Recent reviews by Cat.meow();

The superior version of Half Life where you play as a physicist with physics. People love to hate on what's good because it makes their favourite look bad and there appears to be an odd smear campaign against Source which gained enough prominence that forced Valve to stop supporting this version. Just don't pay attention to the people online, the majority of the "bugs" that people say this version has is fear-mongering and you won't experience it without hacking the game in ways that would make *any* game glitch out.

Used this outside of steam for a bit, but I wanted to show my support on steam! I'm glad there's free open source tools out there that allow common people to create art without a greedy third party prior to the sale of their art.

It's nice knowing I'm using software made by nice and tolerant people who care about the injustice in the world. It's refreshing to known there's FOSS developers out there that stand up for and support marginalized game devs (although I am not a part of that demographic myself) and expose the bigotry of the average gamer who would never even use these tools to begin with. Support those that stand up for the marginalized!

Keep up the good work, Godot!

Core gameplay is good, but the game performs worse than it did in early access. Yet another example of Unreal Engine 4+ not being fit for game development. Even with ini fixes to preload shaders + other assets before a level loads, the game may have a good framerate for a minute or two, then drop to 30 or less if you look in the wrong general direction. Your framerate may come back to its original high, but it will always drop intermittently.

The enemy bots are tuned to have inhuman reaction time and accuracy. They track players through walls by sound from running and yelling for compliance (good, fair) with 50%+ accuracy (bad, unfair), and have no sense of self-preservation. Enemy bots only fire in full auto when the weapon allows it, and they have no differing personalities (cowardly, aggressive, evasive, etc.) that keep the game and subsequent playthroughs of levels varied which causes this 2023 game to have less replayability than SWAT 4 released 2005. A game whose ultimate mod was created by Ready or Not's development team. They've done this before, but better, in someone else's game.

All of this put together makes the less-than-lethal approach to missions fans of the genre strive for unnecessarily difficult. It is still possible, but definitely not what most would call fun. Thankfully, being made in Unreal Engine has a benefit: Being able to decompile the files to adjust values in config and .uasset files to adjust variables, specifically the AILevelData.ini and BasePlayer.uasset to adjust enemy bot reaction time and accuracy, and player movement speed to reduce frustration when looking for the last piece of evidence or civilian that trailers is supposed to pick up for you. I recommend everyone to look for and edit these values yourself so when you recompile the file and put it back in it doesn't tramp-stamp your game as "modded".

Some people say changing the bots and movement speed makes the game not "tactical" but the game is not advertised as a simulator, so it should focus on being a fun experience. A good compromise to please everyone is by having a standard preset for variables to have the intended difficulty, but allow the user to change whatever they want in game to play the game in a way they find fun. Having an outline for evidence isn't realistic either, but they added it into the game as an accessibility option because the majority of players found evidence-hunting not fun, so why not let people adjust the game to their liking?

Overall, Ready or Not is definitely NOT. I enjoy it with a few adjustments, but I can't defend it in its current state. Definitely not worth 50 USD, wait for a sale for about 20-30 assuming it doesn't improve. I'll definitely change this to a positive review if it changes for the better.

Very good for $10. Best BF since Hardline. Lots of accessibility options.

IT ALLOWS YOU TO LEVEL UP, COMPLETE CHALLENGES, AND PROGRESS IN THE BATTLE PASS WHEN PLAYING WITH/AGAINST BOTS. That alone is the #1 reason I bought the game, and should be the standard in every multiplayer-focused game. I remember the good old days of multiplayer games having bots like in BF2 and 2142, which was taken from us in the 2010s. Hopefully this is a sign of bots making a comeback in multiplayer games, especially with advancements in AI to make it simpler to imitate players. Have the bots trash-talk like they do in Quake 3! It's cheesy, but it's more endearing than being called slurs by idiots online. Most fps games treat bots as an afterthought and don't allow you to experience the full game when playing with them, but not this one. The bots are pretty good on the hardest difficulty, but if you have a few people playing with you, you'll probably win most matches against a full bot team.

Portal server creator on the BF website is very easy to use and allows in-depth customisation of server parameters, even access to a scripting interface for more fine-tuning. Unfortunately can't make portal servers when too many people are playing like right now, you'll get an error because it's not dedicated servers, it just allocates a space for your game on ea servers, and when too many people clog it up it won't allow the creation of new ones.

