Recent reviews by GGK

Ready or Not. I sure as hell wasn't ready for this 1.0 release and I'm pretty sure Void Interactive neither. Ready or Not is not a good game at this moment in time and I can not recommend anyone to spend nearly 50 € on it. But what even is the problem with Ready or Not?

Well, I'm glad you asked, because the game is facing multiple problems that make it a chore to play through at best and near unplayable at worst.
The first and biggest problem is the enemy AI. I don't know what they did to the AI but these guys are on another level. The AI seems to have a superhuman reaction times (I've seen cases where they shot you in less than 300 ms after registering you).
On top of that they seem to be very accurate, which I would understand if we were fighting something like the "Left Behind" (a domestic terrorist group in the game consisting of veterans), but there is no reason for some methheads or gang members to be able to accurately headshoot me when I'm not only a moving target, but also have 4 highly trained SWAT officers besides me.
Not even to mention that on some maps the AI will shoot you through a pixel spot from the other side of the map, which is very frustrating because you didn't even see them and they somehow spotted you through multiple obstacles (looking at you Greased Palms) and immediately landed a headshoot on you. I'm not kidding when I say that there were moments where the AI unironically did a 180 and headshoted me. This is something that I'd except from a fast-paced shooter like BF or COD, but definetly not from a tactical shooter with an emphasis on strategic and (to some extent) slow deployment and movement.
This leads to a lot of frustation, because of this cracked AI you will have a hard time judging if you died due to a superhuman being or if you made a tactical mistake that put you in a bad position. Naturally this leads to any motivation to play the game leaving my body as fast as my officer dropping to the ground after meeting a hostile.
By the way, don't even try to utilize CS gas or flashbangs. The AI will easily spot you and open fire on you on the former and will simply ignore the latter.

The second issue is that the game is a bit unoptimized. It's not at the point of being near unplayable, but you shouldn't except any high framerates. I've heard of multiple 4090 users also having problems and I do stumble upon the occasional frame drop on a few maps. As I've said, it's not unplayable, but it's definetly not what I'd except from a 1.0 release.

The third and smaller issue is the Campaign/Commander mode. I want to preface this by saying that I do find the idea of a Commander mode very interesting, but they definetly need to work on properly implenting it. The problem with this mode is that even though you theoretically need to manage your officers (keeping an eye on their mental health and switching them up from time to time), there is literally no penalty for just not caring about it. Even if the officers resign, you can easily replace them and then just play with them until they also have a mental breakdown and then just replace them once again. In theory you do loose the special abilities the officer carried with him, but they are pretty much negligble and have little to no impact. In practice, this mode is pretty much just "Practice" with more (useless) micro-managing mechanics and their intended goal to make us care for our SWAT team members was also in vain thanks to them appearing like nothing more than NPCs for the player to utilize than actual law enforcment officers.

Luckily, there is also a good thing to mention concerning this game and it is its environmental storytelling and the general plot. The maps are beautifully crafted and filled with a lot of details. I always spend a few minutes going through the map when I finish the mission and just observing all the little details that Void Interactive implemented into said maps. Not even to mention that Ready or Not has a very interesting plot just hiding beneath the surface that is told through these maps and their small details. In that regard Ready or Not is definetly a succesor to SWAT 4 and I hope they keep it up in that department.

At the end I want to say that I love Ready or Not and even though I have only around 50 hours in it I did enjoy it very much. This game is a fresh breath of air in the tactical shooter genre and I believe it has the potential to be a worthy successor to SWAT 4, but this "full" release definetly didn't utilize that potential in any believable capacity. As unfortunate as it is, I can not recommend this game at the current full price. This game could be worth 50 €, but in it's current state it is definetly not worth this price tag.