tempted to bump this higher once i can play with actual people and some of the more annoying bugs and ai issues are ironed out post launch but i'm going to first start with the bad so you can kind of understand what you're getting into if you plan on playing the game. technically the game is optimized very poorly, with it's penchant for photorealism there's a ton of massively taxing physics objects in the game that slow the game to a crawl when engaging in crowded rooms or even just walking through the hub world. there's a lot of bizarre design decisions that hinder getting into a groove with this game, such as the inability to restart a mission without the game booting you back to the hub police station (a hub world that would be greatly improved by simply replacing it with a menu, large and empty with little actual personality). missions are also just plagued with pretty unrealistic AI on both the suspect and companion side, making some missions much more difficult than they need to be, suspects shooting you through walls without knowing of your presence or companions failing to follow orders and just standing around while you run into a room and get riddled with bullets.

more than any of this is simply the fact that this is an absolutely vile piece of software. on the very surface level it's pretty clearly just propaganda for police brutality, allowing the player to brutalize suspects in gory detail with limbs and heads flying off when shot from close quarters. there's incentive to use non-lethal means to apprehend suspects (the only way to get an S rank on all missions) but very little punishment for just going in and killing all of them (slightly lower score and your interchangeable teammates get a slight mental health debuff). there's also the queasy fact that some of the situations here are ripped straight from the headlines, with missions pretty obviously based on the siege of christopher dorner and the pulse nightclub massacre, as well as others more coyly recreated like a school shooting mission taking it's name from gus van sant's columbine film elephant or a siege on a wealthy hollywood pedophile that's strikingly similar to dan schneider. then there's just the abundance of 4chan and right wing memes slyly referenced in the game such as a gas station taking it's name from /tv/ baneposting and the abundance of missions which involve your team raiding child pornography rings which just feel ripped straight from the sound of freedom.

with all that said, this is still one of the most nailbitingly tense games i've ever played. your character and your teammates are incredibly vulnerable even with the most amount of armor on, and will go down with only a few shots from an enemy you didn't immediately notice. the game feels more like a survival horror game with tactical elements than a straight up tactical shooter, checking under every door in the hopes that you can get the drop on someone before entering the room before entering and getting domed by someone else you didn't notice hiding around the corner. the fact that suspect locations and evidence are procedurally placed around the map makes it so that you need to constantly keep yourself on your toes, no runs of the same map will ever be the same, and i can guarantee this is even more nailbiting in multiplayer without the crutch of ai companions that can more quickly find the suspects than a human's reaction time, leading to even more chaos and confusion.

and for as much as i've complained about the thematic ideas and overly engineered environments the world here is actually incredibly compelling. it's grim and nihilistic, full of violence and brutality. the game is much more similar to the work of s. craig zahler than the "equal opportunity offender" of postal 2 and south park or the unremitting right wing "comedy" of the postal 2 expansions or the daily wire films. the game is filled with flavour text to dive further into the depths of depravity, environmental storytelling that does actually really add to the immersion even if it tanks the performance. the brutal violence actually adds to the depth of the proceedings for me (even if it may not be explicitly intended), where players are complicit in acts of pure evil, never solving anything and getting very little reward beyond maybe a new helmet and a "good job" from your superior while your team's mental health constantly spirals and more death is on the horizon.

i think it's totally fair to hate this game based purely on any of the negative aspects i've mentioned, but at the same time if this sounds interesting to you i would highly recommend at least checking it out as i was thoroughly engrossed (altho maybe i should just play swat 4 instead lmao)

I'll admit to not being very enthused by this game when it initially landed in Early Access, both because my older self is uncomfortable with any game that's inherently sympathetic to law enforcement and because the initial serving of Ready Or Not was... Sour. Uncomfortable racial caricatures, eyebrow-raising dialogue, potential right-wing dogwhistles and an odd eagerness to let you go full police brutality on people were what awaited me, which is a far cry from SWAT 4. This isn't getting into the massive technical or balance issues.

101 people before me have said it, but SWAT 4's legacy is less of a cop game and more of a horror game. It knew just how much literally everyone hated cops and weaponized it, creating alienating and hostile environments where everything could be a threat yet told you outright that you weren't supposed to react as you would in other FPS games. The core difference between SWAT 4 and its contemporaries is that perfect play in SWAT 4 meant taking as few actions as possible and ideally walking out with 0 kills.

