Remember the battle arena games trend of the 1990s? No, me neither. But apparently there was one, and Get Over Here aims to recreate that era and invoke some nostalgia. In this game you find yourself involved in a deadly reality show, where you’ll need to regularly get stuck into four way battles, featuring some pretty insane characters and off-the-wall battle arenas.
Each character is armed with a hook gun and a finishing move. The simple aim is to take out as many of your enemies as possible, by attaching your hookshot to them, and then dragging them back in for the kill. If you’re not quick enough, another player can swoop in and steal your kill or simply choose to take you down instead, whilst you are distracted. Doing so can be pretty satisfying.
Items will randomly drop to temporarily alter battle conditions, such as disabling all player hook guns or distorting the screen as if your characters are drunk (and this really does put some strain on your eyes, it’s horrible). However, the items end up simply making it even more difficult to figure out what on earth is happening.
You can also alter the battle and victory conditions, but for goodness sake don’t choose “Kills and Deaths” alongside a point limit, as the match will most likely go on forever. This is because you have to achieve the required kill to death ratio, which is no easy task. The other, more enjoyable battle conditions you can set include having a set amount of lives, achieving a kill streak or simply hitting a kill target. In addition to this, you can also set the match duration in minutes or points, as well as toggle what items you would like to be thrown into the fray.
It’s fair to say Get Over Here is total carnage and not in all the ways intended. It’s quite difficult to track what’s going on, never mind successfully executing your finishing move on an enemy. You’ll either get taken out by an environmental hazard, such as a car or falling rocks, or someone will come along to interrupt your finisher. It’s not helped by the fact that the controls don’t feel very responsive, and the battle arenas feel quite small when four people are duking it out, so you’ll struggle to rack up the kills at first. It certainly takes a while to get the hang of it.
Even when you do, unfortunately the gameplay feels more like button-bashing than anything else. You’re seemingly helpless to defend yourself from other hook guns, and as a result you resort to attempting to kill as many enemies as possible to win, which turns the gameplay into a grind. At its core, Get Over Here is loud, crude and difficult to get to grips with; despite the simple premise, it never quite clicks, and even though you get a generous amount of options for the price, the game loses its appeal fairly quickly.
You can play solo with CPUs, however it’s more enjoyable to play with friends. Of course, this will be challenging given the current restrictions unless you’ve got gamers in the house. If you do, you can team up, or leave it as every player for themselves. Unsurprisingly, given Get Over Here will only set you back £4.19, there is no online play option to choose.
However, as well as quick matches there are other ways you can play Get Over Here. Firstly, Tournament Mode gives you the opportunity to fight to take the top spot in a series of four matches. Each is set under random conditions, but all play in the same way as the Quick Matches. You’ll also get the opportunity to include items in some of the matches, if you wish to.
As well as this you can play Soccer Mode, which is probably Get Over Here at its most crazy – it’s borderline unsettling if I’m honest. This mode sees two teams battle it out to hook an armoured chicken, and then fire it across the opposing team’s line to score a goal. You’ll struggle to score due to the inaccuracy of the control setup, making it quite frustrating to play. What also doesn’t help is that at random times I’ve found my character immobilised and unable to move. It was only when I was killed and respawned that I could move around again. A word of warning here – this has happened across different modes whilst playing, and is not just isolated to the soccer match.
In all modes, you get access to thirteen playable characters and eleven battle arenas right off the bat. There are no unlockables here to work towards sadly, which may have helped breathe some more replayability into the game. However, it’s a generous amount of content given the game’s more than reasonable price tag.
The characters in Get Over Here have a certain style to them, with each being distinctly different to each other. The soundtrack is fairly average, although the repetitive taunts of each character will irritate you very quickly. For the most part the characters help cement the overall vibe of the game, that being utter chaos.
The repetitive gameplay and unrefined controls of Get Over Here on Xbox make it very difficult to enjoy. It’s cheap, and throws a fair bit into the mix, but despite this it will struggle to get its hooks into you.
