Ready or Not Review

Just when everyone thought 2021 was over in terms of relevant releases, Ready or Not appeared out of thin air. Well, not exactly out of thin air. People knew it was coming, and it has been under development for a while now, but Void Interactive was being rather secretive with the early access release date, throwing people off the scent with a Twitter post two days before the public EA release with the classic “it just might come out this year”. And it did.

Ready or Not, or RoN like people usually refer to it, is a tactical shooter in the making, that promises to eventually become just as good as the legendary SWAT 4 from Irrational Games. Your character is a SWAT operator and your job is to arrest or kill bad guys, make sure civilians are safe and apprehend drugs, illegal weapons, destroy human trafficking schemes, and so on. The usual tactical police stuff, done brilliantly. You can either play alone with four AI-controlled teammates or cooperatively with up to four teammates, with the twist that there’s no friendly AI to offer a hand or two, meaning that heading to the mission with just one or two friends will be rather challenging. The enemy count varies per map and it’s often dependent on the environment: some will naturally have a higher civilian to bad guy ratio due to its sheer likeliness while the opposite also occurs. Currently, there are six different maps to choose from, with an extra two WIP environments, still untextured and ridden with glitches. Granted, it’s still an early access title and more maps are going to be released, along with full modding support so that the community can also help provide extra content to warrant unlimited hours of fun.

As far as content is concerned, there isn’t a lot just yet, but the variety is good enough to allow different approaches to each mission so that the replay factor is nearly endless. From your average M4 rifle to a paintball gun (yup), they got you covered. The gear list is also rather extensive, with different vests, masks, cop paraphernalia like battering rams, breaching shotguns, C2 explosives, flashbangs, even a camera thing that allows you to look under doors. Who’d ever imagine that voyeurism could be used to enforce law and order!

As it couldn’t be any different with an Early Access title, some things still do not work as expected, an OK thing if it gets fixed, and it probably will. The AI can be rather unpredictable sometimes, with civilians running from you, sometimes locking themselves in rooms with the enemies, or just straight up hiding from you and making your mission take a lot longer because you and your friends end up forced to play tridimensional “Where’s Wally?”. Something else that might annoy you ever so slightly is the fact that civilians and enemies don’t have a lot of different voice lines, meaning you will hear the same sentences over and over even during the very same mission. Granted, it’s probably a placeholder. On that same note, the cop’s voice is way too calm, which differs a lot from real-life operator footage telling bad guys to drop their weapons. But once again, a placeholder card probably applies.

The gameplay aspect is where RoN truly shines, sporting the possible best gunplay on the market, shootouts are dynamic and challenging. The AI can be very accurate at times, making it so you and your friends got to be on the very edge, with eyes wide open. It doesn’t take much to die, just like in real life. You are not a bullet sponge, nor are the enemies or civilians. As a matter of fact, civilians are even more fragile, so be mindful of that and take extra care when breaching into a room with thugs and civvies inside. That’s where the tactical element comes into play and cohesive play rewards you, while recklessness can be punishing. There are multiple ways to approach the different situations that you will be faced with and no right answers. Go with your guts, trial and error, or develop standard operating procedures with your friends so that everyone knows what to do and what not to do to get things done the cleanest way possible. It’s easier said than done, as Ready or Not is very hard and will give you a tough time if you are not paying enough attention. The sheer unpredictability makes for very fun and engaging gameplay.

It would be interesting to have a little more dynamism on certain stuff, like objective items that always spawn at a fixed location, making it so you always know where to go and how to get there efficiently without major hiccups, which is good from a speedrunning standpoint but doesn’t help when it comes to longevity, because it will get repetitive quickly. On the other hand, enemy spawn points are always random, with no mission playing the same, even if the items will always spawn at the very same location. Just like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

Visually, RoN is impressive. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it certainly does not disappoint with textures, lighting, level design, and performance. It doesn’t take much to run, and my old faithful RTX 2070 could easily run it on epic settings in 1080p, well above 100 fps, with eventual drops here and there. As expected from any so-called next-generation title, it supports DLSS, which boosts the overall performance quite significantly, up to 40% even in sub-4K resolutions, without compromising the visual acuity, meaning no ghosting, no artifacts, as clear as it can be. A really solid implementation, even more so considering it’s still a work in progress.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Ready or Not is perhaps one of the most solid early access releases ever. As much as it still has a lot of things that are not quite up to standard yet, the gameplay mechanics and the challenge are enough to keep you coming back for more. A breath of fresh new air into a genre that we haven’t seen much from, apart from Zero Hour. It was a long, painful wait, but SWAT 4’s spiritual successor is finally among us and it’s great. Why haven’t you purchased it yet?