Ready or Not Review – Less Ready Than Desired

The thing that typically turns me off about games that position themselves as realistic takes on a genre is that they often take a turn into tedium that you can only find in a video game. This was the thing that initially turned me off about Ready or Not. I understand there is an audience for a game like this, and playing through the many missions you are tasked with, I could see exactly why those people might enjoy the experience. It didn’t take me long, though to realize that it wasn’t for me. Going further into the experience than I actually wanted to, there was some hope that the game might turn a corner for me, light Danny Devito looking at the camera and saying, “I get it,” at the end of that Always Sunny episode. That moment never really came for me, but I can admit the game is sound from a technical perspective.

The player takes control of the leader of a SWAT team in the fictional city of Los Suenos, which itself is in an alternate version of the United States, grappling with massive economic decline. I’m guessing money is an issue in this reality, as several of the missions the player is actually tasked with feel like they need more than a five-man team to actually rectify them. That’s what you have, though, a five-person team that you command in big, but tight levels filled with small rooms to clear and corridors where you need to keep your guard up.

One of the more interesting concepts of display is the fact that police under your command have emotional states based on how missions go, leading to them possibly performing poorly if you set them loose in a firefight while they are under high stress. Since these cops can also permanently die, handling the well-being of the people under you plays a prominent role in the game. This being said, unlike games like Xcom, where perma death can remove a character you invested into becoming a high-tier soldier, these cops have minor perks that keeps losing one from feeling like a world-shattering event. There is very little personality to your people, and, weirdly, as you unlock more cops to recruit, you can get cops that almost look identical to the ones you lose. This system is designed to put you, the player, fully into your leadership role, but as gamer logic creeps in, the feeling might not emotionally resonate.

Thankfully, the single-player campaign of Ready or Not functions as a fun experience that never feels like a setup to push you to multiplayer, and honestly more enjoyable. Your squad is given a big hub area of a police station that you can explore before taking on tasks. There are cool places you can go, such as a shooting range to test out your guns, and there are a lot of guns to choose from, with testing them a must, given how fast a situation can change from good to chaotic. While this hub gets weird, it’s things like loadout, which can be changed at the player’s locker, but that’s also what the armory is for. There are a few options that seem concisely packed into your unit’s room, but then given their own area, as if to justify the existence of a much larger space to roam.

The levels in Ready or Not feature a briefing that you should read, as those mostly cover all the things you need to know. This is more so than other games, which give you a rundown of why you’re doing what you’re doing, but you will inevitably accomplish in the course of simply moving forward. Here, the design is nonlinear, such as the first task that involves resolving a hostage crisis in a convenience store. While the area you have is relegated to the parking lot and the store itself, it is a large area. You can check every door to the store for the best entrance point, or split your team and take two. Inside, you are tasked with contending with both hostages and hostiles, taking one room at a time and adapting quickly when you see armed individuals. The game doesn’t punish you for taking out armed individuals; you can take most of them without using your gun, further giving you free rein on how you accomplish your task.

As the commander of the unit, much of the game actually comes down to a series of tedious commands you can give your units, such as breaching and clearing. Arguably, you could complete levels by just doing this and sitting back, though it would make the game much less fun for a number of reasons. In cases of taking a room from two sides by splitting your teams between red and blue, you have to open a menu, switch menu, select an option, and go into that menu, then selecting a second option and specifically noting to hold that selection, then go to the second door, and do the same on your second unit, then going into a third menu to trigger both. On PlayStation 5, this is all done using R1 or L1 in real time, but it can be incredibly annoying to pull off. Despite there being an hour-long tutorial to teach you all this, in practice, there are many moments these commands failed to trigger like they should or failed to register, requiring me to sit there and wade through the menus repeatedly to get them to trigger.

Despite the premise of being grounded, outside of hard mode, the player and allies can survive a punishing amount of bullets and still walk away. On the flip side, you can walk into a room that your allies told you was clean and get one-shot and killed. The game does not treat your character the same as allies in that you do not take on a new character if you die, keeping the customizable one you always have. Dying, though, punishes you by failing the mission, getting kicked back to the hub, and forcing you to restart and load into the mission, which kinda just seems pointless. This seems to only occur to increase the stress of your squad members who watched you die, despite you not actually dying. Insult to injury, the AI often causes it, as if you give characters a command, you need to uncommand them to fall in. This becomes such a chore that I opened a door and started getting shot while my team stood there, and just sort of watched. I understand the control over them is important, but they have no sense of autonomy to realize that this is happening.

Thankfully, despite being able to avoid shooting in Ready or Not, the gunplay is so good you might want to go, full rogue cop, one day away from retirement. Each gun has a unique feel, even among its respective category of weapon and situations (again, read the briefing) can often present different environments that call for different weapons. This said, getting shot can often be annoying. The reticle rarely tells you which direction you are being shot from, which is to be expected given the game’s design, but what you get is a blurring effect that can make it even more confusing as you spin around attempting to pinpoint where the bullets are coming from. Again, this can be in a location where a person is firing only a few feet away, partially hidden by a door frame, and you can somehow eat that lead till you find and shoot the hostile, then walk away.

Multiplayer takes everything you played through in the core game and allows you to substitute your AI for real people. As you might expect, matches, at least the ones I played, had everybody branch off in different directions and shooting enemies with no mercy. I did get one match where somebody hopped on the mic and tried to lead, which was more fun than as individuals. It feels like a game that needs you to convince your friends to all buy it as well, for the multiplayer to really power on all cylinders, but even without it was a fun experience. The drawback is that it feels there is very little progression to be had in the multiplayer, with no levels or ranks and all tools being available from the get-go. I understand the approach, feeling nostalgic, but it also means multiplayer isn’t going to add much to your experience you the game isn’t already clicking with you.

Verdict

Ready or Not, even without clicking with me, and my sensibilities, never felt like a bad game. Gunplay and level design are the absolute standouts across the experience, with you taking everything slowly and methodically as you find yourself in cramped spaces with armed hostiles trying to get the upper hand on you. These features are often let down, though, by the very elements that are supposed to bolster it. The AI teammates are often less than intelligent and require your command to do basic things like kill the stile they are standing right next you watching him kill you. The commands that you give them are often the root cause of this confusion and are an inconvenient jumble of menus to wade through that stops the experience cold turkey. If you are enjoying yourself, you can take the experience online in multiplayer, but with no progress, this will really be for the die-hard players. I’m sure there are players out there who are going to have a blast with Ready or Not, unfortunately, it was just never going to be me.

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