Some time ago, "Ready to Fight" finally ended its two-year EA phase and launched the official version 1.0.
This hardcore game focusing on indoor CQB combat can be said to have created a sales miracle - to date, it is conservatively estimated that it has sold nearly two million copies, and Ground Branch, which is also a tactical realistic FPS, even after 5 years of release, sales are only a fraction of it.
You could say that in order to sell better, Ready for Fight has made compromises to most players, making it no longer feel so realistic and hardcore, but at a balance point that most players need for hardcore shooting.
Regardless, Ready is undoubtedly a success that allows most players who don't know CQB to happily work together with their friends and engage in intrigue against criminals and hostages in an atmospheric variety of maps. If you put aside its sinicization that is not as good as even machine translation for the time being, then "Ready for Battle" is definitely an excellent work worth trying for FPS cooperation fans.
CQB enforcement like no other
Unlike most other FPS games, in Ready to Fight you're not here to kill, but to enforce the law.
So, even if you see a terrorist with a loaded gun, you can't shoot immediately, but you have to shout at the other side to surrender and wait until the other party is ready to fire before you can return fire - otherwise you will be judged as an illegal exchange of fire or an abuse of force, and you will lose points at the end of the level.
Of course, you can't use force against the large number of civilians who are stranded at the scene, not only do you have to tie them up one by one, but you also have to make sure that they all survive safely, otherwise even if you eliminate all the suspects with guns, you will still fail miserably.
Therefore, just like most CQB games, "Ready to Fight" is more willing to let players plan carefully, advance carefully, and implement a perfect plan of action through excellent tactical deployment and strong execution.
With the chain of command and single-player campaign mode in place, you'll already have the option to go on missions with your trained AI teammates, but you'll only have to play with friends to experience the full fun of Ready to Fight.
You'll have to turn on your teammates' miniature screens and slowly navigate dangerous rooms while looking out for each other's blind spots, and the unexpected will always come your way—whether it's a bullet from the darkness, a sudden crossfire, or a deadly mine buried behind a door. As your teammates die one after another, and you report the situation in a hurry, you have no choice but to put aside your cautious strategy and start preparing to fight to the death with the few remaining enemies with the limited props and excellent marksmanship on your body......
Now, in version 1.0 of "Ready for Battle", a new area map has been added before the action, and you can discuss the route of important rooms on the map with your online companions, and choose the breakthrough when entering in advance, which can be regarded as a round of pie drawn during the EA period.
And the map of "Ready for Battle" has also been expanded to nearly 20. The maps range from well-lit gas stations and residential buildings to dimly lit slum drug caves with dilapidated walls to open and dangerous logistics centers. Maps like a silent farm estate, a bomb-threatened college campus, or a container port in the rain all have an excellent atmosphere that will make you shudder just walking through them.
Overall, between casual and hardcore, "Ready for Battle" has found a good balance. If you talk about the level of realism alone, then "Ready to Fight", which can't run fast and has a system of real bullet trajectory and local injuries, is definitely more realistic than a tactical shooter like "Rainbow Six Siege". However, if you compare it with games like "SWAT4" and "Ground Branch", which focus on CQB combat, then "Ready to Fight", which only has two paces, doors can only be opened 90 degrees at all times, and can only be dispatched by a team of 5 people, is undoubtedly not realistic enough in some places that will affect the richness of tactics.
However, it may also meet the needs of many players today—to be able to play a hardcore shooter game that carries over the experience of guns and the use of projectiles in normal FPS, in short, to feel the atmosphere of tactical enough and shoot coolly.
Powerful and cunning enemies
As a PVE-focused game, the most important part of Ready is how to design AI enemies that players will be happy with, and so far it seems to be doing a pretty good job.
There are many types of enemies in Ready to Fight, ranging from street thugs with pistols to professional terrorists with bulletproof vests and light machine guns, but no matter what kind of enemies they are, they are all very powerful, intelligent, and ruthless.
Their marksmanship is steady and ruthless, and many of the time they are tough players are not left behind. Even if you just spot an old lady from a distance, don't take it lightly, because she could turn into John Wick at any time and shoot you and the SWAT officers around you in the head.
