Shatter Hands-On

Lucy and I got to see Sidhe’s latest game, Shatter, at E3 at the start of June. Unfortunately, we were pressed for time and didn’t get a good feel for it. But luckily enough, Sidhe’s offices are located in Wellington, so we traipsed on down there recently to get a closer look.

To picture Shatter, it’s best to envisage Breakout (or whatever clone you’re familiar with). You know, it’s the game with a bat/paddle that you move around at the bottom of the screen, bouncing balls upwards to destroy bricks. There’s a very good chance it’s on your mobile phone, in fact.

So take the image that’s now in your head, and now try to picture it meshed with anything from Geometry Wars and Rez, to Lumines and even Wipeout HD. The result is something that starts out like Breakout, but moves off in totally different directions after about five seconds of play time.

You’ve still got a bat and balls, but the gameplay diverges through a few key power-ups and abilities. Probably the biggest of these is the use of a controller’s triggers to affect gravity. Using either trigger, you can either pull objects towards you, or push them away. This not only allows you to suck in all the free-floating points that soon fill up the screen, but also alter the course of the ball as it’s bouncing around. For such a simple thing, it makes a lot of difference – I’ve never been a fan of the Breakout genre, partly because you had no control once the ball was doing its own thing. Now, however, it’s a lot more interactive.

Power-ups take things further – you can charge up a rapid-fire gun that blasts through bricks. Explosive bricks cause huge explosions that can quickly wipe out most of the screen. Entire chains of bricks can be linked together by a central object – destroy this and all the bricks start floating around. There seems to be a never-ending stream of variations on the regular abilities found in the genre, and when they’re all packed together it turns Shatter into a completely different game.

You’ll progress through several worlds, made up of individual levels. At the end of each world, you’ll encounter bosses that you have to defeat. If it’s all starting to sound a bit like a shoot ‘em up, you’re not far wrong – with power-ups, boss battles, an emphasis on score multipliers, and simply a metric ton of visual debris in each level, Shatter sits as much in that camp as any other.

The gameplay, however, doesn’t exist on its own. Both the visuals and the audio combine to create an intangible experience that becomes strangely immersive. In line with Rez or Lumines, the visual style in Shatter is all about pulsing neon colours, futuristic-looking objects, and a ton of bright lights. If trance music were visible, it’d look like this.



And speaking of the music, it deserves a call-out for fitting right into the game as well. Created by local man Jeremiah Ross (aka Module), over 90 minutes of original material was made that…well, that puts you into the best kind of vegetative state.

We only got to play the first two worlds, so it’s hard to say how much the gameplay will hold up over the long-term. Considering the amount of features and different takes on the gameplay early on, however, it’s looking promising.

Shatter is coming exclusively to the PlayStation Network. No release date has been set yet, but we’ve been told it “shouldn’t be too far away”. I never thought I’d enjoy a Breakout game, but I can feel an addiction coming on.

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