Back when the only internet available was dial-up, and home computers could barely run two programs at once, I was but a wee lad in my parents’ basement, playing SWAT 3 on my potato of a Dell PC with AOL Instant Messenger notifications blaring in the background. You see, alongside Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims, SWAT 3 is in my holy trinity of PC games. In fact, I took SWAT 3 so seriously that I joined a clan as a recruit, trained with them weekly, and eventually worked my way up from a B2 to an R1. What’s a B2 and an R1, you might ask? This former SWAT 3 nerd will be happy to explain: Blue Two and Red One, with the former being the caboose of a SWAT team element, and the latter being the tip of the spear. I took it seriously, I made online gaming buddies, and I had a ton of fun along the way. All of which is to say that Ready or Not has taken me back to those days in the best possible way.
Ultimately, Ready or Not is a grounded, gritty tactical shooter that nails the core experience of operating as a video game SWAT team. I’ll even go a step further and say that it is one of the best tactical shooters on console, and one that we desperately needed.
SWAT is short for “Special Weapons and Tactics,” with an emphasis on tactics. There is no running-and-gunning in Ready or Not (there’s not even a sprint button), no guns-blazing (unless you like failing missions), and no cringey character skins (unless skull and bones forearm tattoos are cringey to you). This is a tactical shooter for serious people. The friend in your gaming group who likes to bark orders or tell everyone how to play a game is going to love Ready or Not, not that I would know. And with training, your other, less patient pals can enjoy it too. I think I’ve finally convinced one friend to give suspects more than two seconds to surrender, and the owner of Gaming Nexus to quit smacking civilians with his gun when nobody is looking. Rules of Engagement are a real thing in Ready or Not.
Ready or Not can be played solo or with up to five players in a full element. In single player, you can play with extremely competent AI teammates as well. Missions can be carried out a la carte through Quick Play, or in a semi-career mode called Commander Mode. This mode does not allow mission restarts, meaning if a member of your team dies, they’re dead, and it will have negative mental effects on the rest of your team. Officers may be content, anxious, or downright stressed, requiring therapy to get them right again before they can be selected for missions. Ready or Not throws in a little XCOM with this team management system.
As you complete missions, you can hire additional officers so that you can rotate them in and out of your squad. I mean, you can only respond to so many active shooters before needing a break, I would imagine. Officers will also unlock their respective trait as you (successfully) complete missions. One may have a Paramedic trait that lets them revive a downed officer, or they may have the Breacher trait that gives a team-wide boost to the effectiveness of breaching actions, meaning whether a suspect will surrender or not.
At Los Suenos Police Department (LSPD) headquarters, you will customize the loadouts of you and your entire team, select a mission, and go through its briefing. There is a wide variety of assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns, and pistols to choose from. Additionally, each officer also carries one piece of long tactical equipment with them, which are things like a battering ram, mirror gun, or police shield. When you’ve geared up, the mission briefing gives you a rundown of any known suspects or civilians on the premises, possible entry points, a map if available, and sometimes the harrowing 911 call audio.
After arriving on scene, you’ll need to work as a team to clear the premises, rescue civilians, and “bring order to chaos” – the primary objective for every mission. Ideally, bringing order to chaos means everyone gets out alive, but that is rarely the case in Ready or Not. Some of these bad guys are bad guys, which results in the use of lethal force. There really are Rules of Engagement in place, encouraging/preventing you from being the type of police officer we sometimes see in the news, but combat is often inevitable.
Ready or Not takes its combat just as seriously everything else, though. Getting shot at is startling, terrifying, and frankly, disorienting. The screen gets fuzzy with tunnel vision when you are taking fire, usually making it hard to see what is happening around you. Also, guns are loud when firing, especially indoors (and if you’re playing with headphones), maybe more so than other shooters, but adds even more realism. Despite being overwhelming, hesitating can mean the difference in living or dying, both for you and your teammates. If a threat presents itself, it must be dealt with swiftly, especially if a suspect has a hostage meat shield.
