Ready Or Not is a game where you’ve most likely played it before if you’re interested in it, but it’s also an all new experience. It’s a tactical SWAT shooter made by VOID Interactive set in a dystopian Los Angeles where crime is at an all time high and you work in a team of 5 trying to stop hostage situations, planted bombs, and just people doing illegal things in general. Sound familiar? Yeah this game is pretty much just a spiritual successor to SWAT 4, with gameplay mechanics copied right over from it, and a scoring system very similar. So, if you like SWAT 4, you’ll most likely like this game.
You’ll be going through areas like people’s apartments, a hotel, a gas station, a post office and a school!
Naturally, this game will obviously get a bunch of controversy from so-called “games journalists” calling it copaganda or a game to live out a power fantasy. Now, in my opinion, the game doesn’t glorify cops, just like how SWAT 4 doesn’t. All it really does is put into perspective what cops go through sometimes. If you shoot a civilian or a surrendering enemy, you’ll get punished via losing points, and sometimes your teammates will shoot at you thinking you’ve gone insane. It doesn’t try to glorify being a cop, it really just tries its best to put everything at a level perspective. Got it?
Anyways, the gameplay itself is a little convoluted, but makes sense. If you’re not playing co-op with friends since most likely you don’t have any, you’ll be in charge of managing your AI teammates by telling them what to do and when to do something. You can tell them to stand in a certain place or follow you, or you can tell them to stack up at a door and breach it, which you have quite a lot of options for. It helps you manage as to who does what, and you can get the upper hand on the enemy and in turn, clear the room easier. You can get the AI to kick down the door and throw a flashbang into the room, you can get them to simply open the door and throw a flashbang, or you can tell them to plant C2, and blow the door open without them going in until you do something. With friends however, the game becomes a hundred times more entertaining, since you and your friends will keep talking about how they want to breach a door, and the one guy being an idiot everywhere he goes and then dies immediately because he forgot to check his corners. It’ll also be easier sometimes, since you don’t have to take a while getting the AI to do what you want to do, and you can do things the AI can’t do at all.
The HUD is somewhat simple and well, taken straight from SWAT 4 as well. On the bottom left corner you have a silhouette of you and the places you’ve been hit showing up as red. If you get hit at an important spot, you’ll be bleeding out and have to stop it, or the outer ring around the silhouette will get more red, and you’ll eventually die. On the bottom right corner is the status of your teammates, and on the bottom you can see what weapons you can pick from and your items. My only annoyance with this is how for some reason, selecting a weapon that allows you to scroll to other ones will change it even when you don’t want to select that weapon, which leads to you fumbling for the weapon you want to pick, which gets annoying when you’re getting shot at. Your ammo isn’t shown on the HUD normally though. To check your ammo, you have to hold the reload button to see how many bullets you have left and the ammo of all other magazines. You can also just throw away the magazine by clicking the reload key twice if you need to reload quicker or you’ve emptied the magazine already. Again, the game is a mix of SWAT 4 with other tactical shooters.
With shooting, it’s pretty obvious. You’re gonna have to stop and aim down your sights before shooting, or else your bullets will hit anything other than the person you’re aiming at. You’ll be able to peek corners so the enemies will have a harder time shooting at you than they already are. Surprisingly, wallbanging is also quite important, since if you know if an enemy is outside let’s say, a door, you can just shoot them and they’ll drop to the ground like a sack of potatoes. However, they can do the same as well, which can lead to a few undeserved deaths.
The weapons themselves pretty much fall into 3 categories: Assault Rifles, Submachine guns, and sidearms. Do yourself a favor and don’t use a submachine gun, since they’re pretty much useless for anything long range, and enemies can shoot at you from another continent if they wanted to. (more on that later)
Shotguns are really good for what they’re meant for, and can help take down an incoming enemy if they’re extremely close to you, and they can still work well on long range, unlike every other shotgun in video game history.
For pistols, your choice doesn’t really matter, just get something with a large magazine, and you’re good. In almost every YouTube video you watch on this game, you’ll most likely either see the in-game equivalent of the Glock or a revolver.
After you pick your weapons, the next thing you’re most likely gonna do is go customize your weapon. You pretty much have only 3 options to change, which is the scope, grip, and muzzle attachment, which is all pretty straightforward. One thing I do have to mention though, is how useless the suppressors are on weapons. This is mainly because they function just like they do in real life, they only make weapons actually bearable to hear, so killing one dude is still gonna alert every other person near you. While I’m not sure if this is true, I think keeping the suppressor off also makes the enemies surrender more often due to the loud gunshots. Either way, shooting anything at all makes the enemies aware of you and they will be more cautious.
