Ready or Not

Still not Ready

I’ll start my review with the fact that it’s difficult to find another game like it that would evoke love and hate at the same time like Ready or Not. In appearance, this is a very bold, ambitious and successful project for such a young and inexperienced studio, VOID Interactive. For many fans of tactical shooters, including fans of SWAT4, Ready ot Not was a breath of fresh air. I think there is no point in explaining what the game is about and I’ll get straight to the point.

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Pros of the game

The visual component of the game looks very cool, even taking into account the fact that the developers did not use all the functionality of Unreal Engine 5 (hereinafter referred to as UE5). Textures, lighting, shadows and effects give a very realistic and atmospheric picture. In terms of animation of character movement, shooting and use of special equipment. funds here, too, one can praise those people who dealt with them. The same goes for the sound - gunfire, screams, explosions, ambient sounds and other elements exceed all expectations.

The gameplay provides the player with 18 (excluding the "Home Invasion" DLC) unique and well-designed maps with the ability to play them in story mode (or commander mode) and co-op. We are also given freedom of choice in terms of weapons, personal protective equipment, special equipment. means and customization of your team’s uniform, allowing you to assemble a team for any mission.

Unfortunately, this is where the advantages of the game end. Let's move on to the cons of the game, because of which I gave the game a negative rating.

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Cons of the game

The big spoon... no, even a ladle of ointment is that Ready or Not is an excellent techno demo, but disgusting game. Almost everything the developers touch works poorly. This is the same case when they decided to go for quantity of mechanics rather than quality. But let's take things in order.

The developers have tried very hard to create a good impression from the first hours of the game for fans of the genre. Because of this, when you realize that the matter smells like pussies, it will be too late to make a return. The game takes advantage of the fact that at first you don’t quite understand what and how it works, and you will, like me, think that you are doing something wrong. In most cases, as I have determined empirically, everything is just the opposite. In order not to be unfounded, here are examples below:

• Artificial intelligence. Yes, this is a topic that has already bothered many people, about which people have been arguing for a very long time, but I could not help but mention it. In short, the AI ​​here works pretty lousy: bots can see in the dark, punch through walls, can attack you halfway across the map through walls and ceilings, and have unfair reaction speed and accuracy regardless of the type of enemy. I’ve read many times that players themselves give visual and auditory cues to bots, and they would be partly right, but after looking at a large number of my repetitions, I can say with confidence that some bots blatantly include cheats. There are not many of them, but quite enough to fail you a lot of missions and make your ass burn.

Separately, it is worth mentioning the AI ​​of our officers, which is very stupid at times and behaves quite strangely: they cannot enter the room, they cannot use special weapons. means, they throw grenades that don’t go off, they enter the room with their backs, etc.

People have been asking developers for a very long time since early access to fix the AI ​​of criminals and special forces. More than once fixes were released in which we were assured that everything had been done, but in reality they had no effect. One could argue that this wouldn't really matter if the game had a PvP mode. Judging by the fact that the AI ​​has not changed much since beta, the developers have hammered a big screw on it.

• Special. means and hand-to-hand combat. Most special The tools here work like Dungeons and Dragons - you roll to make them work. And it turns out that in approximately ~30% of cases, for some unknown reason, grenades and hand-to-hand combat techniques (~80%) simply do not work. A grenade can explode right in front of the bot's face and have no effect on it, or maybe even from the next room. A taser and pepper on a bot standing still works 3-5 times, and melee strikes are like signing your own death warrant, since you need to almost hit the pixel so that melee at least has a chance to work. But the bots have you on a permanent basis. It is also worth mentioning door locks, which often visually disappear or are removed by bots for some unknown reason.

• UE5 and work on fixes. With the transition to a new version of the engine, the developers took one step forward and two steps back. For some, the game began to work better, while others now cannot launch it or play without crashes. To most of these complaints, I read responses many times from Kaminsky, who claimed that the team tested the game on 30 computers with different components and there were no problems on any of them. Later it turns out that these are problems not with their game, but with the hardware of people who have new or old Intel processors, where it is read between the lines that it is the players themselves who are to blame. What we can conclude is that the tests were superficial or were not carried out at all, and at the moment the game is still extremely unstable and can either start and work well, or crash on a regular basis.

The work on corrections is very sluggish and slow. UE5 did not solve the problems that had accumulated over all this time, and added a portion of new ones. Those fixes that are released fix minor problems, and some of them are like deja vu - more than once I see the same fixes in patch notes that still do not solve the problem. But the basic critical bugs mentioned above have been around for a very long time.

• Weapons. Bugs with automatic shooting on some rifles, like the SLR and SA-58. Combination modules that should include a flashlight and a laser, but this was not implemented in the game. Sights that are not calibrated, especially optics, in which the bullets constantly go to the left. Disappearing sights on collimators.

• Cut modes. Before release, the game offered various play modes, namely: Barricaded suspects, Hostage situation, Active shooter, Bomb threat and Raid. They introduced some changes to the gameplay and increased the replayability rating of missions. In general, they worked fine, but since release they are no longer available.

• Bugs. Banal bugs. There are a lot of bugs. In addition to the errors that were described above, there are many others, although not entirely critical, but overwhelming in their number. Among them are the inability to open some doors (especially when it is very necessary to check for traps), sometimes invisible tripwires, suspects’ weapons falling under the textures, wounding (not death) of suspects with a shot to an unprotected head, shots through a shield (if the suspect comes close to each other) , the suspect continues to shoot with a shattered arm, etc. Most of the bugs have long been known to developers since early access, but few have been fixed.

• Defects. Those same mechanical flaws that you don’t expect to see in such a game with a rather hefty price tag, namely: you can’t normally throw a grenade into an ajar door, the lights on the shield don’t work, there are no responses on the command panel for co-op, there are no visual indicators or markers when giving orders (very often it is completely unclear what the team leader wants), lack of remarks when giving orders in co-op for other characters, lack of normally implemented balaclavas, etc.

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Verdict

Overall, Ready or Not is a diamond in the rough that could have blossomed in the hands of more experienced developers. VOID tried to make a complex game at once, but they didn’t succeed. Judging by the speed and quality of the release of fixes, the decisions made by the studio and the disgusting feedback, Ready or Not will soon become overgrown with mold from its own dampness.