Void Interactive’s Prepared or Not casts you as a SWAT workforce chief tasked with dealing with horrific fight and hostage situations not often represented in motion video games. In a single stage you should storm an residence complicated the place a videogame livestreamer has killed his mom and brought his youthful brother hostage whereas nonetheless on stream. In one other you should clear out a methamphetamine den whose residents act erratically, forcing you to evaluate who’s and isn’t an precise menace in real-time. Deeper inside you’ll discover an incapacitated little one on a mattress affected by spasms. A non secular successor of types to the SWAT sequence, Ready or Not differentiates itself by means of its grim dedication to the simulation of the intense, and 6 months after its 1.0 launch, it’s as uncomfortable as ever.
It’s mechanically harking back to some FPS game greats. As a part of a four-person squad, you’ll work collectively to determine your infiltration fashion, excellent entry factors, and strategies of entry, which embrace explosive expenses, battering rams, and lockpicks for a stealthier strategy. You too can combine and match entry factors and strategies after which execute them concurrently if the scenario requires it. When you’re inside you’ll start the extraordinary technique of clearing rooms, looking for hostages, amassing proof, and stopping both actual or perceived threats.
It’s simple to get misplaced within the sporadic bursts of civilian panic and the believably sudden and at occasions medical nature of the violence. Screaming at frenzied civilians to hit the ground and put their arms behind their heads begins to really feel like a part of the grim routine, as do the moments the place you mistake them for a menace, gun them down, and incur a meager rating penalty. Its allusions to realism and ripped-from-the-headlines situations merely don’t sit nicely with its need to retain and reward you for a job nicely achieved.
Prepared or Not works finest when tensions are excessive and also you’re but to slide into any kind of numbing familiarity. The AI enemies are stunning crack pictures, lighting you up with pinpoint accuracy do you have to make a false transfer. The traumatic audio design coupled with the plausible enemy habits sometimes thrusts you right into a horrible sport of cat and mouse the place you’re the surprising prey. I’ve discovered myself because the final particular person standing whereas nonetheless looking for remaining suspects solely to appreciate they’ve been quietly and patiently lurking behind a door the entire time, giving me the kind of jolt you’d anticipate from essentially the most skillfully executed leap scare.
In time, nonetheless, Prepared or Not’s simulation begins to really feel like a grind towards a grislier-than-usual and arguably bad-faith energy fantasy. The extra I returned to that streamer’s home, raided that civilian-filled drug den, stormed that nightclub, experimented with my large arsenal, and tried on my tasteful cosmetics, the much less I considered the sport’s dealing with of its material.
“Don’t neglect: Our mission is to not create widows and orphans. It’s to deliver order to chaos,” reads a banner hanging on the wall of your briefing room. One other close by proclaims “Cease the killing. Cease the dying,” which makes me chuckle once I keep in mind my arsenal consists of dozens of deadly weapons and a grand whole of three with non-lethal capabilities. Capturing a suspect earlier than they’ve grow to be an energetic menace units you again 50 factors, which could look like quite a bit till you notice mission scores usually hit three or 4 thousand in whole. Right here, the police establishment is simply and its strategies needn’t be questioned.
In late 2021, Ready or Not cut up from its then-publisher Team17. It was broadly speculated that this was resulting from Void Interactive’s teasing of a faculty taking pictures stage. Six months later, the sport was beneath scrutiny once more following the discharge of its nightclub stage on June 12, the anniversary of the 2016 Pulse nightclub taking pictures. Void additionally eliminated alt-right references reminiscent of a redpill field and Pepe meme after Kotaku noticed them in a 2022 preview.
All of this combines to type a really conflicting expertise. The moment-to-moment motion is mechanically spectacular and the sport has little concern ramping up pressure and terror, nevertheless it’s additionally unsettling and uncomfortable to play within the mistaken methods, which means I’m prone to hand in my badge and retire from the power earlier than lengthy.
