Ready or Not Review

After its Early Access period, VOID Interactive’s tactical first-person shooter Ready or Not launches on consoles. See whether you should take command of the chaos and corruption in our review.

Ready or Not Review

Stepping into the shoes of an Elite SWAT team, players will join a squad as they take on high-risk missions that the regular police simply can’t handle.

We’re dating ourselves, but if you played SWAT back in the day, Ready or Not serves as a more advanced version. Whether busting a drug deal or taking down active shooters as they roam a college campus, Ready or Not is an intense, addictive game.

Before hopping into these scenarios, players will need to set up their gear. Playing solo, one can set up their entire team’s weapons, armor, tactical gear, grenades, and more – the whole nine yards.

However, one is just part of the team when playing online. In that scenario, one will need to set up for one’s self while coordinating what the team needs.

From what I could tell, all gear is unlocked right away. While we were typically rolling out with a smaller assault rifle or silenced MP5, there are a ton of options for guns, scopes, and other parts.

Ready or Not gets really strategic with gear choices. We usually rolled with one riot shield, a couple of gas grenade launches, the wand for under the door, and (of course) flash bangs and stinger grenades.

The first few missions of Ready or Not are pretty calm – a few hostiles, a couple of hostages, maybe a trap or two. You tell them to drop the weapon, they drop the weapon later on, though, the enemies come in with body armor, gas masks, assault rifles, explosives on the doors, human shields, and all sorts of other stuff to deal with.

Ready or Not nails that intense feeling of anxiety, because you know one wrong move means you are dead.

Here’s one of our favorite examples…

We were in a fancy apartment complex, and military vets have taken over because a senator voted to defund them or something. So inside, we have a bunch of military-trained soldiers with heavy armor and weapons, and a bunch of people still inside their apartments.

If you know anything about SWAT, you have to clear all the rooms. If you find a room with a civilian, you tie them up and then move on.

With there being so many rooms in this mission, it’s hard to clear all the civilians without engaging with the enemy. The problem is that when the bullets start flying, the civies start running – and they LOVE to run right in the middle of a firefight.

In this particular exchange, we won, and heard footsteps running down the hall, so we all turned to light the guy up. We had about one second to determine if it was a bad guy or not. It wasn’t, but we all said the same thing: that dude just almost got lit up for acting like that.

Split-second decisions in the middle of chaos…that’s what Ready or Not is about.

Even if you’ve played a ton, you won’t know where the enemies are without scouting around first. We were on a mission out in the woods, and we breached the first door about five times without issue. On the sixth, we didn’t check, and boom, a grenade was on the door.

It’s almost like the game knows when you’re relaxed a bit and punishes you for it.

Ready or Not’s gunplay itself is solid; we never had issues landing shots or with the power of the guns.

That being said, the shotgun was a little underwhelming…though that could very well be user error.

The equipment works great as well, but grenades don’t have a line to show throw direction. We ended up hitting the door and flashbanging the team more than once, because there is friendly fire on the normal and higher. It took about an hour on our end to get a good feel for it.

Ready or Not unfortunately lacks a sprint; one can lower one’s weapon and move quickly, but one is always moving slowly.

In addition, after clearing enemies out, one will need to still rescue the civilians around. This means clearing the rooms until you find one person, on a big map, where you can’t sprint. Sometimes they come out to find you, and other times you have to search for five minutes.

Ready or Not absolutely nails the feeling of being in an Elite SWAT unit, packing mass appeal for tactical shooter fans.

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