Along with that, you have a bunch of throwables at your disposal.These are mainly just grenades such as flashbangs or grenades with rubber balls in them. There are also just normal weapons or tools that you can take with you that don’t take up your primary or secondary, such as the taser and pepper spray to make enemies surrender, C2 to blow open doors,or door wedges to block people from opening doors. My main issue with the pepper spray is that it takes a while for them to surrender, plus it seems the AI goes towards you instead of running away when they get pepper sprayed which doesn’t make much sense. They still shoot when this happens, so even when they’re pepper sprayed they still can kill you. The taser is useful, but I think it was a missed opportunity to just make it a sidearm, which leads to the taser not having a lot of ammo. Which brings me to another thing I want to talk about, which is the armor system. There are 3 sets of armor that you can bring into a level, which is just heavy armor, light armor, and nothing at all if you want to bring yourself even more pain. You can also select what material the armor is made up of, but in my experience this doesn’t change much when some guy is shooting a bullet right into your skull. The less armor you have, the faster you can move, but you are forced to carry less things such as your ammo and throwables. This means that there will be a lot of times where you run out of either your primary or secondary ammo, so you have to swap to either weapon, or rely on your team to do things for you. Also, no matter what you can’t really catch up with enemies even when you have no armor, so just pick either light or heavy armor, unless you want to make everything harder on yourself.
You can practice using your weapons at the shooting range in the police station you spawn in, which you unlock more of as you progress through the game. There is also an evidence locker, which is sort of a gallery of all the things that are found after you finish the missions.
You also can customize stuff like your character’s shirt, tattoo, eyewear, or pants, because shooting minorities is more fun when you’re dripped out.
Now, the scoring system. You get points based on how well you do in the mission. Simple enough, right? Well, outside of the main objectives you also have some side objectives you can complete but don’t show up until you do them. You also lose points if your teammates die or you accidentally hurt a civilian or surrendering criminal. You also have to report dead or incapacitated bodies to earn points too. After all of that, you’ll get an A+. Why? Well, if you want an S rank you have to finish the mission non-lethally without a single person dyin- okay this is just fucking SWAT 4 all over again. Same exact scoring mechanic, and just like SWAT 4, you’ll be searching the entire map trying to find that one body you didn’t report or that one weapon that’s either stuck under the floor or in a random spot, but now that there are trailers that pick up bodies and weapons in Ready Or Not, there’s a small chance that they might make the mission impossible to fully complete.
Now, about being non-lethal. I missed 2 interesting weapons that make S rank runs possible. Those are the beanbag shotgun and the pepperball assault rifles. The pepperball guns are absolutely goddamn useless in my opinion because you’ll be mag dumping into one guy, and he most likely will still be shooting at you. Plus, you can still equip pepper spray if you want to. The beanbag shotgun however, is amazing. Almost any person you go up against will immediately stop shooting and give up due to the sheer force of the beanbags, but because the beanbags are so powerful, if you aim for the head they’ll just not get up and have strawberry jam coming out of their head. Oh did I say strawberry jam? Because sometimes said jam will show up as white for some reason. I’ll leave you guys to wonder what that is. One annoying thing that happens when trying to play non lethally is when even when you’ve shot them using beanbags, they’ll still be hurling insults at you and you’ll still be telling them to get on the ground, like you’re playing “Oh, Sir!" Once they do give up, they just might pull out a gun or a knife when you’re close to them. The enemies with guns are easy to take down, but the guys with knives…. They suck. You’ll be trying to shoot at them, but instead your character will be holding the gun up as if they were facing against a brick wall, and you die. Trying to hit them with the gun doesn’t work either, because for some reason they will instead go closer to you. The best course of strategy is to look down, and shoot them in the legs. Also, remember to wait for other enemies walking in, or else they might come in while you’re tying up someone, and you can’t fight back against them. If the enemy is in the open, you can tell them to come towards you instead of being forced to go out and get them.
If you’re playing lethally there is almost a 0% chance someone will surrender, even if you’ve been firing at them. I know some people say that this game has a morale system that relies on if you’re with multiple people, If the enemies are in groups, etc etc, but I really cannot see anything relating to that. Sure the first person you see might hesitate to shoot you, but once you’ve shot them because most likely they’re still not gonna surrender, all of the other enemies will shoot on sight and there is nothing you can do about it. One thing I do like about the AI though is how they might fall back and take cover, or take someone hostage, although I wish I saw this more.
