Active Matter Hands-On – First Look at Gaijin’s New Shooter

Meeting Active Matter at Gamescom

At Gamescom 2025 I stopped by Gaijin Entertainment’s booth for a hands-on session with their upcoming title Active Matter. Officially it positions itself as a military shooter, but what I played felt more like an extraction roguelite horror looter-shooter. Every part of that description matters, and in this first-impression write-up I’ll share why.

The game is developed by Matter Team, one of Gaijin’s internal studios. Their name shows up alongside Darkflow Software in the credits for CRSED: Cuisine Royale—the battle royale that began as an April Fools joke, complete with kitchenware armor and supernatural rituals. Some sources credit Darkflow alone, others list both, and Matter Team also handled later updates for CRSED. With Active Matter, they’re shifting tone completely: no frying pans or magic circles, but a darker, more grounded survival experience that mixes PvP and PvE.

It’s a bit messy to track who did what behind the scenes, but the key takeaway is simple: the project is backed by Gaijin. The company has a wide portfolio, from smaller experiments to large live-service titles, and in certain segments they are clear market leaders with games like War Thunder. More importantly, they run their own studios and have the resources to fund and adjust projects quickly.

That steady cash flow from established hits gives them a buffer that many studios don’t have—while others may bet everything on a single release, Gaijin can afford to experiment. That’s how they turned a kitchenware joke into a full multiplayer shooter in CRSED, or added crossover events into a hardcore simulator like War Thunder. With Active Matter, that same safety net allows them to test concept, and that’s often where the most interesting games appear.

So, what exactly did I experience in this early demo, and where might the game be heading? Let’s break it down.

Active Matter Game Loop in 100 Words or Less

1. At base you pick a raid, each map bringing different challenges and rewards.
2. during the raid you scavenge loot, gather resources, and react to events like airdrops.
3. Encounters happen with monsters, NPCs, or other players, though solo mode is also available.
4. Extract to return to base and unload everything you carried out.
5. Craft weapons, armor, consumables, tweak your layout, and test gear at the shooting range.
6. Start another raid—the cycle of risk and reward repeats.

So that is the core gameplay loop; while there are a lot of mechanics and important details in between, this is the game framework.

Details about Active Matter Game

Now let’s take a closer look at what I learned during my hands-on session. I assume I might have overlooked certain details like specific game modes or missions, but what I did see is enough to give a clear impression of the game without diving into spoilers or dragging this out too long.

The World, Where We Fight

Active Matter currently offers around 14 maps, each with its own layout and setting. Some take you through abandoned Soviet-style villages, others into ports, factories, or completely different countries.

You can’t really damage large objects (my tests with poking cars and furniture with a knife didn’t yield any results, haha), but smaller stuff reacts — you can shatter some tables or benches, and even knock around items like teapots or kitchenware. Still, there’s no real destruction for big interactables, though plenty of things can be searched. Searching cars, cabinets, and furniture drawers for loot is a core pillar of the gameplay, since at its heart this is a looter-shooter.

Add in anomalies that twist spaces upside down and environmental traps waiting to punish mistakes, and the world feels dangerous even before you meet your first enemy.

The Enemies, What We’re Facing

During raids you run into plenty of monsters, and they come in all shapes. Zombie-like humanoids, dogs “from hell,” walking bushes, silent stalkers, flying ghosts… pardon my naming, but during the demo they didn’t exactly introduce themselves properly. There’s definitely a wide variety, and I’m sure I didn’t see them all.

They’re not just scary, they fight smart and hard. Some aim surprisingly well, others set traps that trigger when you stumble into them. At first it feels overwhelming, but with experience you start learning how to counter each type. And once it becomes too easy, you can always push into higher-difficulty maps for better rewards.

On top of that, players themselves can become monsters. Finding an artifact ‘Distorted Hunter’ lets you transform, a bit like Dead by Daylight, and grants abilities such as a sonic shout that reveals enemy positions. The shout is audible, so when you hear it you instantly know one thing: there’s no safe place, and you’re being hunted.

