Active Matter is a new extraction shooter that bends reality

The extraction-shooter battlefield is getting another strange competitor. Active Matter, the latest multiplayer shooter from Matter Team and Gaijin Network, has officially launched on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, bringing a familiar loot-and-extract formula into a universe where gravity, space, and even reality itself have stopped behaving properly.

With ARC Raiders helping put extraction-style PvPvE action firmly in the spotlight, Active Matter enters a genre already packed with high-profile competitors. However, the game's biggest hook is a fractured multiverse in which operatives are trapped inside a time loop and forced to repeatedly venture into quantum-unstable zones in search of a substance capable of bending space and time. This setting is unusual and exciting enough to grant the game attention from the fans of the genre. But, what else does it offer?

Active Matter gives extraction shooters a reality-breaking twist

Active Matter foffers a rather clasic extraction shooter gameplay experience when it comes to the basic mechanics. Players select their equipment, enter a raid, search for valuable resources, complete objectives, fight AI enemies and opposing players, and then attempt to extract before everything goes catastrophically wrong. The difference is what happens inside those raids.

The game revolves around a mysterious substance capable of altering space and time. This active matter can be harvested from transformed creatures, discovered in clusters throughout the environment, or taken from rival players. The result is a battlefield where conventional military combat can suddenly collide with bizarre anomalies and supernatural threats. And yes, that means you can be worrying about another player's sniper position one moment and then have the laws of physics ruin your entire plan the next.

In the game, the world is a hostile and unstable multiverse, combining realistic military weapons with twisted environments, gravity-defying anomalies, strange SCP-inspired objects, and monsters created through exposure to active matter. Despite all the science-fiction chaos, Active Matter keeps its arsenal grounded in recognizable military technology. Weapons and equipment are based on real-world designs, creating an interesting contrast with environments where the rules of reality are constantly being rewritten.

The game also uses the multiverse concept to explain its enormous variety of equipment. Active matter can bring objects from different timelines into the same location, while players can replicate discovered items at their base. This gives the progression and crafting systems a narrative justification rather than simply throwing a collection of unrelated guns into an inventory. The setting itself is similarly fragmented. Players can explore environments inspired by a Soviet closed island, a Central African quarantine zone, and a deteriorating North American metropolis. Each location brings its own enemies, atmosphere, and tactical challenges.

Active Matter also features a progression system linked to a Syndicate base, where players can expand their facilities, improve their arsenal, and prepare for future raids. The wider conflict revolves around controlling important sources of active matter, tying individual extraction runs into the game's larger multiverse narrative.

Update 0.4.0.115 arrives with a long list of fixes

Matter Team isn't waiting around to start refining the experience. The game's first post-launch patch, Update 0.4.0.115, focuses on performance improvements, animation fixes, gameplay corrections, interface changes, and audio adjustments. Several changes target problems that could directly affect raids. The patch fixes an incorrect magazine ammunition count that could appear when spawning into a raid, an animation glitch that could interrupt reloads, and an issue where taking damage could reset a movement-speed modifier.

Update 0.4.0.115 also addresses some environmental and AI-related problems. The patch also tackles several issues affecting the broader raid experience, including problems with extraction and anomalous-zone behavior. These are exactly the sort of technical problems that can turn a tense extraction into an involuntary rage quit, so cleaning them up is important for the game's core loop.

A different flavor of extraction shooter

Active Matter is carving out its own space in a genre increasingly populated by ambitious PvPvE shooters. Its extraction mechanics will be familiar to players coming from games such as ARC Raiders, but the combination of realistic firearms, time loops, multiverse fiction, supernatural anomalies, and reality-warping environments gives the formula a distinctly stranger flavor.

For players looking for an extraction shooter but interested in something more surreal than a conventional military battlefield, Active Matter offers an experience where the biggest problem might be reality itself falling apart around you. Make sure to use our comparator to purchase Active Matter at the lowest price if you are interested in the game.