"TOC to Entry team, this one is a goat rope! Head home."
- Tactical Operations Command, SWAT4

Ready or Not started off as a promising rookie in the Tactical Shooter sub-genre. Seemingly with a glint in their eyes, it went through a long period of Early Access in an attempt to be the perfect spiritual successor and contemporary interpretation of the renown local veteran, SWAT4[en.wikipedia.org].

Unfortunately, the only thing time on the field offered to Ready or Not was jadedness. Doing the right thing turned out hard, and the benefits for so would most likely not pay off. It grew authoritarian in its dullness, abandoning its ideal vision and adopting instead a gorged caricature with a strong beating heart that pumps incompetence.

The gameplay of Ready or Not (RoN) can be summed up as a hardcore PvE game where a small team of heroes will usually go against a battalion of incomprehensibly suicidal felons armed to the teeth that need to be put down at all costs. You can see some very "high-level" gameplay on the net, where players will dynamically enter a civilian building and annihilate every "bad guy" with gunshow levels of lethal weaponry to choose from.

This would all be fine as a premise, if not for the fact the intended way for a game like this to be played, and the way its score system works at the highest level and difficulty, would be to have the ideal of zero casualties.

There's a big gaping hole in the core of RoN which makes its gameplay loop a boring failure, noticeably:

• The Police Rules of Engagement (RoE) where use of force is to be strict are often confused for Military shoot-on-sight RoE; the scenarios and the suspect AI often have this mismatch for the game goal.
  
  • Enemies Suspects are often armed with military grade body armor, automatics, and pure malice, tending to run at the entry team. They are programmed to crave death, as running from danger to cover (or surrendering) is dishonorable in the eyes of Khorne, the God of Blood.
    
  • RoN comically exaggerates the incident that lead to the event of "cold cuffs", so reportedly dead bodies must be cuffed else they can return to life and snap your neck.
    
  • Alternatively, double tap crackheads with Slug rounds. They may keep coming back. Maybe we don't give the war on drugs enough credit.
• There are sitcom-tier levels of intelligence for the insertion briefing.
  
  • You're usually given a small description of the situation, the world's worst real estate company pictures available of the location, and a "map" drawn with crayons.
    
  • Want to know where the insertions are? Tough luck, jump in and die to find out.
• The many gadgets that should help the entry team to hold the upper hand feel superfluous
  
  • You can try to use a toy gun that shoots farts, pepper spray and a Tazer™ (none of which work for some suspects depending on the scenario) instead of a perfectly hip-fire accurate select-fire Battle Rifle and terminator armor with ballistic helmet and steel plates.
    
  • Enemies can quickly make out the pigs in the dark (and often through walls) so trying to use Nightvision Goggles for tactical superiority is comedic.
    
  • Indeed you can taze someone from behind a ballistic shield while they magdump you. Although the ideal situation would have been fighting human beings that can be surprised and defeated from tactical superiority; not battle tranced chimpanzees that need to be put in a shock collar with a long stick.
• It almost feels like "copaganda" [en.wikipedia.org] in the sense that trying to play "the game" right is a pointlessly risky endeavor that is fun to nobody except the most fetishistic of masochists that would sooner go extinct than stay in service.

Even in the event you are willing to ignore the game score rating and barge into civilian households with a full auto Armor Piercing weaponry under zero objections, the game will force you to locate and apprehend civilians in the map and other "evidence" garbage before you finish the scenario, just to rub it in that "it's a SWAT game". This also happens to be the excuse for there not being a "run" button, a match made in hell itself.

RoN uses the Unreal Engine 4 (UE) to a good amount of its potential and enjoys displaying high fidelity assets in detailed environments with innumerable amounts of shades. Unfortunately, this may as well be the uniform for any self-entitled UE powered game.

