I’m slowly maneuvering through a neon-lit club that’s been the site of a casualty-heavy shooting alongside another teammate. The music is blasting and the lights are dazzling, but nobody is here save for a few terrified civilians, a handful of armed attackers, and crude piles of innocent bodies on each dancefloor. It’s grim, and I’m tense as I search every room for enemies. I slowly swing a door open…and it swings back towards me to close. I swing it open once more, and it returns back at me yet again. Before I can press the button to open it a third time, it pulls all the way back to reveal a shotgun-toting enemy who was behind it all along, and I laugh and scream as I frantically start shooting take him down. It’s fun and tense, it’s stupid and scary, and it’s Ready or Not.
At face value, Ready or Not is an incredibly serious game. Whether you boot up the single player Commander mode or a co-op lobby, you’re initially tossed into a realistic police station, and given a list of almost two dozen different S.W.A.T. encounters to take on – each one either based on an eerily familiar real-life tragedy, or simply set in the kind of speculative or terrifying circumstance that I would never want to find myself in. It’s easy to see a mission list that includes an active campus shooter level, a club shooting level, and a sex trafficking level and think the game is going out of it’s way to pursue shock value above all else. The game doesn’t just agree that these situations are awful and terrifying, though, but it also smartly acknowledges that the deliverers of justice can be awful and terrifying too.
When you load into a mission, your base objectives are always to rescue every civilian and “bring order to chaos” – this means killing or arresting every armed enemy on the premises. Your only option for securing an innocent life, though, is to yell them down and cuff them as they question what you’re doing in a terrified or confused tone. And while you’re hunting down a primary armed suspect, you’ll encounter questionable activities or environmental details that go strangely ignored by your direct objectives, yet slowly paint a clearer picture of corruption and ignorance that, instead of feeling like shock value, rings startlingly true with how cops in America are perceived and behave today.
This helps to provide a lot of nuance to the scenarios, but you can also play with four friends in co-op and watch each other get flung across a hallway by a booby-trapped door. The wild tonal ping-pong that happens when you play Ready or Not in co-op makes for some of the most entertaining multiplayer gaming I’ve dug into all year. Guiding AI companions through slow, narrow corridors is challenging, but nowhere near as engaging as the cops-and-robbers roleplaying that you get with real people. It’s so easy to either lock in and pursue objectives, or slip up and laugh until your belly hurts when a friend messes up or the mission goes south.
There is a staggering amount of hardware at your disposal in Ready or Not that makes it incredibly easy to tackle the same mission a dozen different ways. Besides multiple kinds of primary and secondary weapons to choose from, you’ve got a variety of attachments, scopes, and special gear that can help you lock in a particular specialisation and role. Maybe you want to rock a nimble amount of armour and non-lethal suppression gear. Maybe you want to be the first through every opening with a bullet proof shield. Maybe you just want to shoot the hinges off every door with a shotgun.
The mechanical variety at your disposal can get tripped up while playing on console by an equipment wheel that’s a bit too unwieldy to navigate – with the game’s PC origins, it’s great to see there’s support for keyboard and mouse controls, if you want to circumvent this issue. The UI in general is also just very small for playing on a TV, compared to playing on PC.
A few situations in Ready or Not do bring the experience to a screeching halt, though. As mentioned earlier, playing with AI isn’t nearly as thrilling. At times, they’re almost too competent and can clear out an entire room with the precision of RoboCop before you’ve even realized that room exists. The main single-player Commander mode attempts to add a layer of meta-progression with a squad of partners who you dynamically manage and upgrade as they go on missions, get injured, face failure, and can even die. It’s interesting, but not nearly enough and not all that exciting. Perhaps a roguelike spin on your mission objectives and gear could add a lot to the experience, but as it stands, I had no reason to get attached to the identical gruff old police men the game threw at me.
I also repeatedly faced an awkward moment in each mission where, as you get done exploring the level and have taken care of nearly every objective, there’s always just one more civilian or enemy hiding somewhere. Thus, you’re forced to slowly backtrack through the map to find them – a repetitive task that immediately strips away all tension and often brings the silly co-op fun to a screeching halt. Until one of you rounds the corner and yelps in surprise while firing wildly.
These are minor flaws, though, in what is otherwise an incredibly addictive and punishing co-op thrill ride. Ready or Not is an absolute blast, and the huge variety of levels and equipment provide a feast of equally intense and hilarious co-op possibilities for you and your friends.