Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
The work of security forces ranks among the most important in our society, and there’s no doubt that without their operations, it would descend into absolute chaos. The sight of a soldier, police officer, or even a member of special forces has always stirred in me not only respect but also curiosity. You probably won’t be surprised that I spent a substantial part of my childhood playing soldiers with a friend. Fortunately, I never came even remotely close to the kind of danger this work entails. Thanks to Ready or Not, I got to experience firsthand that wearing such a uniform conceals not only incredibly brave labor but also some pretty nasty stuff.
Command Weight
You’re wondering what could be harder than doing the job of a special forces member? Well, the job of their commander. That’s exactly the role the creators of this tactical hardcore shooter put you in. In the singleplayer portion, which doesn’t hide any deeper story, you’re put in charge of several officers who will accompany you on various missions. You’ll primarily be eliminating terrorists, attempting to arrest wanted individuals, protecting civilians, or defusing explosives. That doesn’t mean, however, that you’ll only be barking orders, as was the case in the SWAT game series.
You’ll also be monitoring the mental state of your unit members. Officers are psychologically affected by injuries sustained in combat, the death of a colleague, or difficult situations where civilian casualties occurred. They can gradually find themselves stressed or depressed, which can also mean their complete departure from the team. It’s up to you whether you decide to be a good commander, care for them and send team members to therapy—which means their temporary removal from the squad—or be ruthless, firing them at the first opportunity and replacing them with new ones.
The stress system thus only functions as long as you want it to. In practice, this means that if instead of sending your officers to therapy you fire them and subsequently hire one after another, you won’t be penalized in any way. Hiring new officers costs nothing, and for many, this can mean an easy way to circumvent the system. If you don’t really immerse yourself in the game, you’ll miss out on a rather essential element revealing the issues of this profession. Although… it depends how you look at it. It’s still a game where massacre follows massacre, but while I wouldn’t want to in any way dishonor the work of these forces, the truth is that their deaths are rather rare. After all, these are trained unit members who are prepared for almost anything.
Missions That Stick
With my own eyes, I was deployed with my team against a gas station robbery, a hospital massacre, a village full of cultists with an atmosphere reminiscent of the horror game Resident Evil Village, a nightclub seemingly inspired by the John Wick films, or the lair of a crazed streamer. The believability of the levels is enhanced by meticulously crafted environments full of thematic elements that, upon closer examination, excellently connect the given cases. These aren’t just mere backdrops, quite the opposite. Each mission has a unique atmosphere that I’ll probably associate with this game forever. Ready or Not simply succeeds in showing an undistorted reality where in one second you can make a mistake that will mean lots of blood and unnecessary loss of life. And when I say unnecessary, I mean truly unnecessary. Among the terrorists and criminals move civilians whose survival is just as crucial as the actual neutralization of the enemy.
Split-Second Calls
And here comes the risk factor. Correctly assessing a situation where it’s just an unarmed civilian is often complicated by their very behavior. Imagine, for example, a situation where part of your unit gets into a firefight and you, in haste and trying to support them, encounter a person who doesn’t comply with repeated commands to raise their hands and instead pulls out a phone. Even in relative calm, this is a situation that’s difficult to resolve. Let alone in chaos, during which your colleagues are dying nearby.
Even though the game is primarily designed as a cooperative title, the singleplayer portion can bring you at least a partially realistic view of the effort these forces put in, which most of us can’t even initially imagine. On the other hand, the game would be much better suited to dialogue cutscenes and perhaps the opportunity to peek behind the curtain of the daily lives of these forces, who must cope with the loss of their colleagues in addition to their own duties. Unfortunately, that didn’t make it in. Instead, I could only examine the unused detailed station environment and local characters who just stare at you without a single line of dialogue or mind their own business. The storyline, if it can be called that, is spread only across briefings that I could replay via audio track before deployment, yet I still felt that the story didn’t make it into the full version.
