Ready or Not is a realistic tactical first-person shooter with you playing as a SWAT unit by VOID Interactive that is currently in Early Access.
Upon loading the game you have a number of lobby options, Find Session, Singleplayer, Public Lobby, and Friends Only. Single Player has you teamed up against competent AI teammates who are as capable as you in terms of tasks they can do. You are free to order them around during missions such as lockpicking, diffusing a trap, breaching etc.
In the lobby itself is where you can customise you and your team’s (for single player) loadout, test out your gear, do some test runs and choose your missions.
Pick your primary & secondary weapon from the array of assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, pistols to tasers. You can then choose the type of long tactical you wish to equip. From Mirrorgun to peek underneath doors before entering to ballistic shield for protection upon entering or come in loud with a battering ram or a breaching shotgun. Then decide on the amount of armour you wish to have ranging from no armour to heavy armour which will provide better protection at the cost of better mobility.
Choosing the right head gear such as NVGS for night operations or a Ballistic Facemask for extra facial protection for operations with more firefight. You can then test out your equipped loadouts at the gun range or the shoot house.
Operations
Currently there’s 8 levels to choose from, 2 of them being test levels. Each level has a maximum of up to 5 mission types ranging for Normal to Insane difficulty. Fair to say even on Normal, the AI enemies can take you out in a split second. Some will even 360 no-scope you faster than you can even bring up your crosshair on them.
The first mission type is Barricaded Suspects where orders are strictly to not kill suspects but take them in unless an officer or civilian is threatened. In this you have to rescue civilians and detain suspects. Second there’s Raid where enemies are more dangerous and you are expected to engage in firefights, so casualties are expected.
Active Shooter is one of the mission types where you are racing against time to take out the threat of a gunman who is actively taking out civilians. Bomb Threat as the name says, your main mission is to diffuse the bomb threat before the time runs out. Freeing civilians and taking out suspects is secondary.
Hostage Rescue is where stealth is the most important aspect of your play. You have to locate hostages without being seen, strategise and execute the plan to rescue them quickly.
Orders Sir
In operations in single player, you are tasked to lead a team of 4 other operatives to carry out a number of objectives based on the mission type and location of your choosing. Ordering your men to carry out tasks is intuitive and simple enough that it is easy to grasp for players who are new to the tactical FPS genre.
If you want to have it easy, hitting the “Z” key will order your guys to do a command that is shown on the bottom right hand corner of your screen which also depends on what you’re looking at. If you’re looking at a closed door, you can have your men check the door whether is it locked and have them pick it if it is locked. You can have them stack up on a door and breach it by looking at it and hitting “Z” when the command shows. By looking at the bottom of a door, you can use your Mirrorgun if you have it on you to check what’s on the other side of the door before entering.
If you’re more experienced and would like to stack orders for simultaneous breaches, you can order your men to do so by hitting the middle mouse button and queueing up orders for each team while holding the shift button, this is something more detailed and needs getting used to. But when it works, it feels so fluid watching a sequence of beautifully scripted actions unfolding as you wield your conducting baton as the director.
Executioner executed
Planning is one thing, executing is another. You may know how many enemies or civilians are there in the room but you don’t know how they will react, or how fast they will react. The enemies are deadly and eagle eyed when it’s you they have on their crosshair. Take a little too long to aim at them and they would have you drop like a sack of potatoes even before the door fully opens. A civilian freaking out seeing you and your men entering may have them sprinting away and into a room that has hostiles which would set off a chain of events you did not foresee during planning and could result in a death or two on either side.
The audio design is solid, you can hear the movements of footsteps behind the door you’re in front of. Weapons firing sound exactly as how you’d expect them to sound like, impactful and powerful. Gunplay feels accurate with the amount of recoil the weapon has. Using a suppressor dampens out the sound so enemies won’t hear exactly where you’re firing from. The only slight issue would be when you’re aiming at an enemy and you happen to lean on a wall, your character will pull you their weapon instead of having it drawn. Which makes it tricky if your enemy is in another room and you’re hugging the door frame and leaning over to look into the other room to fire but your weapon is not drawn.
The objectives are brutal as well, completing 3 out of 4 objectives could still result in mission failure and a grade F. So what Ready or Not manages to capture in this is the need for quick thinking strategic gameplay that requires one to be absolutely precise in execution for a slight misfire or delay could result in an unwanted body bag that could be yours.
Purchase Ready or Not on Steam!
Hailing from a small Island. Huge football fan. Drinks too much tea.
Survival, Roguelikes, Turn-based or Indie games in general are my go to genres but I like to dabble in all kinds of genres. I tend to have a soft spot for Shmups and Hidden Object Games once in a while.
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