Article by Gianluca “DottorKillex” Arena
Intriguing, different from the usual, ambitious, are just some of the adjectives that could qualify Get Even, the new intellectual property on which Bandai Namco has bet: developed by the guys of The Farm 51, a young Polish team that incorporates experienced elements of the industry, this first person shooter places great emphasis on storytelling and player choices, slowing down the rhythms of the reference genre and setting unusual goals. We have tested it thoroughly for you in the PS4 version and we are ready to tell you what we think.
In Cole Black's head
The narrative arc, or it would be better to say the circle, since the story opens and closes in the head of Cole Black, protagonist of the story and alter ego of the player on the screen, is very tangled and mysterious, and brilliantly uses an abused but always effective narrative device, that is to put the player and his avatar in the same condition of ignorance of the events.
Cole Black is, apparently, a mercenary, a rifle in the pay of the highest bidder, initially engaged in an arduous mission to rescue a hostage, which doubles as a tutorial: a bomb was tied to the neck of the unfortunate kidnapped girl, of which Cole seems to be able to avoid the explosion.
"Seems", however, is the key verb in Get Even: it's never really clear how real what the player sees through Cole's eyes is, especially when the latter awakens a couple of days after the rescue mission ( in June 2015) with a strange contraption connected to the head, inside what looks like a disused asylum.
To avoid annoying and seemingly inappropriate spoilers, we stop here, but if it seems to you that the plot is confusing and cryptic, you are not far from the reality of the facts, at least for the whole first part of the adventure: like a puzzle enthusiast who puts away the pieces of the frame first, the player collects clues, records, textual information and documents about what really happened and these, at first glance, do not seem to have any connection between them.
As the hours go by, slowly, the plot is revealed, while maintaining an aura of mystery until the final stages, between false leads, half-truths and more or less hidden pitfalls: although some of the topics covered are not exactly new to the medium, the plot of the product developed by Farm 51, initially slow and confusing, gradually becomes one of the strengths of the production, although a couple of questions remain unsolved as the credits roll.
As we will see later in the paragraph dedicated to game mechanics, Get Even is much more at ease when it has to tell a story, the dilemmas of its characters and the strong emotions that arise from it than when it has to entertain the player at a playful level: probably the development team didn't fully trust the strength of his script.
But how is it played?
The gameplay of Get Even is basically divided into two sections, those of investigation and those of shooting, that intersect and alternate in the course of the missions, sharing both the first-person view and some intrinsic limitations, which prevent the production from aspiring to an even higher rating.
In our opinion, the development team did not fully trust the solidity of the narrative framework of its product, preferring to alternate the more distinctly exploratory phases with others typical of shooters which, however, despite the introduction of a very interesting gadget like the corner gun, they immediately reveal themselves as the weakest link in the chain.
But let's go in order: in most cases, the player will find himself in the role of Cole, and will have to wisely exploit the most advanced functions of his smartphone to shed light on the numerous narrative nodes of the plot: in addition to the canonical torch, it will be possible to view the sources heat, so as to observe the disposition of enemies even beyond walls and other obstacles, and also use ultraviolet rays, useful for finding fingerprints and other organic traces.
Although the path to follow is mostly one and, like all highly narrative titles, the player often feels guided by the events themselves, the investigation phases work, also because, with a technique made immortal by Christopher Nolan's splendid Memento, the player gets fragments of facts and memories one piece at a time, often in the wrong order, and will therefore have to do a great job to reconstruct a mental map of the events.
If Get Even had stopped here, in short, remaining a first-person adventure with strong narrative tinges, it would not have highlighted any particular weaknesses
Instead, perhaps to meet market trends or to embrace a much wider audience than that of the so-called "walking simulators", Farm 51 has included numerous shooting phases, during which it has shown, unfortunately, that it is not at ease as from the point of view of the plot.
The scarcity of guns, the imprecision of the hitboxes, the very low sense of heaviness of the shots (both inflicted and collected) and the fluctuating level of difficulty impoverish these phases, and, once the wonder for the brilliant found of the corner gun has passed, we caught ourselves hoping they would last less and less as the adventure progressed.
The corner gun uses a peculiar combination of a light weapon of your choice (like pistols and machine guns) with Cole's smartphone screen, ensuring he can see and shoot around corners, with an otherwise impossible visual breadth.
We hope to review this weapon (or similar solutions) in future titles, because, in the hands of a team that has more experience with shooters, this idea could be much more successful.
The years of the Unreal Engine
Get Even runs on a modified version of the Unreal Engine, an engine famous for its solidity but not for the spectacularity of its views, also because it has been on the market for several years: the choice of the development team appears conservative, marked by the simplicity of use and the lightness of the engine rather than the quality of the final cosmetics, and the visual impact of their product ends up being affected.
The character models, the polygon count, the level of detail are all sufficient, but on PS4 (version we tested) the product never stands out from the crowd, offering often recycled environments, invisible barriers in the outdoor sections, loaded textures with delay and numerous graphic artifacts, especially during night scenes.
This graphic poverty allows, at least, a remarkable stability of the framerate, which has never shown drops during the most crowded scenes, but only a few micro-slowdowns in the vicinity of automatic saves and loading of new game areas.
Speaking of the latter, we found them extremely long, even if it should be noted how we loaded the game from the disc under test, and therefore the situation could improve in case of digital download.
Where, on the other hand, Get Even comes out of the sow and stands out is in the audio sector, both in the excellent sound design, and in the quality of the soundtrack: the first always returns a feeling of uncertainty, tension, keeping the player on his toes even during apparently quiet sequences, with the touch of class of the protagonist's labored breathing when there are enemies in the vicinity.
Never like this time we recommend the use of a good pair of headphones to fully enjoy the work of the developers.
We also liked the soundtrack, which features motifs always appropriate to the context and a couple of extremely catchy sung tracks, with a particular mention for the one that accompanies the final credits, which extends for its entire duration after peeping during a previous game session.
Less well, but still more than positive, the dubbing: to harm is the alternation between voices with a strong English accent, credible given the setting of the events, and others that are obviously not mother tongue, and speak in a stunted and heavy way the Queen's language: probably the available funds were limited, and a virtue had to be made of necessity for the voices of the less important NPCs.
Certainly, given the taste shown regarding the sound sector, the hope is that the boys of The Farm 51 will be granted a second chance, with perhaps a different budget available.
Final comment
As paradoxical as it seems, Get Even is a successful narrative experiment but, at the same time, just a sufficient shooter: we are convinced that, if the development team had had the courage to go their own way and concentrate on purely investigative phases, the final result would have been more pleasant, especially from the point of view of pace.
Even as it is, anyway the Bandai Namco title could satisfy all those looking for a story out of the ordinary, with well-written characters and a couple of very well-orchestrated twists: just don't expect that along with a nice storyline you'll also find a shooter up to the best on the market.