So you can imagine why RoN's first public version made me grit my teeth and back away. I was content to file it away in the vast wastes of my Steam library and up until now I'd succeeded, but I was bored in the evening and my IRLs insisted it was "quite good no" [sic], so with fuck all else to do and an alarmingly low amount of alcohol in the fridge for a Scottish household, I decided to join them and binge the entire thing in one massive session.

What immediately stands out in the 1.0 version is how a lot of the more obvious copaganda elements are gone, as are the problematic stuff which is most noticeable in the dialogue. It's a relief that I can play the game without worrying I'm going to run into an ulcer bustingly racist comment/accent. The developers also evidently busted out their old copies of SWAT 4, played it to completion and now the game is hellbent on keeping you from firing your weapon at a living person.
Lower caliber weapons offer you the mercy of allowing you to hit someone in the extremities for a non-lethal takedown, but bringing 7.62 Assault Rifle or a Shotgun to a gas station holdup will almost always end in severed limbs and penalties for unauthorized use of deadly force. Call me old, but the first time I accidentally decapitated someone with a stray 12 gauge shot actually made me feel a bit ill, and from then on I've exclusively used an MP5 and a Glock 19.

Where this game deviates from SWAT 4 is that it's very clearly trying to dig into the player's sense of morality to make the need for restraint sting, for lack of a better word. I'm still undecided as to how copaganda this game is on a scale from 3-10 (it will never be below 3, because cops are still sympathetic as the protagonists), but there's something to be admired in how the game will bring you face-to-face with pedophiles, human traffickers, school shooters and libertarians and still demand you keep your team on a short leash, follow the ROE, and try to minimize casualties. In typing that out, I realize that regardless of this game's status (or not) as copaganda, it's very clearly in love with an almost romantic idea of ~equal justice~ that's at odds with the fact you're playing as a cop, a breed of 'person' that in real life views justice as an obstacle to killing people. If you view all fiction as a fantasy of some kind, RoN is a fantasy land where cops actually behave like the image they try to put forward.

I've seen a surprise amount of (admittedly lowkey) debate about whether or not the game handles its subject matter with any grace, and for once I'm not 100% on where my own stance lies. I'd say that the game doesn't actually handle the subject matter... at all. The horrors I mentioned up above are grotesque, yes, but they're portrayed very manner-of-factly. There are no dramatic, heartbreaking violins or horrifying cutscenes in the buildup to the school shooting mission, it's just another mission. The horror comes from carrying out those routine behaviours - skulking around, identifying corpses, trying to subdue suspects nonlethally, praying the person on the floor is just hiding and not dead - in a school. They're depicted, sure, but it feels to me that the game is more about letting you take away your own feelings from the more emotionally challenging missions rather than going out of its way to make you feel a specific way.

I will say that the one exception to this is the swatting level which is, for lack of any better phrases, extremely over the top. It's the second level and comes after you besieging a gas station that's being held up, so I assume the developers wanted to keep the stakes high. The end result is that a 'simple' swapping also features gangsters, a crypto-mining operation, and the implication that the swatting victim partakes in a child trafficking ring. The use of unfortunate streamer stereotypes just makes it feel even more out of place, as if the game is trying to console new players who might fuck up and start firing like crazy. "It's okay, you just hit crypto miners and pedophiles!" or something like that. It's all so garishly out of place with the rest of the game.

Praise must be hoisted upon the visuals and level design, by the way. Brightly lit areas are fucking terrifying because armed gunmen can be literally anywhere, and even the most open levels feel dense and claustrophobic. Darker levels and smaller levels are so much worse, with a flashlight or nightvision goggles only offering token reprieve from the shadows. They really leaned into the 'horror game' thing.

There is, unfortunately, one massive problem hanging over this game like a pendulum, arguably more damaging to it than any potential discussions of its subject matter:

The enemy AI.

If you've ever played Rainbow 6 Siege during peak hours, it's a lot like getting matched against a team of Siege addicts from the Midwest. They possess hyper-awareness, x-ray vision, a total lack of recoil, reaction times measured in nanoseconds, and accuracy that most actual drones would kill to have. Many a time have I lost a mission because someone sensed my tainted chakra and decided to become a bodhisattva for the sake of purifying me.

