Active Matter Review: Janky, Weird, and Somehow Me and My Cousin Can’t Stop Playing

My cousin Justin and I play a lot of games together. At this point, gaming is basically how we hang out. Valheim has eaten hundreds of hours of our lives, we’ve bounced through survival games, Soulslikes, co-op games, and plenty of games that lasted one night before one of us quietly never mentioned them again.

Active Matter has not been one of those games.

This one got its hooks into us pretty quickly, and I’m still not entirely sure how to explain why because Active Matter is kind of a fucking mess.

A really fun fucking mess.

What the hell is Active Matter?

Calling Active Matter an extraction shooter is technically correct, but it also sells the game short.

You grab your gear, head into a zone, loot whatever you can, hopefully accomplish whatever sent you there, and try to make it back out without losing everything. That’s the familiar part.

Then Active Matter starts doing Active Matter shit.

The world is completely screwed. Space doesn’t always behave correctly. Gravity doesn’t always behave correctly. There are anomalies everywhere, strange creatures, bizarre objects, places that feel like they shouldn’t physically exist and a whole multiverse/time-loop thing hanging over everything.

Somehow, all of this is sitting right next to realistic guns, tactical equipment and some fairly grounded shooting.

It sounds like somebody dumped STALKER, SCP, an extraction shooter and a military simulator into a blender, forgot to put the lid on, and decided whatever landed on the ceiling was the game.

And I mean that as a compliment.

The actual premise backs up the insanity. You’re an operative trapped in a time loop, entering quantum-unstable zones to recover Active Matter while the substance itself screws with space, gravity and living things. The game has isolated PvE raids along with PvPvE and PvP, so Justin and I can actually spend time exploring this ridiculous world together instead of every single outing turning into a sweatfest against somebody who hasn’t seen sunlight since Tarkov launched.

This is the kind of game that works for us

I think this is where Active Matter clicked.

Justin and I don’t need every game we play together to be perfectly balanced or perfectly polished. We need stuff to happen.

Valheim became one of our favorite games because half the memories aren’t even about defeating bosses. They’re about everything that went wrong getting there. Somebody forgot food. Somebody sailed the boat into something stupid. We got murdered somewhere inconvenient. A plan that sounded completely reasonable five minutes earlier turned into a disaster.

Active Matter has that same quality, just in a completely different kind of game.

There is always this feeling that we’re heading somewhere we probably shouldn’t be going.

We’ll enter a zone with an actual plan, start working through it, find something strange, and suddenly the original plan doesn’t matter nearly as much anymore. There is another building over there. Something weird is happening over here. What the fuck is THAT?

That curiosity is probably my favorite part of the game.

Active Matter gives me a reason to actually look around.

The world is fucking cool

This is easily the strongest part of the game for me.

So many extraction shooters are mechanically competent and completely forgettable. Here’s another warehouse. Here’s another military checkpoint. Here’s another room full of filing cabinets. Go find six pieces of garbage and hope nobody shoots you in the back while you’re doing it.

Active Matter actually makes me curious about where I am.

The zones are fragments of different realities, with locations pulled from different parts of the world and mashed into this larger broken multiverse. The developers describe areas where Active Matter literally changes gravity and the topology of space, and that isn’t just lore sitting in a menu somewhere. That weirdness is part of the places you’re exploring.

That changes the entire mood of the game.

Justin and I aren’t simply looking for loot. We’re looking around because the world itself is interesting.

I want to know what’s behind the next door.

I want to know what that thing does.

I want to know if we should touch it.

We probably shouldn’t touch it.

We’re going to touch it.

PvE makes a huge difference for us

I also really appreciate that Active Matter lets us play isolated PvE raids.

I have nothing against PvP. Sometimes I want PvP. Sometimes the possibility of another player appearing is exactly what makes an extraction game exciting.

But I don’t want that every single time I play.

Sometimes Justin and I just want to load in, explore, shoot monsters, screw around with our gear, find some loot and see what the game throws at us. Active Matter lets us do that. The developers specifically added isolated PvE raids, and the game now supports PvE alongside PvPvE and PvP.

