Ready or Not is an impressive indie game with near triple A levels of production. It's atmosphere, graphics and gameplay mechanics leave other tactical shooters in the dust. This game is very much a "make your own fun" style game but If you want a constantly evolving tactical shooter that give you and your friends a challenging sandbox to play in, I highly recommend Ready or Not.


This game is NOT like most other tac-shooters. While games like Ground Branch, Zero Hour or even the new MWII Co-op can be handled like being dropped into a shooting range of bad guys, Ready or Not is more complicated. The game offers a scoring and letter system based off of a number of factors such as "Civilians saved" "Suspects arrested" "Officers alive" ETC. If you play the game trying to get the best score, this means that unlike other tac-shooters which are "shoot first, ask questions later" when it comes to their OP-FOR, Ready or Not incentivises to take as many people alive as you can. This adds a new level of difficulty to breaching and clearing rooms. Using an optiwand and knowing that there is an armored up criminal with a sawed off standing on the other side of the door becomes a lot more complicated to deal with when you need to try to take him down alive instead of in a body bag.

Now, this is based off of the "base" game mode known as "Barricaded suspects." There are alternate game modes that offer different Rules of Engagement like "Raid" that give you permission to drop suspects as soon as you see them, that being said the suspects in different game modes can be more or less aggressive not only due to the nature of the game mode, but also how your squad plays during the mission. So if you go in with C2, Flashbangs and M4's blazing, expect heavy resistance.

I won't go into too much detail on the minutia of how the gameplay handles in this game because that would take a few pages of description in order to do justice to how awesome this game plays. In short, this game is hard. Death is quick and gunfights are fast. There are no revives and no health regeneration, once you're dead, you're dead. This, paired with the blurred lines between civilians and suspects plus the moody and realistic atmosphere, Ready or Not is something that I did not expect it to be when I started playing it...

Ready or Not, when first running missions or maps, is terrifying. The map design is immersive and complex, AI spawns are psudo-random and sometimes your only source of light is from your NODs or flashlight. With the possibility of death lurking in every room, closet or hallway, Ready or Not gets your heart racing with every room you need to clear. Just to be clear, there are no monster is the game. No ghosts, no supernatural elements (yet) and no beasts of unfathomable horror. But Ready or Not does not need these things to be scary, the fear of what is around every corner is enough to get your blood pumping.

A short note on customization, it's alright. There are about a dozen or two guns in the game, each having basic attachments. Not nearly as deep as Ground Branch or MWII, but enough for you to make a kit you enjoy.


Ready or Not suffers from two issues that are becoming harder and harder to look past. First, is development cycle. When the game first "released" on Steam, VOID Interactive was doing a regular update cadence of about one update per month. "Supporters" with the "Supporter Edition" of the game got Alpha access to a build of the upcoming updates about two weeks before the update was released. This cadence has stopped as of the summer of 2022. Why this is the case I do not know, but VOID I believe has gone on record saying that it was an unsustainable cadence of updating the game, especially for their smaller team. All of which is understandable in my opinion, VOID is a small team working on a big, ambitious game and sometimes big features take time to implement. That being said, as an owner of the Supporter Edition, it is disappointing that not even we are getting any form of updates to the Supporter Branch of the game. Being part of the Supporter Discord is equally as disappointing since the devs post updates on what they are working on, in which some features (according to this layman's eye, I could be entirely wrong) would have at least been pushed to the Supporter Branch of the game had we been in the older development cadence.

I am of the opinion that deadlines in any form of work are important, and not having them can lead to polishing or tweaking in perpetuity. I do not want to see this game go down the path of so many other "Early Access" titles that simply are in development hell for a long period of time since there are no deadlines or release windows to hit. Although with some of the problems VOID is trying to solve, I can understand why it is taking so long. My only request is as a Supporter we get something, ANYTHING, regardless of how broken it is, to play. That is why we paid the money to be Supporters, to support the game's development.

Anyways, let's talk AI. Upfront, I do not believe the AI breaks the game, unlike a lot of other people who play the game. While the example I am going to lay out before you happens very infrequently (at least to me) I figured this review is long enough I might as well bring it up. Please do not let this discourage you from buying the game, it just means that sometimes you will get cracked out suspects which I like to view as a fun challenge.

The AI in this game compared to real life are, on the surface, not that bad. They have normal human reaction times and awareness, which make them a challenge to go up against when they are working properly. That being said for a while now they have simply been broken. The AI can sense you through walls, spin at breakneck speeds 180 degrees to shoot you and sprint around the map while maintaining perfect accuracy. There is no hesitation, no processing like normal humans do. It is simply turn and shoot. This removes some of the fun that I listed above about knowing who is a suspect and who isn't since 99% of the time the suspects will shoot at you before you can even process what is happening, since the suspects don't need to process information at all. While you, a meatbag with senses and a nervous system, need to actually process what your eyes see, then move your mouse, then fire your weapon, all of which takes anywhere from 150ms to 500ms. The AI can do the processing, target allocation, and movement all in a few frames and the only thing holding them back from blasting your brain out is software that pretty much says "fire after this time aimed at target". Sometimes, not event that works and you get spin-botted like you're a fresh CS:GO account in your first deathmatch. All of that is to say, VOID is working on it and it should be fixed next patch.

Whenever that comes.


I personally love this game and I want as many people to play it as possible since I feel it is one of the best early access games on the market right now. It is immersive, incredibly detailed and an absolute blast to play solo or with your friends. While there are some glaring issues surrounding the game, I think the core is solid and it is why I have so many hours playing it. That being said, I was going to write this review at 100 hours but stopped playing the game after VOID forwent their monthly update cycle for updates with no deadlines or periodic updates to even the alpha Supporter branch. The reason I picked up Ready or Not is because VOID separated themselves from other Early Access devs by providing an update cadence that was transparent and consistent. No amount of "this feature is coming soonTM" will replace the feeling of actually seeing a deadline and anticipating it's release, even if that update is months or even years away.

VOID, pls fix.