No, the title of this new tactical FPS from VOID Entertainment has nothing to do with that old The Delfonics song, but it is a catchy three-word title that stands out, especially alongside its contemporaries like Rainbow Six — a name suggesting the weather suffers from bipolar due to how baffling it is to see six rainbows in a single day. Anyway, digressions aside, Ready Or Not is about barging down doors, arresting folks and collecting up evidence. If you’re hungry for a game where you control a SWAT-like team who clear out buildings with the efficiency of pesticides, then you’ll embrace Ready Or Not with open arms — but be careful, it may sting you.
Make no bones about it, Ready Or Not is wearing Rainbow Six’s influence with pride. Banding with a team of SWAT guys and bashing down doors to neutralize anything that moves certainly cuddles close with Ubisoft’s premier tactical shooter franchise. However, unlike its fast-paced and ballistic forbear, Ready Or Not prefers a methodically slow approach, and as you make your way through it, you’ll discover exactly why a slower pace was appropriate for this ambitious shooter — and no, you won’t be ready for it!
Ready Or Not is set in the fictional city of Los Suenos, California, a crime-infested area that’s seeing rocketing rates of violent criminal activity, and of course it’s up to you David “Judge” Beaumont and company to dig into the dirt of this sludge bath of depravity. It takes ruthless diligence and uncanny skill to clean up a city full of dangerous lunatics, along with proficient strategies and effective pacification of belligerent anti-authority hoodlums to achieve peace.
What is particularly noteworthy and impressive in Ready Or Not is how the environmental detail conveys the bedlam and disturbing undertones of what outwardly may appear as a typical tactical team-based affair. Hate-fuelled scrawling’s on the walls denoting the raw hatred of the police is startling enough, but when you can read full-on emails and listen in on terrifying emergency phone calls, you’ll stumble onto how insidious everything is underneath the surface.
Human pest control is the directive of the SWAT brigade, and carrying out operations will ensure the heat is turned up to 11 each time. The intensity of rallying around quiet doors, then barging in at a moment’s notice is all very sudden and encourages you to think fast with quick reaction times, so there’s very little you can do in the heat of the moment to prepare for the onslaught coming at your face. In addition, there will be lockers and other narrow hiding spots you’ll need to stay vigilant of, but the chances of enemies lurching out in front of you are rare, which means there’s not much need for bated breath. Ready Or Not commits to serious business, and as a result it’s po-faced — but there’s at least a surprising level of backstory to wade through.
The police station is your main hub area that you’ll be dropped in before you undertake missions, whether in single or multiplayer. You can roam around the police station and you’ll find benches where you can customize your gear and appearance and choose what weapons you take into each encounter. The police station also acts as a pre-mission hub in multiplayer, and after each mission you return to the police station before embarking on the next operation, which can be monotonous if you just want to proceed without waiting around in a lobby for longer than you may possibly want to endure.
Mission intel is accessed through a handy tablet that gives you the lowdown on every mission and scenario, as well as informing you of the key objectives of each stakeout. The objective briefings give you a decent amount of insight on what’s in store for you before you undertake active duties, though they are in the place of full-on cutscenes, which is a bit of a whimper.
Your missions will take you to a range of hostile environments such as a nightclub, a medical center and a warehouse — well, actually, these environments are only hostile because there are dangerous criminals lurking in them, but nevertheless they’re quite generic and lacking a sense of place, existing to add variety rather than feeling like meaningfully connected hotspots. Nevertheless, they are decent-enough locations that provide enough variation to offset any feelings of routine and by-the-books job standardization.
Planning and executing clear outs of buildings is Ready Or Not’s bread and butter, and you’ll be utilizing an on-the-fly radial menu to issue commands to your squad. Such commands include ‘stacking up’ to inform your posse to wait by a door before bashing it down, and you can instruct different squad groups to perform specific commands like breaching two different doors at once. Issuing groups to perform different tasks at once does feel satisfying, making you feel like the leader of every engagement, though you might be left with the lingering sense that voice compatibility would’ve made proceedings more accessible. As it stands though, controlling your team’s playbook and executing objectives without a hitch is a satisfaction that you cannot understate because it always feels like a plan coming together efficiently and (if need be) ruthlessly.
Fiddling with commands can be a tad sticky as the analog stick is used to select a command, and behind that command might be a secondary command, meaning you may need to jostle the stick to get the input to register. A more simplified command menu would allow the gameplay to flow with smoothness, but when you’re stuck trying to issue orders to your team you may groan at how finicky it can be — especially during the tutorial.
Ready Or Not’s pre-campaign training is competent enough, but if you’re new to these kinds of games, following the onscreen instructions can be a little daunting. But with patience you’ll rifle through it and proceed onto the main missions, where much of what you learned during the tutorial may not be required because the main missions aren’t interested in ensuring you know how to play the game — but like any tutorial, what you’ve learned will become useful as you play.
Another unpredictability of Ready Or Not is its enemy A.I. When you start playing you’ll be used to yelling out orders and arresting/detaining folks, but some of the sly hostiles will deceive you into thinking that they’re surrendering before they fire shots at you — and you’ve got to have your wits about you and your focus sharpened if you’re going to repel their deceptive tactics.
These unruly scumbags might even grab some random sucker nearby and use them as a human shield — which is especially cruel for the victim because all they may’ve been thinking about is milk and cookies, or what colour they want their picket fence to be. All these innocent fluffy daydreams interrupted when they get yanked back to reality and into a dire situation by a putrid-smelling, gun-toting miscreant. Under these circumstances you need to be extra careful not to shoot the civilian and instead incapacitate the unruly.
You need to proceed with the utmost caution in Ready Or Not. Stay close with your team and ensure you lean on open doors and peek through — because enemies have a penchant for busting you up with piercing bullets when you can’t see them. They can down you in an instant too if you aren’t careful, so you have to be slow. There’s a reason a running button doesn’t exist in the world of Ready Or Not, so you gotta be prepared with sights aimed around every corner and down every hallway and corridor — because otherwise you’ll be shot to pieces and forced to peer at your teammates’ wellbeing through the spectator cam. And you won’t want that, will you? You’ll want to be part of the action, not an inactive onlooker.
What would a tactical shooter be without the guns? Ready Or Not is indeed ready with basic weapons like shotguns, handguns and rifles, but you’ll also be able to hunker down behind a riot shield when the going gets tough, utilize tasers and pepper sprays to keep up-close lunatics at bay, and a mighty bean bag shotgun. The arsenal at your fingertips is certainly commendable in Ready Or Not, and the selections are apropos for a SWAT team dealing with gaggles of gangsters and grunts. The ability to aim sights around corners is an option, and comes in handy if hostiles are hiding out of plain sight — and will give them a shocking element of surprise like a savage game of peek-a-boo.
Conclusion
The arrival of Ready Or Not on Xbox is exciting, but also a foreboding one. The underlying vibes and environmental storytelling are outstanding, and this immersion can be tucked away without notice if you aren’t paying attention. Levels are varied and some can be outright horrifying, which will keep you on your toes during every mission. Ready Or Not isn’t for gamers who want an easy breezy and relaxing time — it’s a relentless tactical shooter where you’ll need to pay attention at all times and work with others to survive. Teamwork is satisfying as you clear out rooms, arrest people and bag evidence — though if you’re yearning for some variety or a break from the norm, Ready Or Not might not do the trick for you. Altogether though, Ready Or Not is satisfying and has been created with attention to detail at its forefront — though its gameplay could’ve done with more excitement and variation.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