Through a wall.

With a glock.

Despite me wearing full plate armor and being behind a cabinet as well.

This game lacks a 'downed' state which really compounds my frustrations. My friends and I, despite our years of tactical shooter experience and general FPS capabilities, never finished a mission with the full team alive because the AI is capable of inhuman feats. This applies to all suspect types, too, so you can meet your end at the hands of a panicked D&D player with a Beretta within about a half-second of making eye contact, and then experience the same thing facing down trained security personnel at a millionaire's mansion.

I wouldn't mind this were it the endgame state, or only applied to special enemies (former military, perhaps?) but as it stands it's omnipresent behaviour and results in the game easily becoming an exercise in frustration. The AI roams a lot, too, which can make a lot of tactical gear feel useless. C2 gas is very good when it works, but good luck getting to use it. In general, while the experience is fine enough, the AI hasn't actually evolved from early access and still feels like it's meant to counter players in a game where doors don't exist.

All in all, I'd be lying if I told you I didn't enjoy my time with this game, but even in its much nicer release state there is a small pit in my stomach that turns sour when thinking about it. Despite everything this is a game where you play as cops out to stop a crime wave, and while it's dispensed with the EA version's 'degenerate America' stuff, it still sometimes toes the line in a way that reminds me of a child looking at their parent to see how much of their brattiness is within acceptable parameters, or a cat about to knock something off the shelf.

There are posters dotted around the police station that encourage officers to take the shot, featuring despondent cops who're lamenting that they hesitated. I think these illustrate the cognitive dissonance the game experiences, because you're likely to see one after a tutorial in which a narrator with a cheap microphone repeatedly tells you to shoot last, ask questions later.

I've been waiting for a spiritual sequel to SWAT 4 for a very long time. I have been so eager for this hypothetical game that 4 years ago I - a person who never preorders anything - spent $120 United States Dollars on this game when it was just a video. Please adjust your perception of me accordingly.

There was a long alpha period where I was too afraid to pay much attention to the game, save for reading a few excited emails about how they've finally implemented doors (and oh boy, have they). Now that it's finally purchasable for the general public on Steam, I've tried it and… it's pretty good?

Don't get me wrong, this is not even remotely a finished product. Within our first three missions, a friend and I already ran into a bug that forced us to completely restart the level because I couldn't interact with the only door out of a room. But the core of SWAT 4's gameplay is here and it feels pleasant and modern - most importantly, actually using the equipment you lug around doesn't feel like a chore anymore. There are tweaks to the formula too, welcome changes that modify the balance of the game or add features present in popular mods for SWAT 4. Turning the game into a joke by spamming the beanbag shotgun is no longer an option, a melee button allows you to subdue civilians who won't let you handcuff them (grandma), and the addition of trapped doors forces you to slow down and greatly adds to the paranoia that comes with being outnumbered in a hostile environment.

BUT

As much as I enjoy the gameplay at the core of the experience, I've got a couple gripes, and they can be real stinkers, depending on your perspective.

The first and most minor are the early access-related complaints. I don't mind a lot of the jank since I've been playing SWAT 4 for years now, but new players are going to have questions that the game doesn't answer, bugs that you're not sure are truly bugs or not, and a lack of features / equipment. The game also doesn't feel like it's trying too hard to stray from SWAT 4's formula (thus becoming its own thing), but it feels like it's too early in the process to say whether the end product will feel the same way.

The other big one is the game's politics. A game like this is going to be overtly political and frankly I wasn't expecting a lot, but the developers of this game have made some… interesting choices. Probably the most objectionable is the civilian dialogue, as most of them will say something after you handcuff them - again, like SWAT 4. The women have terrible voice lines, including at least two separate lines hitting on the cops, and one racist voice line that also just… doesn't feel like it even makes sense? Thankfully the game has very little story compared to The Other Game, since the trailers for this game very much leaned into the "careful, devoted cop heroes are the only thing keeping a tidal wave of crime from crashing upon this city" idea. I know the developers split with the publisher of the game, and I've only seen a single mention of it so far indicating that it may be due to the devs' intention of setting a future level in a school shooting. Not really thrilled about where this game could go in the future - as things stand I'm expecting the game from 2005 to be the more respectful of the two.