What RoN does with its uniformity is create a lot of visual pollution. A lot of things seem to be placed just for the sake of being placed, as if it's trying to justify having paid for those assets. Some of them are out of scale with the player size, giving you the impression the city is some sort of society composed of Elves and Dwarves; maybe the gameplay loop would have been more coherent if it were.

Lights and Lasers work out terribly depending on the graphical setting, often "reflecting" or being drowned by other ambient lights. Needless to say, all these things combined makes target acquisition more difficult. It appears the game is "so realistic" it is attempting to emulate an early onset of cataracts upon the player character.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3117449914

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3117449986

The "visual storytelling" is not too subtle. It displays lots of off-screen violence, sometimes you get extremely contrasting architecture such as an entire cave system built on the backyard of a crackhouse with schizophrenic drawings on the walls. Really nails it in that we don't take the war on drugs seriously enough, and that the bad guys are so evil they'll shoot the dog!

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2913160318

There is a lot of audio, but it often gets drowned out by the gunfire or the 20 second long screams of agony from suspects with sixteen new additional orifices paid for by the local municipality. Subtitles are full of typos and mondegreens.


RoN tried to be virtuous and stand up when nobody else did when it comes to making a Tactical Shooter, and for that it quickly gained some credit. There is some gameplay and eye candy when it is in its best behavior, but a little time and experience will quickly show you its ugliness with a thoroughly broken soul.

In the event you're not willing to put up with blind trial-and-error until you too start seeing there can only be degrees of guilt rather than innocence in the crowds, I'd recommend skipping this title or waiting for a hefty sale with a mod list for a first playthrough.

If you kept up to here, consider checking the following:

- ARMA 3
- Hot Brass
- SWAT4 (on GoG)[www.gog.com]

