 If like me you're old enough to remember PvE tactical first person shooters where the tactical had a capital T, games such as SWAT 3 or the original Rainbow 6 games and you yearn for those glory days to return to form but have long given up hope of the big publishers understanding what made those games great and then replicating it then I have a treat for you. As is so often the case the indie scene has stepped up to the plate and for my money delivered yet again what the big boys can't. I'm CMDR Buur and this is a first look at ready or not. I feel at this point I need to deliver some all important context so that it's clear where I'm coming from with this first look. I like tactical first person shooters, I really like them. In the late 90s and early 90s I put more hours into SWAT 3 and Rainbow 6 3 than were frankly healthy SWAT 3 in particular I have a huge soft spot for. Following those golden classics as the genre evolved it adopted some gaming tropes that attempted to expand the genre to a wider audience and in doing so they very much started to lose their sheen. Rainbow 6 in particular should be hanging its head in shame at this point. It got more and more gamified as time went on merrily bunny hopping away toward things like cover systems. I have distinct memories of a part of my soul withering and dying when playing Rainbow 6 Vegas as I encountered end of level boss battles on rooftops against things like helicopters. There have been other pretenders to the crown over the years since but nothing has really appealed and promised to offer a really pure unashamed CQB room clearing and hostage extraction experience for me until now. Enter then ready or not. Ready or not is a pure unashamed hardcore simulation of US SWAT team operations weapons and tactics in a modern day urban environment. It's been in early access on steam for nearly two years and has now finally reached version 1.0 and gone into full release. Ready or not is a tactical first person shooter in the truest sense of the word and is for the most part utterly uncompromising with that vision. In case you're unfamiliar with tactical first person shooters and what makes them so different from the more run of the mill first person shooter then allow me to enlighten you. For me in a true tactical FPS there are three defining features that set this subgenre apart. Those features are pace, consequences and objectives. Firstly I'll talk about pace and consequences together as they're kind of linked. When I refer to pace what I mean is predominantly movement speed by your player character through the map. To be blunt I don't think ready or not has a sprint key neither can the character jump. You can choose to walk but that's honestly just an ever so slightly slower version of the default already reasonably slow movement in the game. When I refer to consequences I'm speaking about the results of being shot or in some cases stabbed by the various unsavory individuals that the game environment exposes you to. There's no instant health top up potions if you take a round there's a chance your swat body armour will stop it but it's also extremely likely that it'll hit one of the squashier less armoured bits of you and that can be a problem. There's no running into a hail of automatic gunfire and magically dodging or surviving it you'll get killed and the map will end. If you do take some damage there is a mechanic to stem the bleeding but the game is hard core enough that it never feels like a lesser game for it. The third tenant that I spoke of was objectives. When I refer to objectives I'm speaking about the care and precision that's needed when taking automatic weapons into a map in the game and making sure they are used on the right target. Ready or not like the SWAT games before it features unarmed civilian innocence caught in the fray of urban crime and they must survive their encounter with your element having first been made compliant and then restrained. In ready or not if you intend to spray each room with red hot lead and then let your favourite deity sort the winners from the losers then you'll rapidly come a cropper. Your officer and their NPC counterparts more on those in a moment have a variety of intel gathering and non-lethal room pacification tools in their arsenal that must be deployed correctly in order for your objectives to be successfully achieved. You can even shout at suspects and threaten them in order to gain compliance a far cry from the just kill everything ethos that permeates most other FPS games. I said I'd talk about NPCs. The game features single and multiplayer but in single player your unit is made up of a team of five individuals including yourself, one overall team commander and two two man elements the red team and the blue team collectively the whole element is referred to as the gold team. The entire element can be directed and ordered about using some clever context sensitive menus as either individuals as two two man elements or as a whole five man element. In single player the NPC team members are frankly astonishing to watch I'm by no means an expert but the characters move and act completely believably checking their angles leaning round corners breaching doors in a variety of explosive and entertaining ways shouting where necessary for compliance at suspects and cuffing the pacified ready for extraction. The developers recently posted a vlog about their NPC characters covering their apparent awareness of their situation how they react and how they move and having seen their claims in that video I can confirm it's singularly impressive to see in-game as well. At the start of this piece I mentioned how the genre as a whole had slipped into gamified tropes in order to expand its appeal and had diluted the experience as a result. One of the criticisms I've seen leveled at ready or not is that there is no progression beyond unlocking missions to complete. There are in fact some progress unlocks but they are purely cosmetics items and have no effect on gameplay. All the equipment you and your team use is available right from the start. Your weapons and their damage output and handling won't change as the game progresses and your character won't level up in any fashion. How you feel about that will depend greatly on where you stand with first person shooters and your relationship to them. Personally, I'm absolutely overjoyed that the game doesn't attempt to gamify the experience in those ways. The sense of achievement in ready or not comes from completion of the objectives and the efficient use of your team and equipment, not from a number going higher. At the time of recording multiplayer will feature just human SWAT officers. There are plans to add NPC officers to play alongside in multiplayer but they're not available right now. There are also plans to add a PvP mode at a later date. In single player you can play through the available missions in what the game calls Practice mode where each map has no bearing on the next or you can choose to play through a campaign where you play as the element commander and as such you must also manage and account for the health, stress and psychology of your team. If a team member dies in that campaign that's it, they're dead and must be replaced. When it comes to the tactical shooter genre, ready or not is about as uncompromising as you can get. If you plan on picking it up you should be aware that it is extremely gritty and realistic and at times a little too realistic as it dances dangerously close to the taste barrier and I'd advise you gen up on the game some more if you're likely to be sensitive to that and take that into account before playing. You can see the system specs for the game on screen now and you'll find it on Steam for the local equivalent of £45 outside of sales. Ready or not is not for the faint of heart but if you're in the market for a SWAT based purist tactical first person shooter then I think you'd be hard pushed to find a finer example of the genre. Did you play any of the old-school tactical first person shooters I mentioned? Are you planning on picking up ready or not? Do you think bigger publishers could even make a game like it in the modern age? Let us know in the comments below. 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