have rules, and learning those rules is as important as learning recoil patterns.
The narrative is delivered in fragments through the world and your objectives rather than cutscenes, which suits the genre. You are not here for a story so much as a setting, and the setting is excellent.
Gameplay: the raid loop
The structure will be familiar to anyone who has played the genre. You gear up at your base, drop into a zone, complete objectives, loot what you can, and try to get out alive. Die before extraction and you lose what you brought and what you found. That loss is real, and it is the engine of every tense moment the game produces.
Where Active Matter separates itself is in what happens between gearing up and getting out. Anomalies are physical hazards and traversal tools at once. Gravity distortions change how you move through a space, and areas warped by active matter can turn a straightforward route into a puzzle. PvPvE raids mix all of this with other operatives and with the monsters, and a firefight that draws the attention of something that should not exist is the game at its most exciting.
The monsters deserve special mention. The Distorted are dormant creatures that react to what happens around them, and a recent update changed their behavior so they no longer wake each other in a chain, which makes stealth past a nest a real option instead of a gamble. Mimics, including the Alpha Mimic, are the kind of threat that makes you distrust everything in a room. The design principle behind all of them is sound: never assume that what you see is harmless.
Modes split cleanly. PvE raids are available for anyone who wants the anomalies and monsters without the human threat, PvPvE is the core experience, and dedicated PvP battles exist for players who only want to fight other operatives. Solo PvE in particular is far better than it has any right to be in a game built around extraction, and it is the best way to learn the zones.
Gunplay and gear
The arsenal is rooted in real-world military hardware, and it feels like it. Weapons have weight, recoil is honest, and armor plates and helmets matter in a firefight. The list runs through familiar names: the M4A1 and SCAR-L, the MP5 and UMP45, the SV-98 and M110A1, and heavier options such as the PKM. Legendary weapons now turn up in raids across the multiverse, and WWII-era weapons can be found out in the zones too, which is exactly the kind of timeline bleed the setting should produce.
Beyond guns, you can deploy scout drones and take control of vehicles, including an assault quad bike and a robot dog. Movement is fluid, and aim on a DualSense controller feels well tuned for a game this grounded.
It is a hardcore shooter. Time-to-kill is short, mistakes are expensive, and the game does not protect you from the consequences of a bad push. The systems also take time to understand, and the opening stretch can overwhelm anyone new to the genre. That difficulty is a design choice, and a coherent one. It will not suit everyone.
The Shelter, the Replicator, and progression
Between raids you return to the Shelter, your base. It is customizable, and the launch update streamlined both the Shelter and inventory management so you can organize gear and get back into raids faster. An inventory button that suggests suitable items for each loadout slot is a small addition that removes a lot of friction.
The Replicator is the clever part. Active matter can pull objects from other timelines into the zones, and at your base you can use it to replicate specific items you have recovered. It gives extraction a second purpose beyond selling loot: getting a rare item home means getting the ability to rebuild it. Recent updates cut the cost of fusion and replication restoration for rare items and made helmet and armor plate repairs less punishing, which eases the sting of losing good kit.
Harmonization Cycles provide seasonal structure. The launch Cycle introduced Merits, earned throughout the Cycle and exchanged for rewards, including items from previous Cycles. Over the longer term, recovering active matter lets you upgrade your body and your arsenal as you fight for a way out of the loop.
The launch problem: no clean start
I will be direct about the biggest issue with Active Matter in its first week, because it shaped the experience for anyone arriving on console.
Players from the Gaijin Store early version kept their progress, and PC players could link it across to Steam. Your progress in Active Matter is also shared across platforms. That is generous to the players who supported the game for a year, and I understand the decision. The consequence is that the launch did not reset the playing field. Newcomers dropping into PvPvE on day one met veterans with a year of progression, high-level characters, and deep stashes, and the gap was obvious in any contested raid.
The editions widen it further. Higher editions front-load a starting stash of weapons, armor, and ammunition, extra storage and Replicator queue expansions, vehicle and drone recipes, and additional in-game currency. None of that guarantees a win in a game where a single mistake can cost you everything you carried, and skill still decides fights. But it is a head start, and in an extraction shooter a head start compounds.
My advice is practical. Spend your early raids in PvE, learn the zones and the monsters, build a stash, and move into PvPvE once you understand the maps. The game supports that route well, and it is the difference between a frustrating first week and a great one.
Graphics and performance on PS5
The Dagor Engine does excellent work here. The zones are dense and atmospheric, the anomaly effects are genuinely unsettling, and the contrast between grounded military equipment and space that folds in on itself is striking. Lighting sells the horror, especially inside, where a flashlight beam is often the only thing between you and whatever is waiting.
On PS5 the game runs cleanly, with no major performance problems in raids, and the patch cadence has been relentless. Updates landed on September 10, 11, 12, 14, and 17, each with performance work, fixes, and balance changes, the latest improving performance, reworking animations, and updating the interface and sound. That pace is the single most reassuring thing about the game’s future.
Soundtrack and sound design
The soundtrack is a real highlight. Over a hundred tracks by independent composers and guest artists score the multiverse, and Akira Yamaoka, the composer behind Silent Hill, is among them. His presence tells you exactly what tone the game is chasing, and the music delivers it: uneasy, textured, and very good at making an empty corridor feel occupied.
Sound design matters even more in an extraction shooter, and it holds up. Footsteps, gunfire direction, and the audio cues that warn you of a nearby anomaly or monster are clear enough to play by ear, which is the standard the genre demands. The launch update also included sound improvements.
Player experience
Active Matter asks a lot. It is a hardcore shooter with real loss, systems that take time to learn, and an opening stretch that is harder than it needs to be because of how the launch was handled. Players who stay with it get the most imaginative raids in the genre, a solid PvE route for learning, and a studio patching at a pace that shows it is listening.
Squad play is where it shines brightest, and the Elite Squad Edition exists specifically to bring two friends along. Solo players are well served by PvE. Pure PvP players have their own mode but will feel the progression gap most.
Long-term, everything depends on the roadmap Matter Team has promised and on the player base holding up, as it does for every game in this genre. The foundation is strong enough to deserve both.
Verdict
Active Matter is the extraction shooter with ideas. Anomalies that bend space, monsters with rules instead of health bars, a Replicator that gives extraction a second purpose, and a soundtrack with Akira Yamaoka’s fingerprints on it add up to raids that feel unlike anything else on PlayStation 5. The gunplay is grounded and satisfying, and Matter Team’s patching has been exemplary.
It is held back by its launch. Carrying early version progress into the full release gave veterans a year’s lead over every newcomer, edition bonuses stretch that lead, and the hardcore systems make the opening hard to love. None of that touches the quality of the core design. All of it affects how your first week feels.
Play it if you want an extraction shooter where the map scares you as much as the other players do, especially with a squad or through PvE first. Skip it if you want to jump straight into PvP on even terms, because on day one those terms do not exist.
