Recent reviews by Lav

I want to preface by saying I like this game and I recommend purchasing it if you like the idea of the game.

The GOOD;

- Graphics are great.
- Co-op is awesome.
- Weapon variety and gadgets are awesome.
- Mission selection is great, 18 base and DLC1 is out currently which adds 3 further missions. More planned DLCs on the horizon as well.
- Fully fledged singleplayer with mechanics specific to playing with AI. It's even a great setting and vague story(ies). It's worth the price of entry just for the SP.
- Sound design and OST are fantastic.
- Modding support and community are incredible.

Okay so this is the reason why I'm writing this review. I have put about 60 hours into this game as of this review and there are some frustrations I really just don't understand why I've come across whereas the developers have spent 100s(1000s) of hours and still don't seem to know what to do. I want this to be constructive criticism and I want it to be known I wrote this because I want the game to improve.

The BAD;

- Ready or Not wastes your time. No really it just doesn't seem to respect your time. You hit continue from the main menu, load in, go fix your Loadout and then find your mission and confirm. Now there is a 10 second timer to start loading the game. Or in co-op it's 120 seconds if only one person confirms. This is problematic because if I'm ready I want to go now, why can't I hold Y to skip the wait?

Okay so I'm past the countdown and now what? Another countdown. 10 seconds more to 'prepare'. Is this a loading screen? I don't know but it feels worse than that.

Okay now I'm in game in singleplayer, awesome. I get pretty far but then I die. Alright no problem. I now just have to wait for the stats screen to type out every single score stat, slowly, then the penalties without being able to skip it. It's another 10 second wait.

Whatever let's restart, wait I can't do that from here? I need to go back to the station? I swear I saw restart mission..

Because in multiplayer you can restart the mission from the stats screen, but for some unknown reason that option isn't present in singleplayer. So the entire process needs to be repeated every single failure you suffer.

I got S rank in every single mission and it took me about 50 hours. It was a major skill issue thing for sure, but I could cut atleast 15 hours of wait time off that I swear if things were just tightened up with all this downtime. The game feels god awful slow because of it.

Speaking of ranks and being slow..

- Ready or Not doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a simulator or a video game.

There really seems to be aspects about Ready or Not which seem like they were obviously chosen because it's realistic.

You gotta find all the weapons for max score, because duh, tracking down firearms is important. Weapons are unwieldy and take time to pull out and prepare. Suspects try to trick you. The way you can you use comms and AI team to breach rooms effectively. It's all very along the lines of simulator.

But I honestly think this more realistic approach does more harm than good.

I mentioned S ranks before, but what the hell is that doing in a game doing it's best to emulate a SWAT team. Well this is the problem, it has these game like mechanics but insists on purposely slow ways of doing things. ArmA this is not.

Example one. To obtain the highest rank, you can't kill or injure anyone but also must subdue them.You must find all objectives and soft objects and complete them. You must find all weapons. You must find all civilians.And lastly you cannot incur any penalties. Seems fair. But the problem is that means you have to ignore all but 3 weapons and 2 gadgets to achieve this.

The finding all weapons one is quite annoying because NPCs literally chuck weapons metres and metres away. Hiding under trash, themselves, ontop of geometry. I'm very surprised they don't fall out of the map. There's no way to see them outside of visually mousing over them. This goes back to time wasting but I've completed missions in 6 minutes and then proceed to spend a further 12 minutes searching for a single handgun I couldn't find stuck under a wall that enemies could dive under. It's a complete waste of time.

- Another example of this is civilians, I once spent 40 minutes searching a map for a civilian I could absolutely not find. I don't know if they fell from the map or what but I ended up restarting. My AI team couldn't find them either. There's just a complete lack of safety net for Ready or Not dropping the ball. No hud, or marco polo for civilians, no differentiation for weapons from the background. No gamifying for the sake of respecting my time.

- Example 3 of Ready or Not not knowing whether it wants to be a sim or game is the gunplay. At first I really enjoyed how punchy everything is. After S ranking all missions I can honestly say the gunplay is borderline awful sometimes. The game is so preoccupied with showing disorientation from NPCs shooting you, or head bobbing, or lasers not being still, or weapons not being lined up that it forgets it needs to feel good.

I have shot enemies countless times with the beanbag shotgun, perfectly sqaure on and completely missed more times than I can say without losing some sanity.

It feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥. The laser or iron sights can be perfectly locked on and you'll whiff. This isn't just non-lethal guns. They all do it. It's worse in multiplayer even on decent ping. Host advantage is thing here.

The gunplay is just yucky for precision gameplay.

This still tracks with Sim or game, it just doesn't know what to do.

- Another point of this is AI. And I mean the enemies. Oh boy, what the hell is the thinking on this?

I can peak a corner and an enemy can have his back turned to me 50 metres away, and I may have line of sight on him but it's through a forklift cab and I can only see his head and shoulders.

He will 180 degree turn with 250ms delay and begin pinpoint accuracy shooting at me before I've had time to differentiate him from the beautiful rainy scenery.

It honestly is hilarious how broken the AI can be. It feels like versing an aim bot. But not always, just most of the time.

You can never sneak on enemies, if they could possibly have LOS on you, they start shooting, even if they couldn't possibly have seen you from XYZ angle.

It doesn't feel good or fair. It feels like cheap artificial difficulty because the Devs couldn't make the game flow any other way.

Once again this is unrealistic for sake of their needs, so why bother with all the other artificial realism?

- Score system is whack.

Why give me all these awesome guns and attachments if the only way you'll give me the highest score and thus rank, is by having me use non-lethal methods? Why make an achievement for getting all S ranks if it isn't meant to be the intended way to play?

There's so many better ways to handle it and it just comes across as lazy.

Overall I really like this game, but it is very obvious it needs another pass for rough edges and it needs to choose to be a game and not a Sim actively. Add a ranks system so my endless death replays can be for something. Let me get exp. More cosmetics please. I wish we would still get rainbow 6 games with terrorist hunt and ghost recon advanced Warfighter style coop missions. This game is so close to these in terms of flavour but it's just missing the polish.

literally does what it says, its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ black magic.

crazy potential

Bigger and better in every way, if you liked The Forest, its that except the Devs are striving for triple A status. And its damn close, and this is only early access.

Worth every dollar at full price.

its ok