VOID Interactive’s Ready or Not is one of my favourite multiplayer games ever. When it works, the SWAT simulator can be one of the tensest, most immersive FPS games around.
We’ve talked before about how Ready or Not’s technical issues sabotage what should be one of the best games around. Unfortunately, one of the main issues with VOID Interactive’s game is that every patch somehow makes the game significantly worse.
On PlayStation 5—yes, I play the game on console—Ready or Not has somehow become much worse without a new patch. This past month, I’ve been going through the game on hard mode as well as mopping up some non-lethal run trophies, and it’s been an unmitigated disaster.
One issue, which was seemingly introduced in the game’s last patch, sees suspects refusing to give up no matter what you throw at them. Use a stinger launcher, 9-Bang, or a regular flash and they’ll react, but they’ll refuse to put down their guns. This can happen at any moment during a run, even right at the end. In a playthrough of Narcos, the second Home Invasion DLC mission, this happened in tens of runs.
That issue, thankfully, appears to be fixed in the game’s next patch, but it’s far from the only major technical oversight the SWAT game displays. In Ends of the Earth, a mission which tasks you with apprehending the young manufacturers of modified weapons, you have to grab just two civilians: the sickly Hue Nguyen and Peter Tran.
In every run of this mission I’ve played recently, the father—Hue Nguyen—could not be arrested. Every time, the father would crawl from underneath the garage bench and continue crawling until he got himself stuck in the wall. Every time. Whilst shimmying up and down the wall like a dog in heat, no flashbang could affect him. Bullets could, but he would only pop out once killed, therefore, failing the mission.
In recent months, Ready or Not has become so unstable that it’s impossible to recommend. Massive desync issues in multiplayer, floating enemies flying from one floor to the other, bullet hits simply not registering. The game also still has the same issues it’s always had with unreliable NPCs and the occasional crash as well.
It’s a unique pain having one of your favourite multiplayer games be unashamedly busted in almost every regard. I’m used to buggy games; I play The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. However, the level of technical inadequacy found within Ready or Not today has been consistently poor.
It’s also not like Ready or Not’s reputation has put much faith in patches. When the game launched on PS5 and Xbox, the game would frequently see bullets floating in the air after being shot. (Which has now started happening with brain matter should you shotgun a man’s face off.) At one point, a patch introduced an issue that would cause audio to cut out entirely every few minutes and come back with a loud screech. On one hand, I welcome a patch; on the other hand, I dread it.
Ready or Not is an endlessly frustrating game. I adore its gunplay, the sound design, the level design, and the tension is often makes me feel. And yet every mission or so I’m Clockwork Orange’d into a chair and forced to watch the illusion diminish as enemies run into walls and trigger their own goddamned traps. Like, come on, man.
