There’s been some fantastic SWAT-esque team games over the years.

Spin-offs from Police Quest, the Rainbow Six series and now Ready or Not – which, believe it or not, is not a video game adaptation of the Fugees’ iconic song. Sorry, that’ll be the last time…

Ready or Not is a stiff, heavily indie leaning, but very enjoyable squad, objective based shooter that sees you lead a group into hostile situations where you try to rescue hostages, take down reckless killers and retrieve sensitive data to achieve the highest possible mission score.

There’s been a fair bit of controversy around this one, particularly from PC players who’ve seen big changes now the game has finally come to consoles. As someone who’s coming into this fresh, though, I quite enjoyed the pace and tempo.

The graphics definitely look a bit harsh to the eye, with faces blurred, rough textures and breakups, but there’s also some stunning weather shots and environmental details, like floor scuffing, reflective puddles, and large scale graffiti. There’s also a good variety to the levels which definitely make the missions and progress enjoyable for the most part.

Before each mission, you can select your team, each with different attirbutes, as well as pull out your tablet to review the briefs, get a feel for the objectives, check out the map and see the cameras of each of your squad leads.

You’ll get to wander the halls of the police station in between as well, customising your loadout and aesthetic, using the shooting range, and choosing which missions to debrief on.

During missions, you can split your group of four apart, 2 and 2, into red and blue teams, so one can approach one door exit and one another in the hopes of catching any escaping criminals or catching groups by surprise if they’re ready to ambush you from one side or another.

Your tactical wheels give you the option to pick locks and ziptie potential suspects and civilians to keep them from running into a fire fight, dying unnecessarily.

Orders can be made to fall behind you, move in and clear rooms to sweep them, and if you want to play super cautious, you can put a mirror underneath a door to look around and see if someone is waiting right behind it and what you need to prepare for.

Ready or Not is also interesting too, in that you can lower a weapon to move faster, lean left and right to get angles on your shots and even deal with the anxiety levels of your officers, so need to give them time to rest and recoup from a mission, which adds an additional strategic layer to your action.

Though sometimes it feels like levels really slow down towards the end as you move from room to room, trying to find one last enemy to shoot or last hostage ot protect. You feel like you’ve looked everywhere until you find that one last person you managed to miss and only then will a mission end. It defintiely gets a bit tedious from time to time.

The game experience does feel quite buggy with some performance hiccups, slow down when moving and the aforementioned graphical issues. I also had enemies that used to literally walk and phase through walls, meaning, on some occassions, I’d have to kick another door down to get at them. The text size is also ridiculously small on screen and doesn’t feel at all formatted and set up in a way for TV sets, which is a bit bizarre.

The game lends itself to being a multiplayer first experience but you can play in singleplayer with bots and these do respond well enough for you to play the game through, though their reactions and responses are definitely on the delayed side or sometimes they’ll just whatever they feel like and so miss crucial moments. It’s not ideal but at least means you’re not forced to play online if you don’t want to.

The cross-play element at least seems to work pretty seamlessly and with the vast numbers playing on console, mean you can get into a game pretty sharpish. Though be forewarned, you will need to get an Epic account to do so.

As for the censorship you’ve heard so much about it, looking into it some more, there is some nudity censorship and there’s suggestion the graphics have been downgraded from a previous PC version, which really isn’t great and does create this aura of suspicision around the game.

But as an enjoyable loop that’s easy to get into, and an excellent team based game that has you balancing risk and reward and trying to find the best route forward, with everything hanging on a delicate balance from the moment you start, Ready or Not really works. I mostly had a blast with it, even if the game really struggles under its own weight sometimes and still feels quite janky in critical moments.

Verdict

Ready or Not is a fairly solid team shooter that offers an enjoyable loop and a fun bonding experience between friends and players wherever they play. The objectives offer interesting risk vs reward across the varied settings and the feel and strategy that goes into each breach and cover forces you to think on the spot, but random enemy phasing, text sizing, graphical and performance issues and some fatigue in mission length and presentation – as well as the apparent, random downgrading of the game – mean this isn’t quite the smooth ride we’d like it to be. Still, it’s a fun time that we think will have a long-term fantastic home on consoles.

Ready or Not is out now on PC, PS, and Xbox.

Played on Xbox Series X

Code kindly provided by VOID for review purposes