Now, enough of the good things, it’s time to say the things the community has been saying ever since the game was in early access, and that I can vouch for. The AI is fucking annoying. With the 1.0 release, SWAT AI has improved a bunch, but the enemy AI is still terrible. On one hand, they’ll be complete morons and walk out in the open and not shoot at you, for some reason and on the other hand, they’ll be running faster than the speed of light and one tap you through a wall. It feels as if you’re playing Ready Or Not, and the enemies are playing Call Of Duty. For some reason, they can also come back from the dead, even if you’ve already shot them and it looks as if they’re dead. I guess you could call this a feature: enemies can play dead. (editor's note: turns out that IS a feature. whoopsies) It also doesn’t help that each time you shoot the game lags. Now, I probably can’t say anything since my CPU just edges into the minimum requirements, but even on high end machines people are reporting stutters. On an unrelated note, did you know every single time you play the game, it records a replay. The replay function is terrible too, with barely any camera options, and it lags every single god damn time you skip to a certain place. Oh not just that, you can’t turn off the replay function, or just save it when you want to. These replays also take up a shit ton of storage. For me the size was 2 gigabytes until I made the folder inaccessible by the game, but some people have reported more than 10 or hell, even 20. Now, I would call this a skill issue if the people reporting this played the game off of a hard drive, but ALL OF THE REPLAYS ARE LOCATED ON THE FUCKING C DRIVE, even when you’ve installed it to anything else. You know, the drive that contains your most important apps and your Windows drive? Yeah if you’re not careful, the game can eat up all of it. Funny enough, VOID already had this issue before when they introduced mods that could be installable through the game. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, it’s still your fault. Is that how it goes?
Anyways, one of my favorite missions in the game is “23 Megabytes A Second”, where you have to raid a streamer because of a prank call, but it turns out they have an illegal Bitcoin mining setup and a collection of “cheese pizza” if you know what I mean. Look, call it cheese pizza, club penguin, or civil protection, I don’t know, it’s CP either way. The thing is, if you’re raiding a streamer, why are there more than 7 gang members trying to kill you? Why would a white male in his 20s be locked in his home with his brother with around 3 or 4 black gangsters, while still streaming at the same time? There really isn’t anything that alludes to something other than the SWAT team going in after a prank call. There didn’t seem to be any first responders, so how would the streamer know that the police would be ready to get him? I think IBZ put it best. (uh, nevermind was going to put a link to his RoN livestream but he seems to have privated it)
In SWAT 4s “The Fairfax Residence” there aren't 5, 6, or 7 enemies. There’s only 1, maybe 2 criminals, and a scared grandma. The buildup from going into the house hearing a voicemail message of someone asking for their daughter back, going down into the basement, going into the bedroom of the two kidnappers, discovering one of the kidnapped civilians tied up with cameras pointing at them, and then discovering the secret room with cockroaches and a person locked up in there, creates one of the most memorable levels in SWAT 4, without having much action. Ready Or Not however, lacks some of this environmental storytelling, since you’re way more weary of any enemies ready to jump at you and kill you, so there isn’t any time to pay attention to the scenery.
In conclusion, is Ready Or Not worth it? I would say yes, although you have to put up with a lot of its bullshit. Along with that, you’ll need a group of friends that will put up with YOUR video game bullshit, or a bunch of random people that had the same idea as you. I don’t think VOID should have released this game as 1.0, since it feels more like 0.9, maybe even 0.8, and it leaves a bad impression on newcomers, thinking that most of the issues aren’t really gonna be fixed. It’s almost as if VOID rushed this update out trying to get enough content to be considered a full game, and didn’t patch out the bugs. You can still have fun playing it, but it still has a few issues that need fixing. If you are planning to get this game, I recommend waiting for a few new patches to come out and fix some of the bugs. You can also install the ‘No Crack AI Mod'' that fixes at least a little bit of the AI. However, if you’re turned off by the bugs, or you have a bad PC or laptop, I’d recommend playing SWAT 4 to pass the time. It can be found cheap on GOG, and it has a lot of the same gameplay elements as Ready Or Not, including Co-Op play. It has definitely aged due to it being almost 20 years old, but it’s still fun to play.
Hey guys, so uh, this was my first review on this site. (if it does actually come out) I guess it would be cool if you maybe left a comment telling me how terrible I was and how I should fix this or if i should make it into an actual video, ha. Fun fact: I wrote most of this script on a 6 hour car ride. Anyways, bye! (also remind me to upload and put pictures in some places)
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