Ready or Not – PS5 Review

From Void Interactive comes Ready or Not, a SWAT-em-up for want of a better description. Not a Fugees story-based affair then. Tch.

After a rather involved tutorial in which you’re shown the commands to subdue, apprehend and restrain suspects, you’re also shown how to queue up actions for your squad. In a fairly typical fashion, you can’t proceed until you’ve successfully carried out the commands.

This originally came out on PC and the slightly fussy controller mapping indicates that. Heck, the controller settings in the menu even have an option to use a keyboard instead. We suspect that mouse and keyboard is supported here and probably best to play with that, though it’s a bit of a faff if you’re not using the wireless options.

Mindful perhaps of the negative press the US police generally garner, the trailer suggested that this was more of a psychology-based affair, but let’s be honest, it fibbed quite a lot. It’s very much a run and gun along the lines of Rainbow Six or GRAW. But somehow not as good as either. A bit like moribund Sierra Online series Police Quest too, but without the power-hungry police chief who overreached during the LA riots before being deemed a suitable poster boy for the SWAT offshoots in the mid-1990s.

You’re in command of a squad of five squad members including yourself and it’s down to you to manage your personnel somewhat in terms of their mental welfare. If you do well in missions without sustaining injuries, the morale of your squad remains high. But if you’re as inept as we often are, even on casual difficulty, your squad will often be on the ropes mentally. You’ll also take a mental hit if you leave a mission early without having completed all the mission objectives.

Across its twenty main missions, Ready or Not has you facing off against Latino gang members, middle eastern terrorists and cultists to name a few. Each level has multiple civilians and antagonists to negotiate, the critical part being to arrest the antagonists and make the civilians safe.

The missions are all set around a fictional city called Los Sueños in what we assume to be southern California, especially as some of the southern border to Mexico appears to be adjacent to one mission. The real-life Los Sueños is a tourist resort in Costa Rica, but we doubt that Marriott would be particularly amenable to SWAT teams running around a videogame depiction.

Your objectives are broadly the same in each mission, being to subdue several antagonists by either forcing a disarm by shouting at them when first encountered. Yes, really. You get more completion points than if they’re shot, put it that way. Then once they submit, you’ll be able to cuff them. The same goes for civilians, they’re subdued in the same fashion though also cuffed to stop them being a threat to you. It’s a bit woolly and dare we say, ethically dodgy.

Restraining innocent bystanders seems a tiny bit iffy if you ask us, but we guess stateside pro-police sorts will lap it up like traffic cops do in doling out excessive force during a traffic stop for *checks notes* not having your headlights on. ACAB definitely applies there.

When you have dealt with all the suspects, euphemistically referred as ‘Bringing Order to Chaos’ in your mission objectives, you’ll need to track down any remaining civilians before you’re able to get a mission completion. It’s all well and good, but they like to run around aimlessly which leads to a Scooby Doo style chase as you retrace areas you’ve previously cleared out.

That’s easier said than done as there’s often extra wrinkles like bombs set or citizens being held hostage. The scenarios cover the whole gamut of American crime scenes from the rather too on the nose college shootings or in one notable case, a nightclub massacre. You could well conclude that these sorts of atrocities take place so often in America that they’re almost desensitised to them. Let alone they being deemed it suitable for inclusion in a videogame.

The tutorial would have you carefully queue up a chain of commands to breach doors but practically what actually happens is you’ll investigate doors with your mirror scope thing that shows if you’ve anyone the other side, then sic your squad of four on them, with varying levels of excessive shouting and non-lethal options. At least, you can tell them to use non-lethal options to start with but then they’ll start shooting anyway.

This is generally enough for you to get through most scenarios, the only sticking points being locked doors that you’ll have to lockpick on their behalf. You can resort to a battering ram but despite having it equipped, we weren’t able to use it consistently. The hostage situations are also inconsistent. You can be zeroing on the enemies and suddenly you’ll get a notification that a hostage has been executed. It all feels very arbitrary but not as harsh as when you have locked down almost all the objectives in a mission, only for you to come unstuck due to an apparent glitch.

So yes, glitches. During our playthrough we encountered dodgy pathfinding at best from our team of heavily armed coppers to enemies hidden in walls that can kill you without your being able to see them at worst. The pathfinding was highlighted by two of our guys getting caught behind a glass partitioned and needing us to shepherd them out of there before we could continue. The hidden enemies killing you is harder to swallow and we’ve been able to reproduce in one particular mission, almost without fail. It sucks.

Another continual bugbear of ours when it comes to Ready or Not is the UI being visible on a smaller television. We thought this would be a problem that went away with the shift to HD being the norm, but no. We suspect that it’s a byproduct of this being a PC port, but dang. Sort it out.

To cap it all off, there’s day one DLC available at the outset. Given this came out a couple of years ago on PC, it’s pretty inexcusable that it’s not bundled with the game proper. £15.99 extra for the DLC pass seems pretty mean spirited.

In conclusion, we weren’t too sure when it came to what Ready or Not had to offer, but after playing it through, still felt compelled to play through again on the tougher difficulty levels, if not actually do an ironman run for what we anticipate is the tougher of the trophies. The glitches are infuriating and there’s no excuse for day one DLC, but we enjoyed ourselves for the most part.