Wants:
-If the portal has too many servers, create a queue and close servers that have 0 players.
-Please add BF Hardline to the portal.
-Allow uninstalling of specific portal content so users can save storage space.
-Release dedicated server software so we can still use the license of the game we bought when EA inevitably shut it down. Consumers are entitled to a working product when buying a perpetual digital license.

Finding a cool and unique game that is actually fun these days is rare, so seeing one kill itself right before my eyes is incredibly disappointing.

The game in its beta state felt complete and was incredibly fun. Matches were fast paced and whichever team achieved five points, by a margin of two, won the match. Now, outside of quickplay, both teams have to reach three sets of three points with a pause in between sets for everyone to pick what were once trainings one could choose before a match. These are passive boosts to an aspect of a character that can help them reach their full potential, and are now erased after the match has ended. They are also random, which means you may not be able to play your character in your specific playstyle for what are now higher-stakes 20-30 minute matches. The magic of the previous version was how quickly you won if you were more skilled than your opponents, how quickly you lost if they were more skilled than you, and how tense matches got if both teams were equally skilled trying to get two points above the other. Losses didn't matter since you could easily get into another match afterwards, and getting on a win streak felt all the more satisfying. You could play hours of matches and not realise how much time has passed. Now matches are long enough to have one or two be exhausting.

The developer's justification of the temporary, randomised trainings mid-match is that the longer the beta was live, the more similar each match felt. This was a good thing, as it allowed the players to become accustomed to their characters and how they were supposed to function given the right trainings for the player's playstyle. Now it is easy to forget which ones you chose in the 15 seconds your are given to chose when you consider how chaotic the actual gameplay is. Additionally, Counter-Strike hasn't changed in twenty years, and it seems to be doing well for itself. Having matches be similar is not a fault, but the current system
they made to combat a non-issue is.

Another thing that makes matches take too long is the addition of what I will call goal-blocks. Previously, there were walls that retracted and extended throughout the match that blocked both goals. Whichever team was in the lead had their walls retract faster than the team losing, giving the team losing a chance to attack for a short time while their wall was still extended. Whoever is in the lead doesn't need an advantage over the other team, so the design at the time was good. Now there are goal-blocks. These are difficult to hit targets near each team's goals that will retract the walls once all are hit with the ball. This makes matches drag on, as one goalie can usually guard at least one of the goal-blocks for a long time, which means even more time spent in a game that used to have quick and fun matches. The charm of the worldwide beloved sport of football/soccer is that there's one person guarding a large goal with the help of the other players that are outside of the goal box, so adding a mechanic that makes it impossible to score unless you hit a prerequisite makes the game not fun.

Everything else that has changed is at most a minor annoyance, such as splitting up the end-game screen into three screens, so it's more difficult to share a screenshot of if you had a good game.

A common "gotcha" to the changes in ranked and the normal gamemodes include "Just play quickplay so you don't have to deal with the changes." What if you want to play the game you once loved with people around your skill level? Quickplay does not take skill level into account when forming players for a match, only ping. This means that the probability of completely destroying or being destroyed by the other team increases, and while it's nice for an ego boost, it's preferable to play opponents around your skill level to challenge yourself; Something you can no longer do if you prefer the previous version's gameplay compared the the current.

I will gladly change this review if these issues are fixed. It baffles me how a team can make a game for years, show off a fantastic pre-release product, and kill it in front of you when it was supposed to be finished.

Good idea for a game, but despite its art style, it tries too hard to be realistic.

The game gives you the option to either work, stream, or rest every week. You have to balance streaming, finances, and your mental and physical health through rest and monthly diet options respectively. Despite these options, the game seems like it wants you to play it in a very specific, optimised way in order to see the later parts of the story for the product you paid for.

With the inclusion of monthly rent, quarterly taxes, interest on student loans that have a harsh time limit and has to be paid in full by around week 40-50, streaming taking up all of your mental hp forcing you to rest for a whole week or two, and probably other story-related events that affect your character that I wasn't able to see, it is ultimately not fun. The streaming card-battles *are* fun, which makes the rest of the game that much more disappointing.

After retrying a few times you realise you need money, so I tried prioritising working. This resulted in a sudden game-over around week 50 or so, because apparently I didn't stream enough. From what I could tell, there was no warning for this, and you cannot save your game of your own accord. The game only keeps the beginnings of the current and previous 2 weeks, which is not enough of a buffer to get you out of any incoming game-over state.

If you feel completing the games you buy makes them worth the amount you paid for them, I'd recommend looking for a different game.

Cat.