Ready or Not places you in charge of a four-officer SWAT element in fictional Los Sueños, California, the so-called “City of Dreams”. Its missions draw on real-world catastrophes and mass-casualty events, presenting a series of volatile scenes where civilians, suspects and armed attackers can be difficult to distinguish.
The game’s guiding idea is “Bring Order To Chaos”. You issue commands, demand that people show their hands and try to stabilise rooms before situations deteriorate. Non-lethal arrests usually produce the best mission ratings, but the pressure of a live firefight makes flawless restraint unlikely.
That tension gives the campaign its deliberate rhythm. Every doorway requires judgement, while the physical danger of a mistake is matched by the psychological burden of deciding how much force to use.
From SWAT history to a modern tactical shooter
The game’s subject has a complicated history. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko identifies the 1965 Watts riots as a major event in America’s shift towards increasingly militarised policing. LAPD chief Daryl Gates is credited with creating SWAT after the department struggled to respond to the unrest.
By the 1990s, Balko argued, many SWAT teams were being used less for the urban-warfare situations that inspired them and more for drug raids. Gates later produced Sierra’s 1993 game Police Quest: Open Season, after leaving the LAPD amid criticism of the department’s culture of brutality and racism, including the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers involved.
Police Quest was rebranded as SWAT in 1999. Ready or Not is widely described as a spiritual successor to Irrational Games’ SWAT 4, and VOID Interactive hired SWAT 4 modders during the early stages of development.
Ready or Not review snapshot
- Developer: VOID Interactive
- Type: Squad-based first-person shooter with multiplayer
- Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC
- Release date: 13 December 2023
- Review playtime: 20 hours, including single-player and some score-chasing
- Strengths: A bleak American setting, measured pacing, detailed levels and high-pressure shooting
- Weaknesses: Weapon fixation, the post-office mission and the campaign’s troubling political outlook
Los Sueños turns controversy into level design
VOID Interactive handles its hot-button material by gesturing towards several competing political positions. One mission involves a Vietnamese family converting semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic firearms to fund their mother’s cancer treatment. Another sends the team into an abandoned building where homeless people are sheltering from a hurricane; many attack immediately or rush the player with the behaviour of conventional action-game enemies.
The story is loose and non-linear, with evidence and pre-mission briefings filling in the wider picture. Drug cartels, Russian involvement, fake-ISIS groups, MKUltra references, Hollywood predators, 4chan trolls and armed misandrist cults all feature in the game’s sprawling catalogue of threats.
The resulting fantasy is a Mark Wahlberg-ian vision of intervention, where paramilitary officers can step into the aftermath of historical violence and impose order. The scenarios range from a Las Vegas hotel operation to children robbing a service station, but the uncertainty remains consistent: anyone might draw a weapon or take a hostage.
For Australian players interested in how physical controls shape shooting games, RETROCADE’s arcade light-gun collection offers a useful point of comparison. Ready or Not is built for console and PC controls, but its emphasis on target identification and split-second decisions connects with the broader history of arcade shooters covered on the arcade gaming blog.
When the mechanics argue back
Academic Ian Bogost used the term persuasive games for games that aim to influence a player’s opinions beyond simply encouraging continued play. Ready or Not fits that idea in an unusual and uncomfortable way.
Its scenarios and systems repeatedly ask the player to feel the fear of arriving at an active-shooter incident and the burden of making immediate decisions. The game presents its officers as decent people doing ugly but necessary work, framing force as an essential response to a world full of imminent danger.
That approach is more politically forceful than the work of many games commonly discussed as empathy projects, including Depression Quest, Cart Life, That Dragon, Cancer, Problem Attic and Papers, Please. Ready or Not does not simply depict its worldview; its mechanics make the player practise it.
The effect can be difficult to ignore. A mission set around a Tijuana border tunnel is especially uncomfortable amid heightened immigration enforcement, while the game’s violence feels more direct than the confused geopolitics of a typical Call of Duty campaign. The thrill is not separate from the message. It is the mechanism through which the message reaches the player.
Verdict
Ready or Not is a disciplined tactical shooter with meticulous levels, a slow and demanding pace, and an effective sense of danger. Playing alone makes every uncertain civilian and every missed command feel consequential.
It is also an explicit work of fearmongering. The campaign insists that danger is everywhere and that force is the answer, while civilians are repeatedly ordered to the ground by both the player and the surrounding fiction.
That makes the game unusually effective at communicating its worldview—and unusually difficult to recommend without qualification. Players comparing its control demands with arcade hardware can explore RETROCADE’s arcade machine buying guide, but the central question remains less about equipment than the ideas embedded in each mission.
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