[i]"TOC to Entry team, this one is a goat rope! Head home."[/i] - [url=https://youtu.be/nXB6C74EprA?si=aazWDZaH_dhBcUrE&t=231]Tactical Operations Command, SWAT4[/url] Ready or Not started off as a promising rookie in the Tactical Shooter sub-genre. Seemingly with a glint in their eyes, it went through a long period of Early Access in an attempt to be the perfect spiritual successor and contemporary interpretation of the renown local veteran, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT_4]SWAT4[/url]. Unfortunately, the only thing time on the field offered to Ready or Not was jadedness. Doing the right thing turned out hard, and the benefits for so would most likely not pay off. It grew authoritarian in its dullness, abandoning its ideal vision and adopting instead a gorged caricature with a strong beating heart that pumps incompetence. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] The gameplay of Ready or Not (RoN) can be summed up as a hardcore PvE game where a small team of heroes will usually go against a battalion of incomprehensibly suicidal felons armed to the teeth that need to be put down at all costs. You can see some very [url=https://youtu.be/WIz_QZ2PPSk?si=mHUt90-eqF5pdjxB&t=361]"high-level" gameplay[/url] on the net, where players will dynamically enter a civilian building and annihilate every "bad guy" with gunshow levels of lethal weaponry to choose from. This would all be fine as a premise, if not for the fact the intended way for a game like this to be played, and the way its score system works at the highest level and difficulty, would be to have the ideal of [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m88WWvWiTUg&list=PLfCAgRm9s_ZW1yHKFd3OnP3MDvOTtZdMT&index=6]zero casualties.[/url] There's a big gaping hole in the core of RoN which makes its gameplay loop a boring failure, noticeably: [list] [*]The Police Rules of Engagement (RoE) where use of force is to be strict are often confused for Military shoot-on-sight RoE; the scenarios and the suspect AI often have this mismatch for the game goal. [list] [*] [strike]Enemies[/strike] Suspects are often armed with military grade body armor, automatics, and pure malice, tending to run [i]at[/i] the entry team. They are programmed to crave death, as running [i]from[/i] danger to cover (or surrendering) is dishonorable in the eyes of [i]Khorne[/i], the God of Blood. [*] RoN comically exaggerates the incident that lead to the event of "cold cuffs", so reportedly dead bodies [i]must be cuffed else they can return to life and snap your neck[/i]. [*] Alternatively, double tap crackheads with Slug rounds. They may keep coming back. Maybe we don't give the war on drugs enough credit. [/list] [*]There are sitcom-tier levels of intelligence for the insertion briefing. [list] [*] You're usually given a small description of the situation, the world's worst real estate company pictures available of the location, and a "map" drawn with crayons. [*] Want to know where the insertions are? Tough luck, jump in and die to find out. [/list] [*]The many gadgets that should help the entry team to hold the upper hand feel superfluous [list] [*] You can try to use a toy gun that shoots farts, pepper spray and a Tazer™ (none of which work for some suspects depending on the scenario) instead of a perfectly hip-fire accurate select-fire Battle Rifle and terminator armor with ballistic helmet and steel plates. [*] Enemies can quickly make out the pigs in the dark (and often through walls) so trying to use Nightvision Goggles for tactical superiority is comedic. [*] Indeed you can taze someone from behind a ballistic shield while they magdump you. Although the ideal situation would have been fighting human beings that can be surprised and defeated from tactical superiority; not battle tranced chimpanzees that need to be put in a shock collar with a long stick. [/list] [*]It almost feels like [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda]"copaganda" [/url] in the sense that trying to play "the game" right is a pointlessly risky endeavor that is fun to nobody except the most fetishistic of masochists that would sooner go extinct than stay in service. [/list] Even in the event you are willing to ignore the game score rating and barge into civilian households with a full auto Armor Piercing weaponry under zero objections, the game will force you to locate and apprehend civilians in the map and other "evidence" garbage before you finish the scenario, just to rub it in that "it's a SWAT game". This also happens to be the excuse for there not being a "run" button, a match made in hell itself. [h2]Art Direction[/h2] RoN uses the Unreal Engine 4 (UE) to a good amount of its potential and enjoys displaying high fidelity assets in detailed environments with innumerable amounts of shades. Unfortunately, this may as well be the uniform for any self-entitled UE powered game. What RoN does with its uniformity is create a lot of visual pollution. A lot of things seem to be placed just for the sake of being placed, as if it's trying to justify having paid for those assets. Some of them are out of scale with the player size, giving you the impression the city is some sort of society composed of Elves and Dwarves; maybe the gameplay loop would have been more coherent if it were. Lights and Lasers work out terribly depending on the graphical setting, often "reflecting" or being drowned by other ambient lights. Needless to say, all these things combined makes target acquisition more difficult. It appears the game is "so realistic" it is attempting to emulate an early onset of cataracts upon the player character. https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3117449914 https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3117449986 The "visual storytelling" is not too subtle. It displays lots of off-screen violence, sometimes you get extremely contrasting architecture such as an entire cave system built on the backyard of a crackhouse with schizophrenic drawings on the walls. Really nails it in that we don't take the war on drugs seriously enough, and that the bad guys are so evil they'll shoot the dog! https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2913160318 There is a lot of audio, but it often gets drowned out by the gunfire or the 20 second long screams of agony from suspects with sixteen new additional orifices paid for by the local municipality. Subtitles are full of typos and mondegreens. [h2]Conclusion[/h2] RoN tried to be virtuous and stand up when nobody else did when it comes to making a Tactical Shooter, and for that it quickly gained some credit. There is some gameplay and eye candy when it is in its best behavior, but a little time and experience will quickly show you its ugliness with a thoroughly broken soul. In the event you're not willing to put up with blind trial-and-error until you too start seeing there can only be degrees of guilt rather than innocence in the crowds, I'd recommend skipping this title or waiting for a hefty sale with a mod list for a first playthrough. If you kept up to here, consider checking the following: - [url=https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/107410/Arma_3/]ARMA 3[/url] - [url=https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/892860/Hot_Brass/]Hot Brass[/url] - [url=https://www.gog.com/en/game/swat_4_gold_edition]SWAT4 (on GoG)[/url]