SWAT’s Heir
That doesn’t mean, however, that you won’t enjoy the singleplayer with AI colleagues playing through the same missions as in co-op. If you were a fan of the SWAT series, I wouldn’t be ashamed to call Ready or Not its spiritual successor, offering you more extensive options. You don’t necessarily have to kill enemies but can first incapacitate them with a flashbang and thus force them to surrender. In these cases, however, speed plays a major role, because if you don’t pacify the gunman in time, even after securing the firearm, they can pull out a backup weapon and make a big mess. But it’s not just the enemy who can do this—there are also non-lethal means like pepper spray or a taser in the arsenal, so completing the sub-task of arrest instead of killing doesn’t have to be necessarily unrealistic.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better opportunity to try out the work of special forces. Still, I regret how close VOID Interactive studio came to perfection, yet some refinement is still needed even after the PS5 release that came later. I’m curious myself whether other types of rewards will be added beyond what’s currently available. Those are only cosmetic and exclusively clothing, not weapons, which are open from the start along with all other accessories. Each playthrough earns a grade at the end based on meeting certain criteria, such as whether your colleagues and all civilians survived. If you achieve the required grade, you’ll unlock, for example, a new tattoo or perhaps boots. But it won’t add any bonuses.
Where Co-op Lives
If you’re getting this title primarily for co-op and you actually have people to play with, I dare say you’re not looking at dozens but easily hundreds of hours of fun. I myself already have over 80 hours in the game and enjoyed most of them. Coordination of your team is key, and if you opt for anarchy and a solo approach, you’ll die. All of you, to the last man.
Now it’s time to move on for a moment to the negatives. I can say right away that the enemy AI is sometimes simply unfair and equally demanding regardless of how many players you’re currently playing co-op with. It often happened to me that I carefully checked a room corner by corner and the strike came through a window. I admit, it’s realistic and I could indeed lose my life that way. However, any passage through the same level by the window often meant instant death or serious injury and absolutely perfect enemy accuracy. But it’s not just predetermined locations—for example, peeking through a hole in a fence. I barely glimpsed anything and took a bullet to the head. And that’s something that after 20 minutes of walking through the level really started to bother me, although we’re talking more about the higher difficulty.
Fortunately, similar situations don’t happen that often, and in practice it means that while you won’t avoid the occasional cursing, the playthrough with your friends will still be really fun. Especially if you surround yourself with a team that strives for professionalism. If you really want to enjoy co-op, you should determine right at the start who will be breaching doors with a ram, checking under them with a mirror, covering with a shield… And most importantly—who will take on the role of commander. Uncoordinated movement through the level primarily means failure. Unlike a progression where you report the status room by room. And maybe in retrospect I’d recommend going through at least part of the aforementioned singleplayer, which can adequately prepare you for potential command.
Loadout Depth
The selection of equipment is rich. Besides specialization in carrying a shield, ram, or mirror, you can choose between different types of explosives and stunning devices. The type of armor and bulletproof vest is also important. While in lighter gear I could carry more ammunition, in heavy gear I could withstand more but had to conserve bullets. So everything depends on what playstyle suits you best. Personally, I preferred to choose more durable armor with fewer magazines for a more cautious approach than light armor with more ammunition. And this goes hand in hand with the arsenal of weapons. It’s rich and offers submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The feel of shooting is different for each weapon. They differ in recoil, animations, sound, and you simply know which weapon you’re currently using. You don’t need any colored skin or print to recognize the given weapon. A single shot is enough. And if Ready or Not excels at anything, it’s definitely the awareness of what power each of your rounds represents.
Tactical Pace
This is also aided by the slower pace. Ready or Not is first and foremost a tactical shooter that isn’t characterized by sprinting and frenzied shooting across the entire map. The freedom of movement is quite verified for players. Such common leaning left and right from around corners can be done smoothly and in increments here. Just as you can move your body up and down from standing to crouching. Thanks to this, you can examine each room and space to the smallest angle and thus avoid overlooking a possible enemy. Furthermore, immersion is characterized not only by magazine check options but also quick reloading, which although you’ll lose a half-empty magazine, you’ll load a new one into the weapon much faster. Or you can just swap the half-empty one for a full one when you know a bigger firefight awaits and you don’t want to get into a situation where you have to reload during combat chaos. I mustn’t forget the alternative aiming when hip-firing. The implementation of lasers when hip-firing deserves praise. They don’t serve here merely as a cool accessory that only shines where you’re aiming, but I actually achieved more accurate close-range hits with it than when using traditional sights.
