Get Even is filled with contradictions. It's an indie hit held in the body of a AAA title. It's a game that insists upon explore a hallucinatory, dilapidated mental asylum one moment and stealth the right path with an abandoned warehouse with super hi-tech advanced weaponry the next. Its story is a melodramatic mind-trip (literally) that utilizes every cheesy twist within the book while still somehow effectively exploring the manic psychological depths of grief and suffering. Quite simply, Get Even is really a fantastic, exciting experience, but as a game it falls a little flat. I guess you could say Get Even is really a little-uneven.
Speaking of bad wordplay, Get Even puts you in the shoes (or, better put, mind) of Cole Black, which could function as the name of the hardened mercenary or a third-tier Batman supervillain alter ego. In this case, Black is much more along the lines of the former, a hired gun tasked with discovering the place of and saving a girl. Following the mission goes south, however, he awakens in the aforementioned mental asylum with zero recollection of methods he got there. Not just that, but he's wearing a suped-up version of a VR headset, and he has got this anonymous, shadowy figure named Red barking obscure orders at him to unwind and explore.
The story is a twisting, turning plot point after another, though to say it's fairly predictable could be an understatement. If you've seen The Cell or Inception, you'll be able to do you know what. Regardless, Black's journey revolves around regaining his memory and remembering what led him for this moment by using his advanced headset (known in the game as “Pandora”) to dive into past memories and find clues spread around each level.
Get Even spends lots of energy in unraveling what, by the end, boils down to a reasonably simple storyline. It really works, for the most part, not so much due to where you end up but how you get there. Get Even's plot almost appears to function as a vehicle to immerse you in the world, not another way around-and this is a positive thing.
The one element that actually sticks out within this game is its world. As Black, you'll be whisked in one memory to a different; some of them engage in almost identically to the “Dangerous Minds” mission in Fallout 4. As with that mission, you walk across a series of bridges in one miniature theater-like set-piece to the next amidst a never-ending without any black, a voyeur in a stranger's mind. Each room you come across represents a brand new memory and features a few familiar props of significant emotional meaning-a artwork that someone's ex-wife painted, or the couch in which the couple had their last fight. These miniature set-pieces, populated by the ghostly memories of different characters, are even better and more ethereal than “Dangerous Minds,” though, and do a wonderful job of capturing the obscure notion of walking through someone else's memories.
Other missions engage in like standard stealth-action games, including a Metal Gear Solid-like minimap made up of dots and cones. You'll either be sneaking through the modern headquarters of weapons manufacturer Advanced Defense Strategies (A.D.S., get it?) or looking for memories in a darkened cemetery, but something always feels a little off.
Finally, the asylum moments most look like a smaller, more thoughtful game like Gone Home, where you root around, trying to find the following clue-though in Get Even's case, you'll occasionally need to solve a simple puzzle or take down a rampaging fellow patient who's charging you with a crowbar. Not only are there physical remnants of promising lives that have been shattered strewn through the maze-like asylum, however the growing chants of unstable men seem to be seeping with the walls.
And that's where Get Even truly excels. While the graphics themselves aren't anything to write home about, the skill design and the sound bring the planet to life and almost cause you to forget you're playing a game at all. I never thought ambient noise might be so exhilarating. Sure, half the reason I love the Battlefield series is because the sound, which for the most part has been top-notch, but its audio hasn't lulled me right into a hypnotic, dreamlike state the way that Get Even has. Whether it's the aforementioned deranged chanting, the haunting melodies of the faraway violin, the cries of a family member echoing in your head, or even just Black's breathing, Get Even's sound design is sufficient cause that i can recommend farmville. Yes, the sound design and music is just that good-and having fun with headphones is practically a requirement.
It's bad, then, the gameplay itself doesn't quite reach the same dizzying heights. That's not to state it's bad, since it could be fun, particularly when you receive a hi-tech gun that may peek around corners and fire at enemies (which is based on a genuine gun, by the way). It simply feels far too generic and shallow compared to the more ambient aspects of the game is the problem.
For one thing, you don't have a jump or perhaps a climb button, that was nearly impossible to find accustomed to within this age of the current, mobile shooter. I kept pressing what ought to be the jump button, only to take out my smartphone-which as your map, flashlight, clue scanner, and heat-vision viewer is really a major mechanic in the game, and works fine, but doesn't beg for much in-depth analysis-and scan environmental surroundings in the middle of an intense firefight. On top of that, Red is constantly reprimanding you for “disturbing the memories” when you get into firefights, however the stealth itself is less fun than letting bullets fly. The gunplay actually picks up close to the end from the game, with a few interesting Agent Smith-like mechanics added too, also it made me wonder why all of those other game's action didn't play out in the same way. The abilities you will get at the end of the sport admittedly cause you to almost godlike, but the gunfights never once presented challenging, even around the highest difficulty setting. So, it's not such as the balance of the game would be ruined by looking into making a little more powerful earlier on-but it would have permitted you to have more fun.
The action almost seemed obligatory, as if developer The Farm 51 felt compelled to include guns in a game that will happen to be far better off without them. That said, should you took out the gunplay, the game itself would be simply a walking simulator like Gone Home or Virginia, and would have lasted maybe 2 hours at most (a prospect that publisher Bandai Namco would have probably rejected). The shootouts are conventional padding for an otherwise unconventional game. Coincidentally, the gun sounds are probably the weakest types of audio hanging around, although the music that plays during one action scene particularly creates one of the strangest, most surreal shootouts That i have ever experienced in a game.
In fact, I have to wonder if Get Even started out as a VR game at the start of development until someone in the corporate later ordered for many shooting mechanics to become shoehorned in. Even so, the sport would have worked in VR; the shooting isn't so complicated or fast-paced to induce motion sickness, and the atmosphere would move from immersive for an all-consuming mind-trip. It appears as though a missed opportunity on someone's part, but we're only left to wonder “what if” and whether or not this was because of difficulty in developing for virtual reality, a lack of interest from the team, or worry from the publisher on the limited nature of that market at this time over time. After all, throughout almost the whole game, your character is wearing what's essentially a VR headset that lets you experience memories. There'd have been some nice meta-commentary there, but alas, we're left with what is simply a previously engaging, engrossing game only viewable on your Television set.
Despite the somewhat lackluster gameplay, Get Even sunk its claws into me and wouldn't release. Even a number of frustrating glitches and freezes didn't entirely take me from the game. Like Cole, I felt like I had been strapped right into a strange device, hunting for clues while held in a fever dream. It might not be perfect, but it is definitely worth experiencing. The Farm 51 says something important about games as an experiential medium here, and i am willing to listen.