On PlayStation 5, shooting feels good thanks to the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback and, most notably, its use of adaptive triggers. Maybe not since Returnal have I seen a game utilize the half-trigger pull as an action, but Ready or Not uses a half-left trigger pull for a canted aim (think halfway between hip fire and aiming down sights), and a full pull for ADS. You can also feel the trigger pull of each weapon on the right trigger which adds a nice bit of further immersion.
If you don’t want to go it alone, every mission can also be played in multiplayer, with randoms through online matchmaking, or in a private session with your partners in anti-crime. Playing single player instead of with humans can be a wildly different experience as Ready or Not is one of very few games that I’ve played where the AI makes for far better teammates than humans. I still prefer barking orders at my real friends, but playing solo is a completely viable way to play a co-operative shooter for once.
As a seasoned virtual SWAT professional, I can vouch for the AI’s competence. Blue team will cover the rear when split stacking on a door while red team takes point. As they move to clear a room, you can see them checking corners and moving dynamically together to cover vulnerabilities as they come upon them. They’ll detain suspects and civilians on their own, they’ll maintain the Rules of Engagement, they’ll bag evidence, they’ll drop glow sticks when a room has been cleared – all the SWAT things. Honestly, I felt like an amateur in the way of the professionals working as I watched my team execute. They’re really good. So good, in fact, that they put all my friends to SWAT shame.
In solo, you use the right shoulder button on console to issue commands to either the entire element, or red and blue team individually. You can also queue up commands for those times when you want to breach-and-clear two doors to the same room. I sometimes liked to have one team queue up a C2 breaching charge, and the other a flashbang, if I wanted to make the biggest cop knock possible. Thankfully, you can watch teammates’ helmet cams, allowing you to keep tabs on the action no matter where you are.
As a game making the jump from PC to console, Ready or Not mostly succeeds in translating its myriad controls and menu systems to a console controller. Radial menus are a PC developer’s best friend on console, which are mostly well utilized on PS5. I admit that they take some getting used to, though. For instance, holding the L1 button brings up your equipment menu, which has multiple subcategories. To select a subcategory, you must continue holding L1 but push and release the left joystick towards the category you want to open. So, once I selected the grenade category with the left stick and released, then I had to select the grenade I wanted to use and released the L1 button to confirm my selection. I struggled for a while at first, I admit, but once I got the muscle memory down it was rather intuitive.
With that said, there is something funky going on with the command wheel function. Sometimes, despite having red or blue team selected to issue a command to, the whole element would execute the command. I think it’s a glitch and not a user error, but some refinement there would do it good.
My only other real complaints about Ready or Not are that to utilize cross-platform multiplayer, you need an Epic Games account and must jump through some hoops to link it to your console platform account. Additionally, (and this one is a bit nitpicky) but no one playing on console is going to claim Ready or Not is the best-looking game they’ve ever seen. Furthermore, I’m not exactly a framerate snob, but the 30 frames-per-second quality graphics mode is tough to look at on PS5 due to what appears to me to be a consistent drop in frames. On the contrary, performance mode at 60 frames per second does just fine. Even so, what Ready or Not lacks in graphical fidelity it makes up for in environmental storytelling. The makeshift booby-trapped cabin of the former government spy turned crazed conspiracy theorist. The phones ringing and vibrating non-stop at the nightclub shooting. These are not your typical shooter maps, nor are they for the faint of heart.
And finally, I should probably mention that some content was cut from the console version of the game so that it could pass certification at Sony and Microsoft. My understanding is that some nudity and other graphical content was removed from the console version, though if you are a longtime console player, you’ve probably grown used to censorship at this point. PC storefronts are far more lenient in that regard.
In nearly every way, Ready or Not delivered like I hoped it would. Developer VOID Interactive thought of just about everything for this SWAT sim. We don’t get tactical shooters like this on console, so this one feels long overdue, and it scratches a major itch upon arrival. It is a serious game for serious people, so if you’re thinking, “Haha, SWAT machine gun go brrr!” then think again. This is a game about saving lives, not taking them, even if that is not always possible. It is a grounded, intense experience that rewards teamwork, precision, and execution regardless of if you’re playing with AI or human teammates. Ultimately, Ready or Not has proven to be ready, more than not, for its long-awaited console release.
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.
