Recent reviews by Saritiel

The grind in this game is absolutely abysmal. I have hundreds of hours in the game and I still don't have any jets or any top tier ground vehicles. The top tier gameplay looks fun, its too bad you'll never get to experience it without spending gigantic amounts of money.

The monetization in this game is awful, they make the grind ridiculously long and then charge huge amounts of money to just slightly speed it up.

They could cut the grind in half and it would still be way too long.

The unfortunate thing is that as a concept its a very cool game. And if the grind and price gouging wasn't nearly so bad then I'd actually spend some money on this game. But as it stands there's no point. If you don't buy premium vehicles then it'll take you forever to get anywhere in the game and you'll get wrecked by Pay to Win (P2W) vehicles other players have purchased. If you do cave and buy P2W vehicles then they'll be nerfed after they've gotten enough people to buy them and they release new P2W vehicles that they want you to buy so you'll have to buy the new P2W vehicle if you want to continue grinding at a fast rate.

Cool concept and generally fun game that's completely ruined by the monetization and grind.

Game has the bones of a good successor to SWAT 4. The foundation is there, but its still missing lots of things that SWAT 4 had and feels very incomplete.

The good:

* Guns feel and sound very satisfying to use
* Lots of customization for the guns and loadout
* Giving your men orders generally feels satisfying
* Visually the game looks good

The meh:
* The AI is still very much a work in progress, or at least it feels that way
* You can equip the AI with battering rams and grenade launchers but I can't seem to get the AI to actually use them
* The AI often gets in your way and when they do it can be near impossible to get them out of your way, like if you accidentally have them follow you into a broom closet, good luck getting out
* The AI doesn't seem to be able to use the wand effectively. I wanted to bring a grenade launcher and have the AI wand the rooms but every time they'd just say 'Can't do that sir' and I wouldn't get any info from them so now I just give them all breaching shotguns since its the only tool they seem to be able to use
* AI can't remove door wedges, you have to remove it for them
* When you tell the AI to cover it doesn't have them face the direction you were facing like it does in SWAT 4 so it can be hard to get one of your teams to just watch a hall without having their backs to it sometimes
* Enemy AI doesn't seem to react to sound at all, only visual. I remember in SWAT 4 that once you went loud you'd start finding the enemy AI already crouched and ready for a fight or what have you. In this game no one seems to realize you're here until they see you.
* There are no mission briefings. Its a small thing but I really feel like mission briefings added a lot to SWAT 4 and made the scenarios feel more real. A briefing telling you what intel tells you to expect, gives you a mugshot or two, and rough blueprints/plans of the location

The bad:
* Maybe its just me, I don't know, but level design... well, it feels bad. I frequently get lost in the levels, there's no map or blueprints or planning phase as far as I can tell, the levels are very big and complex and loop around on themselves a lot.
* There aren't very many levels, though the ones they have are all fairly large. But I feel like the game could really benefit from adding a half dozen or more smaller levels like the Fairfax Residence. Where its just one house or gas station or location with one or two bad guys.
* Its very hard to find or see the additional objectives. The levels are cluttered with stuff to make them look more natural and 'lived in' and that's great. But the special objectives (like harddrives you need to seize or meth packages to be found) just blend in with all of the other random detritus making it almost impossible to find them without looking up a guide.
* The game is VERY over the top. Man, in the night club shooting level there are just absolute mounds and piles of bodies that are very excessive. Obviously there have been horrible tragedies in real life where dozens of people have died at nightclubs and in other places, but this just really feels excessive.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but overall the tone of the game is also very different than SWAT 4's tone. I would say that SWAT 4 had an overall noble tone of being protectors of the people who were going in and trying to save people and make the world better. Ready or Not feels to me like it has more of a grimdark tone where the bad things have already happened, almost everyone is already dead, and you're there to punish and 'bring to justice' (usually meaning kill since they almost all fight back) the people who did it.

I think I personally prefer the tone of SWAT 4.

So, in conclusion, I can't really recommend this game in its current state. I feel like it has a long way to go before it'll truly be a worthy successor to SWAT 4. For the moment I have to recommend that you just spend the $5 to pick up SWAT 4 on GOG and play SWAT 4.

This game is freaking sick.

True story from early on when I was still learning.

I was up against a Bryan player, my kryptonite. He was absolutely destroying me, he kept using this one string on me over and over and over again. I had no idea what to do against it so I kept trying different things. Tried backdashing, interrupting with jabs, ducking, sidestep left, nothing seemed to work. But then I found you could sidestep the third hit of the string to the right. So next time he uses the string on me I sidestep the third hit right and launch him. I was so hype that I dropped the combo after the first hit and jumped out of my chair and shouted "THAT'S RIGHT, DON'T YOU *EVER* USE THAT STRING AGAINST ME AGAIN!"

