Ready or Not Review (PS5) – Here They Come

I’m running low on options. Each of my magazines have less than four rounds left. Two of my squad are KIA, left behind in a hail of gunfire. The other two are injured and running on fumes for ammo themselves. One last breach, one more room to clear, and we just might make it out with the mission complete. I stack up my last remaining comrades on the door, tactically burst into the breach after a swift kick, and I fumble on the trigger as all my rounds run dry, gunned down just beyond the threshold.

I load up another mission – clear the hostiles and defuse the bombs. Simple enough. I scour through the building, surgically working room-to-room. We incapacitate every shooter involved, only for the radio commander to inform me we have little time left. I frantically dash through shot-out rooms, desperately listening for a beeping sound. I hear it in the distance, but too late. I crack open the door, and kaboom. Mission failed, team wiped. All is lost.

Nothing quite sums up Ready or Not better than that final ever-lasting moment where you stack up on a door, safety behind you, only to leave it all behind as you plunge into the dangers of what lurks beyond. It’s brutal, it’s realistic, it’s intense, but does all of that stress-inducing attention to detail make for an entertaining video game people would want to play?

Go For Tac-tion

Ready or Not has very little in the way of traditional storytelling. Rather, it’s a perspective lens of veritable tension Hell, through which you, as the player, must endure. Commander mode is the game’s primary single-player campaign, as you navigate a series of 18 increasingly complex scenarios to eliminate hostile forces, save hostages, defuse bombs and recover evidence. No need for CGI or cutscenes here, the entire game is one big unfolding story you create.

Finishing missions in Commander mode unlocks them for quickplay, and you can customise your loadout from the get-go with every available primary weapon, sidearm, gadgets and unique equipment. Moreover, you’ll need to manage your roster of fellow officers, who are controlled by AI and any four of which will accompany you on any mission. While they have some backstory, you learn next to nothing about them, so they end up narratively dispensable, at odds with the rest of the game’s grounded immersion.

Commander mode is a great introduction the game, which allowed me to tinker with different playstyles (i.e lethal vs non-lethal), unlock passive officer traits to boost performance, and get a feel for the maps, setups and mechanics in a realistic way. Once it’s all finished, you can hop into quickplay at any time and go full loose cannon if you so wish, as officer deaths aren’t permanent in this mode.

A Fair Rate of Not

Single-player is where much of Ready or Not’s tactical detail and military-sim style mechanics come to the fore. As Judge, you’ll command your squad (split into Red and Blue teams) with a huge amount of options. Stack up in different formations, sweep and clear, breach doors with kicks, rams or C2 explosives, fall in and even disarming traps or picking locks. Name the operation or command, it’s probably in here. While overwhelming initially, it creates an intensely realistic and rewarding depth to the first-person action.

How you equip your squad to meet the needs of the current scenario is essential too. Go into an expansive mail complex with just submachine guns and you’ll soon find out how ready you are. One of Ready or Not’s best elements is the sheer depth in weapon and loadout customisation, which compliments or rebuttals your in-game orders if used well or poorly. It’s a lot of onboarding to pick up for first time players, and the game doesn’t always do the best job of communicating what everything means particularly well. However, stick with it, and there’s little outside of old-school SOCOM that really compares.

Even after a dozen hours and a couple dozen successful operations (with at least a dozen more failed ones), planning and executing the perfect synchronised breach still feels goddamn spectacular. Queuing up orders before executing means watching your elite force flashbang and Stinger a room full of gun-totting terrorists, then swiftly disarming them like they were no threat at all. When a plan comes together, it’s the epitome of striking in perfect symbiotic form.

You Can’t Hide, I Won’t Run

Aside from barking orders at your highly tolerant squad of fellow SWAT members, you can also engage with the punchy and powerful combat for yourself. Ready or Not has a slower, heavier approach to gunplay, meshing with the serious, unabashed tone of the game itself. Rifles have huge kickback and recoil, accuracy is paramount, and each blast of an assault rifle or shotgun will rip through limbs.

Play this like Call of Duty, and you will be struck with more holes than a cheese grater. Particularly on Standard or Hard difficulties, Ready or Not will punish you for brash behaviour or improper strategy. Everything is deliberate, calculated and meticulous, so if you prefer your shooters loose and freeform, this is not for you. However, the feel of the weapons and audio feedback from every blast, shot or explosion is realistic to a fault, creating a strong feedback loop.

I want to emphasise how incredibly immersive this all makes Ready or Not’s brutalist campaign as a result. The constant pressure of knowing a single rogue enemy flanking your squad can wipe you out. The jump scare factor of suddenly being met with a blaze of bullets. I love my games to be gritty and battle hardened, but even I found long play sessions of Ready or Not were a tough ask. It’s a compliment to its dedication, but the relentless pressure was best enjoyed in short bursts, for me anyway.