The Combat, How We Fight

Active Matter definitely leans closer to Arma than to arcade shooters. Every hit you receive changes the way you play — wounds slow you down, shake your aim, blur your vision. A small indicator in the bottom-right corner shows exactly which body part among six zones is damaged, so you always know what’s limiting you.

There are many types of medicines to treat these states, but using them isn’t instant. Healing takes time, with full animations, so there’s no instant drinking potions mid-fight. You have to find cover and actually bandage or spray yourself while the fight rages on. Since raids happen in real time, there is no pause button: whether you’re looting, healing, or even rearranging your layout, every second you’re exposed to both players and monsters. Luckily, the maps offer enough hiding spots to catch your breath, but you’re never truly safe.

Gun handling feels natural and weighty. Reloads aren’t just a quick click, they’re detailed animations that take time. Shooting itself is complex: you can hold your breath to steady the weapon, but your wounds and even your character’s heart rate directly affect accuracy. The more your pulse races, the harder it becomes to land a clean shot. Together, all these layers make firefights tense and unforgiving — Active Matter plays much more like a first-person simulator than a casual looter-shooter. Not a Destiny 2, nope.

The Loot, Why We Fight

Loot is the backbone of Active Matter. Every raid revolves around what you can carry out and how much risk you’re willing to take. Searching isn’t instantaneous — when you check a car or a drawer, you first see how many items are inside, but not the items themselves. Each one takes around two seconds to reveal, and during that time you’re just standing there, fully exposed. It makes looting a meaningful decision — and a very private one. You don’t want anyone sneaking up while your face is stuck inside a kitchen shelf.

Speaking of risks — if you die during a raid, you lose your gear. That’s where the roguelite element kicks in. Every death hurts, and every extraction feels like a victory. To soften the blow, you carry stash containers as part of your inventory. Anything you place inside them is guaranteed to make it out, even if you don’t. During the demo I didn’t get a chance to test them all in detail, but their existence changes how you pack your loadout and what you’re willing to risk in the field. and of course, they are very limited.

All loot you bring back can either be used in your next raid or scrapped for parts to be repurposed, which brings us to another important aspect of the game — crafting.

Crafting, Building Your Loadout

Everything you extract feeds back into your base. The central tool here is the replicator, which lets you craft weapons, armor, consumables, ammo, and weapon mods once you’ve unlocked the right blueprints. These blueprints can be bought, earned through special quests. Replication isn’t instant — crafting can take anywhere from ten seconds up to ten minutes — but you can eventually unlock four replicators to work in parallel, keeping production flowing.

Because ammo and magazines are physical items you must carry into raids, crafting extends beyond guns. You also produce ammo pouches, armor attachments, and tactical gadgets like drones. This ties directly into the inventory system, where space and weight limit everything you can bring.

The physics system reinforces those limits in brutal ways. If you overload yourself and then jump from a second-floor window, you won’t just limp away, you’ll break your legs. It’s a harsh design, but building your loadout becomes a careful balance between what you want to bring and what might actually get you killed.

Weapons themselves are moddable, typically with barrels, scopes, stocks, and similar parts. Better-rarity weapons unlock more slots, with the maximum I saw being four. It isn’t as overwhelming as some hardcore shooters like Escape from Tarkov, but it’s enough to make each gun feel customizable without slowing down the pace of redeploying after death.

Here’s the full 60-minute gameplay session I recorded from the Gamescom 2025 build — in this footage of Active Matter you’ll see most of the things I described earlier in action (timecodes included).

Comparisons with Other Games

Speaking of other games, Active Matter immediately gave me a strong Escape from Tarkov vibe. The extraction loop, the tension of losing your gear on death, and the importance of every bullet all point in that direction. Weapon customization is a bit lighter and in my opinion hits a sweet spot: enough to feel like your gun is “yours,” without making every redeploy a chore.

On the atmosphere side, Active Matter draws clear parallels to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Chernobylite. The abandoned villages, Soviet ruins, and especially the anomalies feel straight out of those worlds. The mobs lean into the same tradition — unpredictable, sometimes supernatural, always unsettling. It even brought me back to reading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, the original source of the Zone. Environmental hazards like traps, anomalies, and warped spaces, felt exactly like the dangers I once pictured while going through those pages.