All in all, I think I'm mixed on Ready or Not as a consumer product. I'm not holding out hope that this will become something I can recommend in good conscience, even though everything in it feels great. Kicking in doors feels thunderous. Developing a system to conquer missions becomes a satisfying collaborative puzzle. Taking a room where armed hostiles are mixed in with civilians without anyone (friend or foe) sustaining an injury is as exciting as beating any video game boss, crammed into a couple tense seconds. But I just can't recommend it, not before you look into the game, the developers and decide if you'd like to support them with $40 of your own money.

Perhaps this game will change, perhaps the devs will respond to my complaints if they get enough feedback. I've been pleasantly surprised before. Watch this space??

Was this update worth a year of wait? Maybe. I wish they'd have given us most of this stuff a bit at a time instead of dropping half a terabyte of content immediately at launch.

Ready or Not has always been my little spark of faith in the gaming industry. As they ditched the multiplayer PvP in alpha, this game saved itself from being a competitive turd of a game (a faith Siege suffered sadly), becoming instead what I wish games were: a form of art. Ready or Not doesn't just want to be "realistic", rather it's a neo noir story commenting on real events happening in reality through its lore. This update only enhanced that aspect of it.

Gameplay-wise, I think the new AI is much more interesting than it was before both for our SWAT pals and for the criminal and boys, admittedly though there still is room for improvement for future updates. Maps have been revamped and are much easier to play compared to how they were before, making sure they're not too large and open and that civilians don't just run in the opposite corner of the map. I also really like the new customisation system, much more rewarding than the beta's "here, take everything for free".

I recommend this game to everyone who's a fan of tactical shooters, considering Ready or Not is definitely the best modern one, competing decently well against games like the first Rainbow Six or SWAT 4

Voiiiiillllaaaa ça c'est un jeu qui joue ça

Déjà j'ai eu plus de crises cardiaques sur ce jeu qu'un octogénaire raciste qui descendrait sur Sevran. Ensuite enfin un jeu qui respecte le joueur avec une IA qui sait résoudre une équation subatomique. Le nombre de fois ou je me suis fais brain avec un ennemi caché derrière une porte avec un couteau ou qui te flank de l'autre bout de la map. On est jamais en sécurité et c'est vraiment un sentiment génial. Le soin apporté au détail est excellent aussi : pouvoir choisir son type de gilet pare-balle ou ses munitions c'est trop cool. Les maps sont bien pensées et l'ambiance y est constamment réussie c'est un plaisir de découvrir les lieux et de tomber sur des détails extrêmement glauques ou au contraire des easter eggs rigolos. Les défauts iraient au bugs d'ombre ou de miroir mais le jeu est en cours de développement donc ça se pardonne largement. Egalement un besoin de plus de répliques pour les NPC et de modèle est nécéssaire pour éviter les répétitions. Extrêmement hâte de voir comment le jeu va évoluer avec notamment un mode PVP prévus et de nombreux ajouts super intéressants annoncés dans une FAQ faites par les dévs.
Mention spécial à l'accès au mods super facile c'est très plaisant.

I honestly haven't been frustrated by the full release from beta of a game so much. This game is just filled with baffling decisions.
Like oh, we gotta change the main police station for a third fucking time, even though nobody likes using it and would rather use a menu.
We gotta add a borderline unnecessary amount of detail to the levels, even though that involves filling them with a thousand little high polygon models that nobody even sees in the first place and is the main reason why this game is optimized even worse than fucking Starfield. I've seen friends with RTX 3080s struggle to run it at a consistent framerate above medium settings.
How in the beta every level had the different game modes marked on them, implying in the future every level would be playable with them, but on the full release that's quietly moved under the rug. Mind you that in S.W.A.T. 4 every level having every game mode was the standard.
How they added lore for whatever reason and hyper focused on it which is just taking up resources and development time for something nobody would even care about.
And how the game crashes so goddamn much and is unbearably glitchy, even though it's supposed to be the full release.
The only reason why I don't dislike the game is because the foundation is pretty good, but said foundation is already just a worse S.W.A.T. 4.