Your Rules, Your Mistakes
And it’s precisely in the absolute freedom and options of what and how you do things that the real fun lies. You find out that an armed enemy is standing right behind the door? You can get them by shooting through the door. Want to attack from the side? Or send each team through a different entrance? It’s entirely up to you. Even if it’s a stupid idea, you can go and kick down every door you encounter. Or first pry them open or shoot out the hinges with a shotgun. But without prior checking whether someone is standing behind the door or whether there’s a trap set right behind it, you can lose everything. You hold your life, including your unit’s, only in your own hands. So it happened to me a few times that I didn’t have time to think about potential danger and while clearing a hallway of residential units, I didn’t think to check the upper staircase, which resulted in one member after another starting to die, and if I hadn’t run upstairs, I would have been left completely alone. And in the case of scarier missions like Relapse, that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
In case you maintain a cautious yet smooth pace of movement for your or other units, it will have an almost cinematic impression. I often even caught myself deliberately stopping in passage and examining individual environmental details. This is sometimes processed excellently to an absurd degree. You can see all sorts of inscriptions, flyers, objects hiding references to various game series or jokes. Although the game looks really great for the most part, some compromises that are occasionally an unwelcome thorn in the side are disappointing. Light bulbs cannot be shot out. Maybe that’s to some extent good, because the lighting across the entire game is more than solid. When I was admiring from a window overlooking the sea, I saw how it was divided by boundaries of repeating textures. Not a nice sight. On the other hand, it’s hard to estimate what’s behind this shortcoming. After all, it’s a background element and no title gets by without limitations.
Technical Rough Edges
It’s also too noticeable when members of my crew look identical to each other. The game offers customization of your character’s appearance, so there should be something to choose from. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if the developers didn’t have time.
This suspicion is also manifested in insufficient optimization and overall technical state. Constantly disappearing random loadouts, enemies loading in at higher distances from which they can immediately shoot at you and often even hit, or unnecessarily long loading screens. I believe this will still be fixed; it’s clear that certain sacrifices had to be made for some aspects of the game before release. And speaking of those sacrifices, their screaming is unforgettable. Surprisingly, it’s not the civilians but mainly the shot enemies. These are often accompanied by screams that would wake the dead. Nice long screams…
Sound Design That Matters
Even though there’s no storyline and cutscenes in the game, the character dialogues and for example the audio recording of the briefing really do listen well and partially awaken a desire for the presence of a real story. Besides music, ambient sound also adds to the atmosphere, when for example after hitting a car its alarm goes off, in tunnels there’s an absolute echo, and each step of your colleague or enemy is distinctly audible. The musical backdrop is chosen differently for each level, but primarily it’s electronic music called breakbeat, which characterizes the given location more. What amused me most was the use of Bach, during which I as commander fell in battle while a string orchestra played. Simply classic. The weapons are also excellent sonically, which I’ve already raved about.
Despite obvious shortcomings such as balancing and bugginess of the AI or unfinished mechanics, this is a title that brings a unique experience. At the moment, it’s even the best tactical co-op game where you and your friends will have fun for more than a few dozen hours. You’ll simply melt over the sounds of gunfire or fallen enemies and won’t even have to use several hundred rounds to do so. The variety of levels is helped by the use of different color palettes and detailed environments, thanks to which you’ll feel as if you’re really deployed in a different place each time. All this is wrapped in an immersive execution in which each piece of equipment isn’t just a nice accessory but an actually functioning piece of gear that corresponds to reality
Final Words
Ready or Not offers the opportunity to taste the work of special forces, thanks to which some may create a much better picture of just how complex and underappreciated labor it truly is. Risking one’s own life to save civilians shows not only immense courage but also a dark side where the slightest mistake can turn into absolute catastrophe. Although it’s not the only title that has managed to at least partially approach the extreme conditions of this profession, I’m convinced that Ready or Not has succeeded in getting by far the closest so far. Poor coordination and leadership can put you in situations where you won’t be sure whether you’ve gotten lost. And once you lose control of your surroundings, you’ll barely have time to pull the trigger.
About the Game
- Title: Ready or Not
- Type of Game: Tactical First-Person Shooter
- Developer: VOID Interactive
- Publisher: VOID Interactive
- Release Date: December 13, 2023 (PC Full Release); July 15, 2025 (Console Release)
- Platforms: PC (Windows), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
- Reviewed on: PlayStation 5 and 5 Pro
Where to purchase Ready or Not
Official Digital Stores
- Steam: Ready or Not on Steam Store
- Xbox Store: Ready or Not on Xbox.com (Search local region for availability)
- PlayStation Store: Ready or Not on PlayStation.com
- Epic Games Store: Ready or Not on Epic Games
Third-Party Retailers Affiliate Links
G2A: Ready or Not PC Steam Key or Ready or Not Xbox Key
Gameplay Gallery