There’s also a DayZ element in how you approach encounters. Gunfire isn’t just noise; it’s a beacon that can bring enemies or players down on you fast. Running and gunning will only get you swarmed. Instead, the game pushes you to think, move carefully, and manage noise as much as bullets.

Finally, I’d mention Enlisted, another Gaijin title. While the scale and era are different, both games share that DNA of treating combat as serious business — weighty shooting, heart rate management, and consequences for every mistake.

Altogether, Active Matter blends familiar systems from several survival shooters but wraps them in its own PvPvE roguelite loop. It feels like a hybrid, pulling threads from big names while testing out ideas of its own.

Monetization, How the Game Is Sold

At launch, Active Matter uses a simple buy-to-play model. The Standard Edition costs $29.99 and includes the full game. No microtransactions have been confirmed yet, though cosmetic packs are likely down the line. Three higher tiers are also available:

• Advanced Edition – $49.98 
• Premium Edition – $79.97
• Elite Squad Edition – $120 

Higher editions add bundles of credits, Crystallised Active Matter for crafting, and various equipment packs. Essentially, they give you a faster start, but nothing you can’t eventually earn through gameplay.

Since raids are unforgiving and you can lose everything in a few bad runs, these bonuses don’t make the game pay-to-win. A skilled player can loot similar gear on their own, while careless players can burn through even the most expensive edition’s extras in no time.

Looking at my own Steam library, some of the closest games have clocked well over 600 hours of playtime. With that in mind, $29.99 for the base game feels like a very solid investment. The cost per hour of entertainment here is tiny — every single dollar can stretch into dozens of tense, memorable raids.

Active Matter Performance & Release

Active Matter enters early access on September 9th, available first through the Gaijin Store. This early version is meant as a testing ground. Steam and console versions are planned for 2026, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox confirmed. 

From a hardware perspective, the game looks well-optimized. The minimum spec lists a GTX 1050 Ti and DDR4 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, but the still-popular (Steam GPU Charts) GTX 1060 should handle the game well. Recommended builds target 1080p 60 FPS on cards like the RTX 2060 or RX 5700 XT, while high-end setups can push 4K on modern gen GPUs. Ultra-wide resolution and DLSS 4.0 are supported, and the install size is 45 GB on SSD.

During my session I was running on a high-end PC, so I can’t comment on scaling just yet. What I can say is that it ran smoothly at max settings and while recording video. Visually the focus is on clarity and atmosphere rather than pushing graphics tech to the limit. It feels like Gaijin knows its playerbase well and tuned game to run on older rigs while still giving newer hardware ability to flex.

Closing Thoughts in the Anomaly

When I called Active Matter a horror shooter, I wasn’t joking. The game feels very intense, especially inside tight buildings where monsters can suddenly jump into your face from a corner. Some enemies act like shades, silently stalking and only moving closer when you look away. The most terrifying moment for me was turning around with my flashlight and finding one right behind me. My heart rate spiked to about 140 bpm — more than during my actual horror hands-on with Cronos: The Last Dawn.

A few things I marked and wanted to outline:

• Monetization is in a strong position: buy-to-play, with extras that don’t slip into pay-to-win. A rare beast nowadays for a game-service, I must say.
• Inventory management is genuinely interesting, forcing you to make choices about what to carry.
• The “everything is temporary” loop isn’t usually my favorite, but I can see myself adapting to its “get in, loot, die, repeat” rhythm quickly.
• With Matter Team’s experience and Gaijin’s resources, the project feels well-supported.
• It’s very challenging, and while solo play is possible, I’d strongly recommend bringing friends. Otherwise it can be too scary and unforgiving.
• I really hope the team will build some kind of campaign or storyline. Something that doubles as a tutorial, a lore introduction, and another solid reason to buy in even if extraction grind isn’t your thing.

Active Matter blends survival, horror, and looter-shooter elements into a raw and challenging experience — a game built for players who don’t mind risk and fear as part of the fun. With its simulator-grade combat, I expect plenty of “uh-oh” reel moments once players start sharing their edge-of-the-seat experiences. As for me, I’ll be keeping an eye on how game evolves once early access begins.