There is so much to be said about this fucking game it's insane. How like 1/3 of the missions are cranked around this pizzagate child pornography conspiracy, how 1/3 of the others are varying degrees of turbo-methed super-predators getting supplied by The Cartels. How none of the AI has any self preservation instinct and will attempt to kill you at literally any random opportunity, and how the AI is literally, straight up broken and has millisecond response times with perfect accuracy and can see you through cracks in the door from across the map well enough to shoot and kill you through a wall you cannot shoot through yourself.
I think the most appalling, egregious aspect of the game is the half-hearted, ai-generated assets in the police department regarding police PTSD. This makes me think about how cops have been talking a lot about PTSD lately, modeling the conversation after the way PTSD was such a massive propaganda win for the global war on terror and changed the nature of conversations drastically. In Commander Mode, you have an xcom-like roster of officers. They each have a unique skill you can unlock after repeat missions. They also have a stress condition, which will degrade on missions. When their stress degrades too much, you literally hit a button that says "SEND TO THERAPY" and they're out for a mission. I figured their condition would degrade dependent on mission performance and injuries incurred. After playing a number of missions, fucking up a bunch, doing some less-lethal runs (more on this later), I think I've figured out how this system works. Getting injured does not affect their condition. Failing a mission does not affect their condition, from what I can tell. I've failed several missions doing LTL-only runs because of the insanely cracked-out AI. And I've run completely successful missions using lethal weapons, where nobody was injured, no civilians harmed, even with only one or two perps outright killed rather than incapacitated or apprehended. It appears the only condition for the deterioration of the mental health of these officers is shooting people. Shooting people is what causes them to get sad and need to go to therapy. There's also a bunch of weird loading screen hints about how the officers' morale is getting hurt cuz of what the public is saying or whatever. It's so fucking brazenly shoot-and-cry copaganda in a video game which is so memetically popular right now.
And the thing about LTLs is nuts. There's no way to order your officers to use LTLs only. In SWAT4, which the game is emulating, you can exclusively equip your officers with Less-Than-Lethal equipment. You cannot do this in Ready Or Not. Even if you give them beanbag shotguns and pepper ball guns, their sidearm HAS to be a real gun instead of a taser. Because of this, I have had numerous Would-Be S-rank missions bungled by one of my officers randomly deciding to draw his sidearm and shoot a perp in the chest when he isn't surrendering. Additionally, it appears values have been changed between the pre-release and 1.0 versions of the game which make some perps actual emboldened by less-lethal munitions rather than beanbags, flashbangs and stinger grenades persuading them to surrender.
The guns have, by far, the most attention in the whole game. Everything but the guns is shit. The maps are terrible and make no sense. A huge portion of the assets are really lazy AI generated shit. The AI is straight broken in a way that makes all your tactical tools hit-or-miss. Tons of content was cut from the game, including core, promised features, apparently with no word of them coming back into the game. The guns got all the attention, in sound design, in feedback, in controls, everything. Most of the guns in the game are meme guns. The kinds of things Garand Thumb and Administrative Results make obscene money off of with clickbait thumbnails. There's a fucking SA58 OSW in the game. It's the only .308 gun in the game, despite there being a model for a full-length FAL and a G3 in the game files used by perps. The G36C in the game is explicitly in the same configuration Garand Thumb showed off on his youtube channel. Like half the fuckin assault rifles are in .300BLK for some reason, including the two MCXs in the game. Your whole team is equipped with fucking ATAK and high-cut helmets and combat-pants and high-speed plate carriers and shit. They don't have a feature to issue orders over the helmet cam system like you could in fucking SWAT4, a game from almost nineteen fucking years ago, thus completely invalidating any reason to split your element into blue and red teams and do anything like a split-entry. But you can get a PEQ-15 and an Elcan SpecterDR on your fucking HK416 with a Geissele rail and rock that with GPNVGs on the mission where you, a five-man city SWAT team, go down to the border in order to clear a massive, intricate tunnel system being used by the fucking cartel like in Sicario. Because not only were ground branch the good guys in that movie, but cops are basically the same as the fucking SAC anyways.
This game is fucking insane. It's a grotesque microcosm of the glory-hunger which drove police officers to cast themselves as warriors on the same level as special forces, provoking gamers to undergo the exact same self-deluding militaristic metamorphosis into over-funded deathsquads as police have, and it meticulously constructs a NextDoor-esque nightmare world in which this descent is not only justifiable but necessary. The game actually, for real, wants to make the players feel like being on a fucking shitty metro SWAT team is the same thing as being a tier-zero operator while, actually, being harder, more noble, and less rewarding.
janainaart
izzy806
pixelskylines
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
ellievsbear
turnnoffyourmind
