Get Even Review

Famed French New Wave director Jean Luc Godard once said, “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” All Get Even needs is a girl, a gun, and a shitload of serpentine narrative weirdness, as it takes you on a mind-bending journey from pillar to post. Ostensibly a shooter, you'll actually be doing very little with your gun in Get Even, and as for the girl, it all begins with one who's had a bomb strapped to her chest. It gets a bit complicated from there on out.

As Cole Black, an agent with a chequered past and a patchy memory, you'll set about gathering and piecing together evidence, joining the dots to understand how the girl came to find herself in such a horrendous situation. Going from a decrepit asylum, Black has a strange device known only as the 'Pandora' strapped to his face, enabling him to focus upon photographs in order to travel back to that exact time and place in order to relive his past memories.

It's probably a good idea to keep your gun at the ready.

By jumping back in time via photos, Black is able to go back over a variety of occurrences, searching his fragmented memory to get to the truth. For the most part, this involves tracking down old scraps of paper ranging from emails to fevered, insane scribblings, discarded tape recordings and pictures that together paint a complex picture of what's transpired to lead up to the game's quite literally explosive opening chapter. From the asylum to a huge weapons corporation, gloomy cemetery and a number of abandoned warehouse-type areas, Get Even is an unusual mystery, interwoven with seemingly connected trips into another life.

A rat in a maze situation, of sorts, ensues as Black is told what to do by the mysterious Red, which includes the theft of a valuable 'corner gun' prototype that sets in motion a whole series of events. Get Even's story can seem like a bit of a muddle, with a cast of characters all with their own backstories and place within the game's intricate jigsaw puzzle. And as the slightly convoluted yarn unfolds, it soon becomes clear that only a few key players are really of any importance, as red herrings and misdirection gives way to real answers in the end.

Upon acquiring the corner gun, meanwhile, you're able to shoot over cover and around corners, as the name suggests, the thermal imaging on Black's phone enabling you to pick out heat signatures. In fact, your phone proves an invaluable tool throughout Get Even, acting as a torch, a map, and device for scanning fingerprints and DNA samples from vital pieces of evidence that all feed into your ongoing investigation. Should you find yourself forgetting vital information, all of the materials you've found appear in Black's evidence room, so you can review it all at certain intervals.

Gather all of the evidence in a case, and you'll be rewarded with a code leading to hidden memories. No doubt the completist in you will want to find every bit of evidence and fill all nine boards in the room. Of course, there are achievements in it for you should you manage to collect every last scrap of paper, all of the tapes, and other scrawlings. The rest are rewarded for fulfilling certain objectives, while most come at the end of the game, as the revelations fly thick and fast.

One or two achievements also tie into combat, which in itself can be rather patchy. Although you're encouraged to adopt a stealthy approach and evade enemies at certain junctures, the reality is that stealth isn't all that viable an option, unless you're willing to move at a painful snail's pace. Try and shoot your way through an area on the other hand, and things become infinitely easier. There's a marshland late in the game that's particularly interminable, whichever approach you opt for, and you have to play it through twice, which is horrid.

Aargh! Phew. It's only a dummy.

Get Even has some great ideas up its sleeve then, and there are aspects of the story that are genuinely intriguing. Clearly, it's all a bit 'Inception', with reality seldom quite as it seems, amid conspiracies within mysteries within enigmas. Even the ending is fairly satisfying, though given the time it takes to reach it, the conclusion doesn't quite feel like the rug pull it could have been. Parts of the game's execution is a little on the sloppy side too, again, the combat being one area of relative weakness.

Get Even is actually more enjoyable when you're exploring and soaking in the atmosphere, which at times can be quite tense, especially when coupled with the excellent audio design. All in all, though, it feels like there's something missing from Get Even. There's a lot of reading of notes, a lot of strange and surreal moments, and while there are decisions that can come back to haunt you later on, these are too few and far between. More choices would have been welcome, as would additional puzzles to really stretch the grey matter.

Still, despite these few gripes, Get Even is an entertaining way to while away 8-10 hours, even if the shooty bits aren't quite up to snuff. Thankfully, the majority of the game is dedicated to exploration and unravelling the mystery at the heart of Get Even's spaghetti-like narrative, and it's all the more compelling for it. Whether the payoff is ultimately worth the time you'll sink into Get Even, I'm not entirely sure, but the journey alone is a worthwhile and mostly enjoyable one.