Shatter

Shattering conventions

Shatter was released on the PSN July 23 for $7.99.  Now Shatter is really good, but short. The game has three modes and two of them are hardly modes. You have ten worlds with about 7-10  stages in each world. At the end of each world you will encounter a boss. Now these bosses all differ greatly from one another and become increasingly difficult. By the last one you really have to think things out. At first glance shatter looks like an Arkanoid clone, but with a closer look you see that there’s much more to Shatter.

(This is my favorite world and by far the best track.)

In Shatter, you have the ability to “Blow” and “Suck” almost anything in each stage. You start with three balls that act as your life, if you lose all of your balls…well you can guess the rest. As you clear each stage by hitting all the blocks you will see a bunch of blue “shards” as they are called, and as you collect these shards by sucking them into your paddle you fill a bar. Once its filled it allows you to do “shard storm.” A shard storm is a kind of  blast that slows down time and allows you to shoot these shards back out of your paddle to clear a bunch of blocks from the stage, and sometimes shard storm is the only way to damage the latter bosses. This is not the only thing you can do with these shards you collect…you also have blocks that are affected by your blowing and sucking and sometimes the blocks will hit you and stun your paddle which may cause you to miss your balls. This is where the bar comes in…you can use some of the energy to make your paddle absorb the blocks as they hit you.

Beyond the ten worlds in single player, you get two other modes…one being a boss rush mode which is just the ten bosses one after the other and isn’t all that special and once you do it once or twice you won’t really have any draw to visit it again. The last mode isn’t even worth talking much about, its a bonus mode where you just try to hit three balls and keep them from getting past your paddle. This is the same as what you run into in between each world.

The best part of Shatter is the music. Shatter is fully scored soundtrack by New Zealand artist Module, featuring more than 90 minutes of music, that fits perfectly with each world’s theme. Now its worth noting that the soundtrack can be bought and costs $9.99…I can’t stress this enough you have to check out this music. I’m not that into techno or electric music but this is just right and puts in you a great mood.

In closing I highly recommend Shatter. It doesn’t have much lasting appeal or much replayability, but what you get out of it is well worth the 7 dollar admission fee.