Ready or Not: The Kotaku Review

Moralizing is useless: the patient's excitement is the point

"Bring order to chaos." That's how Tactical Shooter Ready or Not sums up your role as part of Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT. As a commander, you lead a four-officer "element" through a gauntlet of headline-grabbing disasters in fictional Los Angeles, California - the "City of Dreams," not Angels. Some missions simply touch a nerve, while others evoke namesake American tragedies like Columbine, Pulse, Waco, or Vegas with recorded serial numbers. Developer VOID Interactive has announced that it plans to immerse players in volatile, split-second situations and appreciate the sheer physical and mental strain these officers endure for us.

Order turns to chaos at the end of a gun. You press X to shout "I want to see hands!" All exposed persons, whether civilians or armed persons. It pisses you off when they don't comply. You are here to help. The non-lethal dispatch tool will give you the best score at the end of a mission, but nobody's perfect.

Indulge me in a quick history break. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko says the 1965 Watts riots were "the first major incident that pushed America toward more militarized policing." Infamous LAPD Chief Darryl Gates is credited with creating proper SWAT after his experience during the riots, which the LAPD had "no idea" how to handle. Almost 30 years later, Daryl Gates produced the 1993 Sierra Cop Quest: Open Season, the fourth entry in the series.

Gates had just moved out of Los Angeles in 1993 and had embraced a culture of brutal and racist policing, including but by no means limited to the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the riots that began a year later with the acquittal of King's attackers. In the '90s, Balko says, most teams weren't responding to "urban warfare" situations like the division was built to handle: They were breaking down doors in drug raids. Militarized police need war to fight.

Police Quest was renamed SWAT in 1999, and Ready or Not is widely regarded as the spiritual successor to Irrational Games' SWAT 4— VOID Interactive even employed SWAT 4 modders in the early days of development.

Squad-based first-person shooter with multiplayer

America's evil heart, speed, precise level design, high-pressure shooting.

America's evil heart weapon fetish. Post office level

20 hours. Singles, some points.

VOID Interactive is aware that it works with hot button material. The game carefully toes a seemingly neutral line of taste by pointing/dog-whistling to left and right ideologies. The enemies in one mission are a Vietnamese family who are switching from semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic weapons to pay for their mother's cancer treatment, which is pure liberal pity. Contrast that with a mission where you clear an abandoned building full of homeless people sheltering from a storm, most of whom open fire if seen or seen. Like Condemned: Criminal Origins mooks rush you - a glimpse into the nightmares of people who ask you if Chicago is really that violent.

The plot of the game is loose and non-linear, but if you look at the reports and evidence before the mission, it's clear that everything from fake ISIS to MKUltra, Hollywood sickos to 4chan trolls are laying siege to Los Suenõs. Drug cartels? Surely the Russians? I received them. Armed sects...Messan worshipers...? OK! The features, while nonsensical, represent Mark Wahlberg's pervasive fantasy of intervening in historical mass shootings. You are here to correct mistakes. The rest is taste. Militants in a Vegas hotel or a group of kids holding up a gas station: any one of them could pull a gun or take a civilian hostage. Go to the damn ground!

Academic and Twitter user Ian Bogost coined the term "persuasive games", saying they "attempt to change or influence the player's opinion outside of the game, not just to get him [sic] to continue playing". While Ready or Not's politics, setting, and mechanics are fundamentally different from any game anyone has ever described as such, it's completely on board. It really wants you to understand what it feels like to be on scene for the first time with an active shooter nearby. It wants you to feel the psychological weight of these decisions—decisions that are terrible and unenviable but absolutely necessary to maintain the modern American standard of living. These are good men doing ugly things, rooting out evil, so vote yes on next year's police budget.

The idea of games as empathy machines was popular about a decade ago: Consider Depression Quest. Shopping cart life; that dragon, cancer; Attic problem, or article, please. Ready or Not is ostensibly more effective at communicating its own worldview than any automated "empathy game" or itch.io curio I've ever played. It happens to be a worldview that I find utterly abhorrent. The Tijuana border tunnel mission is certainly ugly to be included in the midst of ICE's heightened horror campaign. Call of Duty's augmented geopolitics doesn't deal with such clarity. Moralizing is useless: the patient's excitement is the point.

Ready or Not is like being force-fed a pure scaremonger. Surprisingly, there is no mission at Planned Parenthood. You yell at civilians to get on the ground and the game yells at you. This is how it is. This is the world we live in. This is what needs to be done.

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