When is being kidnapped by aliens ever actually a good time? It’s always either invasive surgery or mutilation or a desperate fight for survival. Aliens are never cool about it. Then again, I suppose abductions aren’t the best way to …
When is being kidnapped by aliens ever actually a good time? It’s always either invasive surgery or mutilation or a desperate fight for survival. Aliens are never cool about it. Then again, I suppose abductions aren’t the best way to kick off a party either. Keeping with this tradition, the aliens in Get Me Outta Here are jerks, and the game itself falls into that third “desperate fight for survival” category. Because aliens gotta alien, I guess.
Our pudgy, balding protagonist wakes up on a probing/autopsy table (neither option is particularly pleasant to think about), grabs a carelessly discarded laser rifle, and blasts two of his captors into goo. Of course that’s just the start of it. Turns out the military is about to blow up the ship, but if all of the aliens on board are reduced to ash they’ll call off the attack and actually come rescue you. How noble of them.
Get Me Outta Here is basically a wave survival shooter on a time limit. You only have so much time to eliminate everything that moves, every so often a boss shows up, and you get a big chunk of time added to the countdown every time you best one of the big baddies. Every now and then you can grab a power-up or two, things get progressively more difficult, etc. Chances are we all know the drill at this point.
I keep going back and forth about how I feel regarding the controls. At first they felt awkward and confusing, as you use the left side of the screen to move left/right and aim up/down, and the right side of the screen to shoot/jump/drop/roll. Once I got used to the button mapping I had a lot more luck not getting horribly killed (as quickly). But then there’s stuff like the lack of a proper explanation for power-ups, which I had to figure out how to use on my own (I didn’t even realize they were power-ups in the first place) — and even then the game can’t always tell when I’m trying to tap on one of the icons to use them.
That occasional spottiness is a recurring issue, unfortunately. Just about every action you can perform, from dodge-rolling to jumping to climbing ladders, has moments of either working when you don’t want it to or not working when you do want it to. Even the pause button is almost absurdly unreliable. When the stars align it’ll work as soon as I tap the top-left corner of the screen, but more often than not I end up tapping repeatedly while also getting peppered with alien projectiles and whatnot until the game finally decides I’ve suffered enough.
I do appreciate that there are a few different types of weapons, though, and that they force you to adopt slightly different strategies as you run & gun all over the place. I also appreciate how you can adjust three different options before starting a game (damage, boss health, and enemy spawns) in order to make things easier or harder, with an appropriately adjusted elements like score bonuses or combo chances to match. So big thumbs up for that!
It’s not that I disliked playing Get Me Outta Here. I actually think it’s a pretty satisfying pick-up-and-play action game. I like being able to decide what I may or may not what to trade-off in the name of an easier game, and when the game does what I tell it to do I’ve been able to have some enjoyable and impressive moments of action. I just really, REALLY wish the controls weren’t so moody.