All Teams, Respond

Alongside combat and gunplay, Ready or Not’s 18 levels are a variety of stomach-churning nightmare scenarios to face down. Developers VOID Interactive lean into the confronting and uncomfortable at almost every turn. “Elephant” features a campus shooting with bomb threats, “Valley of The Dolls” has you uncovering paedophile networks amongst a rich family’s birthday party for their child and “Ides of March” has you taking down a terrorist cell who’ve attempted an assassination on a political figure.

As you may imagine, all are likely to be contentious and controversial in their own right. The developers have recently taken flak for ‘censoring’ some of the game’s most disturbing imagery for release on console, but the themes and setups are still likely to be enough to turn some people off entirely. I felt the commitment to discomforting imagery and theme was appropriate for the grounded, unfiltered presentation of the dark undertones that permeate real life.

From a gameplay perspective, this fortifies layers of heightened tension and hypervigilance. One misplaced shot suddenly feels that much more impactful when it strikes a hostage related to such sickening world events. In this way, I think Ready or Not excels in its willingness to be controversial and even potentially unpopular, to achieve the disquieting adrenaline rush that comes from such volatile scenarios hanging on the precipice of complete chaos.

Not Ready For Others

Ready or Not’s thematic material is hardly sunshine and rainbows to start with, but it becomes even more bleak when it comes to multiplayer and erratic AI. I jumped into a few missions with fellow SWAT-wannabes via public matchmaking. To say it was a trainwreck would be an insult to English rail companies (one which they deserve, too). For a start, latency issues were ever-present, almost always at 150-200 ping at any time, despite excellent internet on my side.

Playing with randoms is also a pretty miserly affair, and rips out much of the core of the experience that makes Ready or Not so compelling. Instead of tactically commanding your units, having them perfectly in-sync, it often descended into carnage and a free-for-all brawl, totally divorced from the point of the game. I’m sure this will improve with the community’s experience, but almost every match I played was a crapshoot of trolling teammates, or squaddies with the collective brain cell count of a gnat.

However, as always with games of this ilk, join a team of like-minded communicators and coordinators, the entire experience becomes the polar opposite. Instead of relying on AI, you now have the punchiest, most intense sandbox of missions to overcome with your friends. Latency issues and a couple of crashes aside (only in multiplayer), Ready or Not has the makings of an online cult classic. Nice touch that if the host has the DLC maps unlocked, anyone can play them too.

Ready Me Timbers

Then there’s the AI squadmates in single-player. Now, I sang their praises earlier, as for the most part, they’re great. However, on a couple of maps, they go wildly out of control and lose all sense of anything. “Rust Belt” was notoriously horrific, with my team often refusing to enter doorways to begin clearing maneuvers, or straight up bugging out altogether and not moving at all.

It’s not uncommon for you to spend upwards of 10-20 minutes meticulously clearing a mission with the precision of a laser-guided drone strike, only for your team to get stuck moving into a position before being butchered by a single rogue hostile with an AKS-74U. It’s depressing watching a perfectly executed S rank melt away before your very eyes as your team’s bodies pile up on top of each other from a scenario that just shouldn’t have happened.

Problem is, the motion capture and animation work is so fantastic and true-to-life that it makes these breakdowns of logic that much more infuriating. This can be alleviated by playing solo (which is in-and-of itself an excellent way to play), or of course with friends, but given a core part of the game centers on the commands structure and Commander mode, it needs some further refining to prevent agonising unjustified losses.

Excellent Job Team, Now Bring Them Home

Despite my gripes with the multiplayer experience and inconsistent AI, Ready or Not was still an immersive and addictive experience. Visually, the missions are incredibly distinct and detailed. You’ll trek through grungy neon nightclubs, take down hustlers and drug smugglers in underground networks and second hand car dealerships, even work your way through a swanky hotel complex before tip-toeing through a rural trap-filled outback home.

The HUD and UI have been transplanted onto console relatively seamlessly, though the commands reticle can be finicky and awkward when separating Red and Blue team orders, for example. It’s a shame the DLC wasn’t just bundled into the main edition, but such is the way of these things. Having joined a couple matches on the DLC maps, I was impressed with their further variety and intricate setups though.

No matter how much a frustrating loss or sudden death made me want to give up entirely, I kept finding myself coming back for more of Ready or Not’s unapologetic, savage and steely coldness. VOID Interactive have embodied the role of the SWAT operative expertly, harnessing the anxiety, tension and realistic brutality of horrific scenarios to create one of the most intense and intentional FPS games you’re likely to find.

Ready or Not is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), PC and Xbox Series X|S.

Developer: VOID Interactive
Publisher: VOID Interactive

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

If you enjoyed this article or any more of our content, please consider our Patreon.

Make sure to follow Finger Guns on our social channels –Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Spotify or Apple Podcasts – to keep up to date on our news, reviews and features.