It's been a big summer for new gaming launches, with the Switch 2 sucking up a huge amount of attention and dominating my gaming diet in recent months, but in the last week my PS5 Pro has finally started to fight back in earnest. First, I used it to access the rip-roaring Battlefield 6 beta, which I absolutely loved.
Now, though, I've got a new obsession, in co-op mode with my friends: Ready or Not. This extremely tactical and brutal SWAT team shooter has been available on PC for some time, but it only hit consoles in mid-July and had passed me by until recently. Now, though, my gaming squad and I are firmly into it, and learning new ways to play.
Whereas the likes of Battlefield and Call of Duty: Warzone do involve a little strategy, as you work out where to flank another team, or push to capture an objective, they're also very run-and-gun, prioritising quick fun engagements. Ready or Not, by contrast, is super slow-paced and all about making sure you don't walk into a problem every time you open any door.
The game's structured as a series of missions to take charge of, in a team of up to five SWAT officers. It's set in the fictional city of Los Suenos, implicitly in California, and each mission is its own summation of a stereotypical crime, from abductions to underground meth labs and hostage situations.
You infiltrate each level through a variety of routes, and each time you play a mission, you'll come across suspects and civilians in different places, armed differently and with potentially new traps laid out for you. This means the order of the day is slow, careful exploration – and as much communication as possible, to keep track of where you all are and what you're doing (and seeing).
It's a total change of gear for us, and the tension is reinforced in a few ways. Firstly, you can die very easily, thanks to enemy AI that's properly devious (faking surrenders and flanking aggressively, for instance) and deals huge damage. Second, there's little visual information on-screen – you can't ping areas, and if you want to know which of your friends you're looking at, you'll need to be able to read their uniform badge, or to remember what their loadout looks like.
That all makes the game way more attention-demanding, and it's a really fun portal into another world for the duration of each mission. Plus, on PS5 Pro at least, it looks pretty great during gameplay. Compared to the highest settings on a gaming PC, there's a clear downgrade in Performance mode, but that doesn't stop this from being a good-looking console game.
Lighting, in particular, is really impressive, with each scenario having a very distinctive and different look and feel. That might mean a dismal stormy night where night-vision goggles are a must, but it could instead bring out a rainy day, or a brilliantly sunny evening where you can get dazzled if you look through the wrong window.
Even more impressive, though, is the sound design, which is right out of the top drawer. As you navigate through a creaky house, for example, you'll hear muffled footsteps from the floor above, but you'll have to tune out the chuntering and complaints from suspects you've already left cuffed in your wake. When gunfire does erupt, it's near-deafening and contributes to the sense that you need to avoid it unless it's necessary (as it often is).
With 3D sound and graphical steps forward being a hallmark of this console generation's advantages over the previous one, Ready or Not is a surprisingly great summary of what can now be enjoyed on something like the PS5 Pro. I'm already looking forward to my next session, and the next mission – it's got its hooks in me bigtime.
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