For two people playing together, that matters a lot.

It gives us room to actually learn the game instead of learning it through seventeen consecutive bullets to the forehead.

More importantly, it lets the world breathe.

We’re not constantly sprinting toward an extraction because another squad might be hiding behind every bush. We can actually wander off because something looks interesting, which is exactly how we tend to play games anyway.

Oh, there is jank

Let’s talk about the obvious part.

Active Matter is janky.

Sometimes very janky.

There are animations that look strange. Movement can feel awkward. AI occasionally seems to be having a personal crisis. Things don’t always behave the way you’d expect them to. Some systems feel like they still need another pass, and every once in a while something happens where Justin and I just kind of stop and go, “Okay… what the fuck was that?”

There are bugs.

There are rough edges.

There are moments where you can absolutely see the game underneath the game, if that makes sense.

But here’s the thing.

We’re still having fun.

I have played plenty of games that were more polished than Active Matter and dropped them almost immediately because there was nothing there that made me want to come back.

Active Matter is the opposite.

I notice the jank. Sometimes we laugh at the jank. Sometimes the jank pisses me off.

Then we queue up again.

That’s usually the test that matters to me.

It has actual personality

I think the reason I can forgive so much of the roughness is that Active Matter actually feels like somebody had an idea.

Maybe several ideas.

Possibly too many ideas.

But there is something here.

The realistic military gear next to supernatural SCP-looking nightmare fuel is weird. The multiverse stuff is weird. The anomalies are weird. The time loop is weird. Even the idea that Active Matter can pull objects from other timelines and let you replicate them back at your base is weird.

Good.

Give me weird.

I’d rather play something that occasionally falls on its face while trying to do something interesting than another perfectly polished game that feels like it was assembled from a checklist of whatever is popular this year.

There are already enough extraction shooters.

Active Matter feels like Active Matter.

The cousin test

I’ve realized over the years that this is probably the easiest way for me to judge a co-op game now.

When Justin gets off, do I actually want to play it again tomorrow?

Because we have played a LOT of games together.

Some are fun for a night. Some survive a weekend. Some make it a couple weeks. Then there are the ones where one of us sends the other a message the next day and basically says, “So… we going back in?”

Active Matter is currently one of those games.

We talk about the gear we found. We talk about where we should go next. We talk about some stupid thing that happened the night before. We start figuring out what we want to work toward.

That’s the part Steam screenshots can’t really show you.

There is a difference between a game that is good and a game you actually enjoy playing with someone.

Right now, Active Matter is absolutely the second one for us.

What I want to see improved

I don’t want the praise to make this sound like Active Matter gets a free pass.

It needs work.

The jank needs cleaning up. Some of the movement, AI, animations and general interaction with the world need to feel better. There are systems that aren’t always immediately understandable, and there are parts of the experience where the game seems determined to make something more complicated than it needs to be.

The developers have clearly been working through that stuff. Recent updates have included fixes for players getting stuck in geometry, monster visibility, raid selection, anomaly locations and other general weirdness, which tells you both sides of the story pretty well. They’re fixing it, but yes, this game has some shit to fix.

I want to see all of that improve because underneath it is a game I actually want to keep playing.

That’s an important distinction.

I’m not sitting here waiting for Active Matter to eventually become fun.

It’s already fun.

I just want the game around that fun to get better.

Final verdict

Active Matter is weird as hell.

It is janky. It is confusing sometimes. Occasionally something happens and Justin and I have absolutely no idea whether we just encountered an intentional anomaly or a spectacular bug.

And somehow that has become part of the fun.

The world is what really sells it for me. I haven’t felt like we’re simply grinding another extraction shooter. It feels like we’re poking around somewhere we’re not supposed to be, trying to understand this completely broken reality while grabbing whatever useful shit we can carry back home.

Most importantly, my cousin and I are having fun playing it together.

Real fun.

The kind where a session ends and we’re already talking about what we’re doing next time.

I can forgive a lot of jank for that.

Active Matter absolutely needs polish, but please don’t polish the weirdness out of it.

That’s the best part.