Ready or Not Review

Ready or Not is a realistic first person shooter (FPS) where players, as part of a SWAT team working to fight chaos and corruption in a fictional city. You and four of your teammates will tackle a handful of mission where you’ll either have to arrest or shoot terrorists and make sure to save civilians.

The game allows players a certain leeway of customization. You can change your characters’ gear and weapons at the police station; the hub in between mission. As a SWAT team member, along with your trusty pistol and machinegun, you have a bevy of items as part of your arsenal to get your objectives done.

At your disposal, you’ll have flashbangs, stun grenades, lock pick; just to name a few. Most of them do come really handy, especially flashbangs, but there are risks of wasting them and you’re limited in usage. Also when you run out, you’re out. You can’t pick up additional resources throughout your missions. And yes same for ammo; if you run out of bullets, you’re shit out of luck.

When you take too much damage, just a bullet short of dying, you can “heal” yourself by stopping the bleeding. The health is a shape of your character and you can see which part of your body is damaged, but from what I can tell, it doesn’t affect your actions. So if you have a completely red arm, it won’t hinder your shooting. And also, if you get hurt, your teammates won’t heal you nor can you heal them when they get shot.

Considering you’re not alone, you’re leading a team of 4 SWAT team members. You can give them orders to follow you or breach and clear a room you’re pointing at. Using LB allows you to select a sub item likes your lock pick or flashbangs whereas using RB allows you to dictate orders to your crew. Pressing either will bring up the last item used/order you gave, but holding either of them down will bring up circular menu where you can select what you need to use or say.

Each mission will have players carefully navigate through various establishments in order to find civilians and criminals. Ideally, you want to be able to catch the terrorists by surprise so you can give them the order to surrender and capture them avoiding bloodshed. However, it’s not always that simple. The enemies have a shoot first, ask questions later mentality; i.e. they’ll shoot you on sight throwing out the window any option for peaceful resolutions. Some enemies will have civilians hostages so you’ll need to be quick and precise to save the civilian.

The game looks straight out of the PS3/Xbox 360 generation; it looks bland but there’s something to be said with the variety of levels. Some are smaller, more claustrophic like a home but there’s also bigger buildings such as a US Post Office or college where you can often end up in wide open areas, leaving you vulnerable to attacks. There are a few glitches; such as clippings, terrifying civilians due to the colors not loading properly, bugged eyed NPCs. On the audio side of things, obviously, there’s no music to maintain the realistic approach. Voiceovers are a plenty, but they are annoying and lines are, more often than not, delivered without emotions; even scared civilians. And also the developer made some civilians so irritating that I had to restrain myself to not shoot them to shut them up as you’re penalized if civilians die.

And here comes the problems. First up is the visuals; it looks nothing like the trailers we’ve seen. Your A.I. teammates are dumber than a doorknob; if you get shot, they’ll stand there doing nothing. Additionally, the game’s accessibility are lacking. I have a 65″ TV; from which I’m about 6′ away from; I still couldn’t read the mission text/objective; so when starting a mission, I never knew what the fuck I was supposed to do. So I played the missions until a prompt said that I had completed the objectives and could end the mission.

Also, if you’re unfortunately having vision issues, chances are you’ll never be able to spot the enemies as they shoot you because they mesh with the environments from afar. Additionally, this review was done prior to release and the game *already* has content locked behind un-announced DLC such as missions and equipment. You also can’t run. So if you’re walking around an open area with no cover option and you’re getting shot at, you’re pretty much screwed. And there’s no up close self defense, so if a crackhead or terrorist runs at you and you’re not fast enough on the trigger, you’re dead.

Looking at the gameplay only, Ready or Not is a fun, challenging, tense and enjoyable FPS. It’s offers a nice diversity in a world of Call of Duty or Battlefield games, but there’s something missing. The glitches, visuals, lack of accessibility features really damper the experience. Also, they were aiming for a realistic experience, yet you can’t run or defend yourself? And not to mention the unveiling of pre-release DLC which is a shitty practice. The gameplay is solid despite some hiccups such as delayed reloading and teammates not being the sharpest tools in the shed; this feels like a beta version of an hypothetical Rainbow Six Vegas 3. Highly recommend waiting until the developers have fixed the glitches and polished the experience a bit more before jumping in.