➤ Get Even: the labyrinth of memories 🎮

The password for Get Even? "Unusual". Seriously, we are talking about a game that in some ways is a half miracle: a minor project by the Polish studio The Farm 51, known for Painkiller: Hell and Damnation (and little else), which managed to get noticed and published by a great company like Bandai Namco despite being anything but a commercial game. Not only that, the Japanese giant has continued to support the developers even in a difficult moment of creative block, managing with the help of an experienced producer and some additional resources to bring the work to completion. However, Get Even is not an atypical videogame only for the events that led to its birth: it is a product far from the first-person titles we are used to, which ranges between various genres and tries to offer the player an experience full of tension. and strong emotions, relying on a branched narrative and a painstaking study of sound. We have played it thoroughly these days, after trying it at various events, to understand if the young software house had actually managed to create something memorable. The answer can be found as usual below, but it is considerably more complex than a simple "yes or no".

Rosso e nero

The beginning of Get Even sees you as Cole Black, a rude ex-mercenary committed to the rescue of an unspecified victim of a kidnapping. On paper it's the typical movie hero mission: neutralize the mercenaries, save the girl, collect the glory ... but something goes wrong. Cole wakes up immediately after the accident, with no memory and in a place he does not recognize. It's a madhouse where he is, and the only voice to guide him through the claustrophobic corridors and crumbling walls of buildings is that of a mysterious doctor who says his name is Red. Only that our "guide" also states that Black's presence in that horrible place is intentional, and that it is all part of a specific "treatment" whose ultimate goal is to make him regain his memory. More of the premise you don't have to know, other than the fact that Red's plans coincide with the use of a very advanced viewer called Pandora - able to revive memories as if it were a virtual reality simulation - and that these will bring the player to get lost in a very complex tangle of events, with more than a few surprises waiting for him.

The narrative of Get Even, indeed, is not an impeccable example of a script: it has ups and downs, and many of its twists are extremely predictable (also because the clues scattered to understand what is happening are not lacking). The epilogue, however, is very satisfying, and the slow and staid progress of events is reinforced enough by the environmental narrative and the careful search for clues not to tire. In short, Farm 51 got the plot right, and the impact they weren't able to get from the dialogues pulled it out of the sound, since Get Even boasts an absolutely exceptional sound design. The multifaceted composer responsible for the game's music, Oliver Deriviere, has in fact curated music and effects in a maniacal way, blending them to events with impressive naturalness. Sound clues populate all levels, while the music gradually becomes more oppressive as you get closer to an important event: most of the emotions that the game manages to stimulate in the player come from this element, and there is very little to criticize (maybe just a few moments a bit too extravagant).

I don't want to use that gun

If it is true that both history and sound are at the top of the range, however, the same cannot be said of two other equally important factors: gameplay and technical sector. As mentioned previously, in fact, Get Even is a hybrid title, which combines exploration and investigation of various types of shootings. You will spend the vast majority of the game walking, solving (rather basic) puzzles, and using the various functions of your mobile, which contains a scanner, a map, an ultraviolet light and an infrared viewer, but everything will break the moment you have to. make use of guns, because of mechanics that are anything but filed. In fact, in firefights the artificial intelligence often proves to be atrocious, and when it does not move in senseless ways it crashes against the obstacles of the maps or stops in cover waiting for death. Not only that, the feeling of the weapons is bad, unstable, with enemies that fall apart after a couple of hits, and can sometimes kill you just as quickly without warning.

A real shame, because the team at least tried to make everything very original, with the introduction of the Angular Gun - a curious weapon capable of folding sideways and firing accurately from any cover - and additional mechanics related to the Pandora viewer that can be used. in the final stages of the adventure. Without quality mechanical foundations, however, this originality is not enough. To want to say it all, the clashes would also be largely avoidable, so much so that the game tries to push towards a peaceful approach (some events change based on the violence of your actions and moral choices made during advancement). Yet the stealth phases are not so much better, partly due to the positioning of the enemies and partly due to the annoying need to constantly switch from the map - where you can see the visual cones of the opponents - to the scanner to "shape" cover and passages often essential to move undisturbed.

The path of the mind

Checkpoints not always very generous only make certain sections even more irritating, despite a rather permissive general difficulty, and it is undoubtedly a serious problem when in a video game that tries to overcome the typical conception of the "walking simulator" the worst parts are precisely those in which you play. From a team that has already worked on shooters we certainly expected a little more skill in this field. The last element that partially ruins the experience is the technical one, because the PlayStation 4 version we tested unfortunately gave us very little satisfaction. Let's be precise: graphically Get Even is not bad, thanks to real locations recreated through precise scans and realistic three-dimensional models that sometimes make a bad figure. The textures are not particularly detailed, however, the polygon count is far from impressive, and on consoles the game makes an abominable effort to maintain a stable frame rate. Especially in the final phase, then, we noticed heavy drops (with some short freezes that worried us not a little), as well as a handful of naive bugs that sometimes forced us to restart from the last checkpoint. In the PC version we tested in the past the problems were certainly minor, but the visual impact of the game does not justify this kind of hiccups on consoles. Let's close with longevity: Get Even is not a particularly long-lived experience, although there is a certain emphasis on collecting clues and it is possible to replay the various phases to discover various significant secrets for the story (related to the changes we talked about earlier). You will finish it in five or six hours at the most, but it is a fair amount of time to avoid the experience becoming stale. The reduced price of the title justifies the time it takes to complete it.

Comment

Tested version PlayStation 4 Resources4Gaming.com

7.5

Readers (11)

6.5

Your vote

Deeply flawed due to clumsy shootings, unsatisfactory stealth phases and a technical sector that is anything but flawless, Get Even cannot deal with the best first-person titles on the market. Its complex narrative and excellent use of sound, however, still make it a worthy product that will surely captivate lovers of well-written stories and atmospheric games. Too bad only for the waste of potential, it could have been much more.