If you visit Big Toe Software's website, you'll see that they refer to their top-down shooter Dark Matter as "an awesome remake of a stellar classic," but they don't actually mention the classic in question. Here's a hint: in Dark Matter, you control a ship that sits in the middle of a star field, shooting huge asteroids into smaller and smaller chunks until the field is eventually clear. Sound familiar? A few upgrades and extras have been added of course, but by and large, the gameplay is the same as it was when you played Asteroids in the local pizza joint some twenty years ago.

It's Déjà vu All Over Again
Dark Matter, available for download for a small fee, is Asteroids. It's not like Asteroids, or reminiscent of Asteroids, it is Asteroids, and as such, has very few surprises to offer anyone who cut their gaming teeth in the local arcade or on the Atari 2600. You shoot asteroids, you clear the field, you move on. As you advance through the Campaign mode and clear more levels, the asteroids get faster and other potential life-enders join the fray, such as floating space debris or lightning-fast enemy ships. Landing successful hits on targets fills your weapon meter, eventually rewarding you with weapon upgrades if your aim is good enough. Even the low-end of upgrades makes clearing the rock field way, way, way too easy, though, especially when you factor in the three field-clearing smart bombs you're given at the start of each round. Upgrades don't carry over from level to level, but even so, you should have no trouble tearing through Campaign mode's 30 or so missions in just a few play sessions.

If you need a break from Campaign mode, you can always test your mettle in Dark Matter's Challenge mode, which essentially dares you to rack up absurdly high scores. When the goal is 10,000 points and you're earning one or two points a pop (no, seriously), you know you have a long road ahead of you. It's definitely challenging, no doubt about it, since your ships and bombs aren't refilled the way they are in Campaign mode, but it's just really not that fun. Getting anywhere close to even the bottom of the leader board isn't all that hard, it just takes forever and a day because your score creeps up in such teensy weensy increments. Challenge mode isn't so much a game as it is work.

Dark Matter is What Happens While You're Busy Making Other Plans
Dark Matter may just be Asteroids, but it does have something to offer besides decades-old gameplay. The entire game's been given a very pleasing graphical overhaul, providing pockmarked asteroids that dwarf your shiny ship, space stations that perform a free-floating ballet inspired by 2001, and nasty little enemy ships with plasma trails that glow an evil red. The weapon upgrades are fun, too, changing your cannon from a pathetic little peashooter into a rock-vaporizing laser of death, complete with homing missles. The mouse is ideal for controlling your ship, as you simply point the cursor at your target and hold down the left button to fire, but my console-junkie brethren will be pleased to hear that Dark Matter is also compatible with the Xbox 360 controller. Cool!

It may sound odd, but the feature I enjoyed most in Dark Matter was the fact that it automatically pauses whenever you activate a different window on your PC, making it the perfect game to have in the background while you're doing other things. The levels also play quickly enough to divide Dark Matter into nicely defined chunks of time, so if you're on hold on the phone, taking a break from writing a report for school, or waiting for the oven to preheat, it's easy to reactivate the Dark Matter window, blow up some stuff, and get right back to what you were doing. It's hard not to appreciate a game that's so willing to work with your schedule.

It is What it is
Dark Matter is not innovative, it's not ground-breaking, it's not even original, but ultimately, none of that is the real problem. What it does, it does quite well, with intuitive control, pretty graphics, and a horizontal learning curve, but the lack of difficulty and dearth of gameplay variety virtually guarantee you'll lose interest before you get your $10 worth out of it. Smart gamers will check out the free demo (60 minutes of game time) at http://www.bigtoesoftware.com/dark_matter.php, instead.

-Maj1013