Technical issues plague this interesting mash-up of CS and Valorant | Review - Matr1x FIRE beta
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✨Overview
Matr1x FIRE is a 5v5 competitive mobile first-person shooter with a unique blend of cyberpunk aesthetics, strategic team-based matches, and integration of blockchain technology. The game is currently on a beta testing phase that started last Jan 26 and will last around a month and a half.
Developed as a flagship product for the MATR1X web3 entertainment platform, the game explores a dystopian future Earth where players engage in battles to reclaim data sovereignty from powerful entities. There are NFT and crypto elements in the game and is being touted as a play to earn game, where players have the opportunity to earn NFTs and digital art assets like weapons, skins, and accessories, all while playing.
⭐️Score: 5/10
📖Story and Premise
Set in a future Earth facing resource depletion in an era dominated by artificial intelligence, the game's narrative revolves around the Matr1X Alliance. This alliance emerges as a response to organizations like Uranus monopolizing human data sovereignty. Players find themselves thrust into a conflict to reclaim control and engage in direct confrontations against the oppressive forces. Matr1x FIRE is just one of many games planned to be set in this conflict and universe.
🎨Visuals and Art
Matr1x FIRE features a blend of futuristic and stylized realism with clean and well-defined character designs, environments, and in-game elements. The visuals are sharp, lightly colored, and easily distinguishable, allowing players to quickly identify characters and objects. The environments and character designs incorporate futuristic elements such as advanced technology, cyberpunk elements, sleek architecture, and high-tech weaponry. The weapons and characters comes in different skins as part of the game’s cosmetic system that is tied to it’s NFT elements.
🎮Gameplay
Matr1x's flagship product, Matr1x Fire, is a first-person shooter game designed for mobile devices. Players choose characters from a roster and engage in five-person team battles. The game may look very similar to the game Valorant, featuring similar color palletes, weapon designs, character styles, and even the menu animations, which in turn most of it inspired by another popular shooter, Counter Strike; But playing the game, the gameplay format it has adopted is actually much closer to Counter Strike than Valorant — no hero skills, no flashy abilities; only grenades like flash, smoke, and frag grenades which adds a lot of tactical element into the game that CS players will find very familiar with.
🔫Gunplay
As usual with this gameplay format, there is no ADS (Aim Down Sight) system like those found in PUBG or Call of Duty except for a limited selection of weapons like the Sniper Rifle and the Steyr AUG equivalent. Matr1x FIRE places a high value on precision and accuracy. Moving while shooting significantly reduces accuracy, encouraging players to stop or use controlled bursts for better accuracy — although here I found the system is more forgiving since its using touch-based mobile controls.
It also features a similar economy system for its rounds. affecting the availability of weapons and equipment. Teams need to manage their finances to ensure they can afford the most effective weapons for each round.
📜Game Modes
The current test version features three main game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Competitive mode. Deathmatch is your basic "kill everyone you die and respawn immediately upon dying" mode, with the first player to reach 40 kills winning the round. Team Deathmatch is a 5v5 fight, and the first team to reach 70 kills wins.
The Competitive mode serves as the main focus of the game and includes the iconic Bomb Defusal game mode, along with familiar map layouts that CS players will easily recognize. I've played on maps with layouts very similar to Dust II, Inferno, Mirage, among other examples. With one side aiming to plant a bomb at one of the designated bomb sites labeled A and B on the map and the other side defending these sites or defusing the bomb when planted. The round ends when either the bomb explodes, eliminating all defenders, when the bomb is successfully defused, or eliminating all attackers when defused. The team that wins the round earns a point.
📊Technical Performance
The game itself is a decent CS/Valorant mash-up when it comes to the game mechanics, but in my experience with my Snapdragon 888 device (ROG Phone 5), it suffers is from massive performance issues—particularly heavy stuttering that I experience during the start of rounds and when the game is loading new entities, such as changing the spectating player or loading new weapons.
This stuttering is happening even with the game at its lowest settings and even throughout the middle of matches, and this basically makes the game borderline unplayable, sometimes the freezes are so severe that you cannot do anything during preparation time at the start of matches.
Connectivity-wise, I was getting good latency to the servers, but I still experience occasional disconnects and lags. One time I even got disconnected from a competitive match and I had no way of reconnecting back. And it's not just me; when spectating other players, I also notice it happening to them—AFKs, players lagging, and running towards walls are all too common. There are also various major issues still in the game such as characters T-posing randomly, or effects not loading properly. Still, its worth nothing that the game is still in beta, things will still improve and this review does not accurately represent the quality of the finished product.
⚖️Conclusion
Despite its promising Valorant/CS-inspired gameplay, Matr1x FIRE faces significant technical issues during the beta phase that need to be addressed if it is ever going to compete with the heavy hitter games. If the dev team manages to pull it off and delivers a polished game upon release all while we are still waiting for Valorant Mobile, it might just capture the market. If not, then it's still a nice stop-gap of a game while we wait.
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