He still beat me four or five times more in a row. But he stopped using that string against me. That's when I realized I loved this game.

10/10, strong recommend, but definitely not for anyone who isn't willing to be patient and learn.

100% recommend

Fast paced flowing action, multiple ways to approach most encounters. You'll die a lot but you restart instantly so its not a big deal and you're back in the action instantly.

Only downside for me is that some of the parkour seemed to not work perfectly. There were a couple of sections that it seems the system just wasn't working properly and I wasn't able to make jumps that the levels had been designed for me to be able to make. I was able to get around these areas by some wallrunning shenanigans along the props around the area though so it wasn't too bad. But I'm pretty sure I wasn't doing anything incorrect and for some reason the jumps just weren't working.

This game is just plain frustrating.

After spending an hour getting frustrated at a puzzle that I knew how to solve but the physics just wouldn't cooperate I got past it and stopped playing. Came back later and I had to start the level over again from the get go and do the whole frustrating thing again. Well, I've been trying again for 30 minutes and its still just plain frustrating and just not working well.

Trying to stow things on my back and retrieve them is nothing but an exercise in frustration. I once lost my weapon because in trying to move a box the game decided that I was trying to grab my gun even though my hands were nowhere near my holsters and it threw it into a place I couldn't retrieve it.

Most VR games don't make me feel motion sick, this one does. In fact this is the only VR game that has made me feel motion sick in the last year or two but I can hardly play this one for an hour without feeling like I need to stop and that isn't always long enough to get to the next mission and you can't save mid mission.

The game is a glorified tech demo that is extremely unpolished and IMO needs a lot more work before I'd be willing to recommend it.

I love the concept and the idea and I really wanted to love the game, but I just couldn't.

The actual figuring stuff out and discovering what happened is quite fun, but I'd say for every ten seconds of figuring something out you spend thirty or forty seconds in pointlessly annoyingly long unskippable animation sequences.

Numerous times I was looking at a scene and figured something important out that I wanted to write down in the book but I couldn't because that scene was linked to another scene that the game forced me to go to before I could write in the book, sometimes these scenes would be daisy chained several in a row together and by the time I got out of it I had forgotten what I had figured out in the first scene. Or if you wanted to go back and look at the third scene in the chain again you had to go through the two before it.

The game is also desperately in need of some kind of an 'end scene' button. Occasionally it has something like that where you walk through a glowing doorway once you're done, but sometimes the game just decides "you should be done now." and ends the scene without any control on your end. It is annoyingly inconsistent in how long it gives you as well. Multiple times it ended a scene before I was done considering it, but even more frustrating was when I would see everything a scene had to see, make my deductions, and be ready to go after about 15 seconds but the game decided that I needed at least another couple of minutes. I would just wander the scene aimlessly wondering if there was something I had missed until eventually the game decided that I had been in there long enough and chose to pull me out.

The graphics are neat but they hinder the gameplay. There are instances where you need to visually identify people and trying to squint at the blob of pixels laying dead on the ground and then compare it to the blob of pixels on the photograph you had to determine if the blobs of pixels were the same was an exercise in frustration.

Overall I really wanted to love the game, and clearly a lot of people do, but the game had *way* too many small annoyances that all built up for me to actually enjoy it.

Went all-in on microtransactions, tons of hackers, no single player DLC, and they fired the man who was the driving force behind making tons of Rockstar Games as great as they were. They fired him because he wanted to keep making great single player experiences and they want to only cash in on microtransactions.

This is one of the best games I have ever played. It is an indie game and not yet in full release, but the developers are highly communicative with the community and regular updates are released almost always adding major features or bug fixes. The modding community is extremely dedicated and the developers are highly supportive of it to the point where they have hired several of the best modders straight from the community.

I've put over 250 hours into this game since its been on Steam, but that doesn't count the hundreds of hours I put in before it was on Steam.

The game is extremely worth it and has an extremely bright future ahead of it. There is no clear objective system at the moment though, which has turned some people off the game. I don't believe its coming in the next update but their main priority is currently fleshing out the 'career' mode (as opposed to the sandbox mode that most people play) where there will be objectives, funding, and research. Research has already been added but it needs some major fixing, which is actually their expressed priority for the coming update.

TLDR; The game is very much worth it, if you're interested in spacetravel at all go for it. The satisfaction of landing on the Mun (Kerbal equivalent of the Moon) on your own for the first time more than makes it worth the cost, not to mention the hundreds of other things there are for you to do.

Oh, and if you're still on the fence there is a free demo for you to try. It only includes a fraction of the parts and celestial bodies that are available in the full version and does not include the career mode, but it gives you a good idea of what the full game is like.