They are also cunning and vicious. When an enemy throws away their weapons, kneels on their knees, and raises their hands in surrender in response to your roar, you may take it lightly and focus on something else in your field of vision. And if the enemy notices that you are distracted, they will secretly pull out their pistols and knives and take the opportunity to deal you a fatal blow.
They also know when to hide themselves and when to strike. When nothing happens, enemies will hide silently in the room, and at any time they will set up doorways and aisles with guns in case of a sudden attack by the players. And most enemies won't stand still in a daze, but will wander, patrol, and react like a real person to your different behaviors.
If you make a sound when you open the lock or push the door, it is possible that the enemy in the nearby room will try to sneak the door out and hit you by surprise. Once the two sides start exchanging fire, they will not rush to their deaths, but will wait for an opportunity to back off and find cover nearby, trying to make you pay more to eliminate them.
Especially if you are on a map with complex terrain such as a logistics center, where several large open factories are connected together, the enemy may emerge from any corner of the shelves and conveyor belts and pour fire on you from all directions. In this case, the SWAT at the team of only five people is almost dead and dead, making the level feel like a meat grinder when actually playing.
Moreover, every time you restart playing a map, the enemy's location, distribution, and logic may also be refreshed, making it impossible for you to reduce the difficulty with the "experience of the previous life" through the backboard, which also makes the levels of Ready for Fight challenging and replayable.
Abundant command orders
In fact, our AI SWAT officers are not weak, they are well-trained, can cross-cover each other, and their skills are probably much better than those of novice players, and they will also appear to be very reliable in the simpler tasks in the game.
Ready for action has a wide menu of commands where you can give orders to a team of two, or all SWATS, to form a specific formation, follow them, or go to a specific room to count.
There is also a great variety of instructions you can use when taking inventory. You can have a team member equipped with a mirror gun observe the room and report back first, or throw a flashbang before quickly entering the room. When faced with a locked door, you can also decide whether to have your team members use Swiss Army knives to quietly open the door, kick the door in, blast it open, or blast the door into the sky with C2 explosives.
Since the AI's inventory efficiency is very high, and there are almost no mistakes in a closed room, in some relatively simple levels, you only need to run around the entire map to find the door, and then repeatedly command the AI to enter the inventory to successfully clear the level, which is very rough and brainless.
Of course, there are still a lot of limitations to the AI teammates, such as the performance of the AI in some levels where the target needs to be captured alive - you can only pray that the target will not be killed by the AI's random guns, because they will not be able to tell whether the enemy with the gun in front of them needs to be captured alive or not.
Stupid Commander mode
In addition, version 1.0 of Ready for Combat has added a new "Commander Mode", which is the usual single-player campaign.
In this mode, you can play as a police station commander and complete missions to increase the number of officers, hire more cops, and unlock a variety of cosmetic items. Each AI police officer has a different trait, and once you lead them through a certain number of missions, you'll be able to unlock their traits and be effective when they go on missions.
It can be seen that "Ready to Fight" tries to add more squad management gameplay to the game, but in fact, there are few features in the game that are implemented at all, and the only feature used to distinguish the differences between them can only be said to be better than nothing in the mission.
In addition, Ready for Combat also features a pressure system similar to that of Dark Dungeon. As long as you lead the officers on a mission, their stress points will continue to build up, and if they fail or get injured, their stress can be filled up in an instant.
This system can be said to be designed to be meaningless. In order to treat the officers who are overstressed, you will have to repeat the tasks you have already completed many times in order to advance the treatment time and get the officers who are not working in the empty seats to get back to work after they have been cured. However, you will soon find out that there is no difference between the veteran officers and the new recruits, because they don't have any dimension of growth at all other than that dispensable trait.
So, you'll end up using all the police officers as consumables for one mission at a time, and countless people will die or quit their jobs every day in your police department, and the system that was originally built for realism is completely out of the way it was designed, and it becomes unrealistic and ridiculous.
Therefore, this "Commander Mode" as a whole is just barely playable, and the rough squad management system makes it difficult for you to experience the fun it should have during the game.
General comments
Ready for Combat has a unique level of fun unlike most FPS, even if you're playing against a bunch of AI enemies that are not real people, but can often be incredibly difficult and unexpectedly fun. You can choose to fight alongside the AI SWAT officers, explore the game's twenty or so maps, and complete seemingly impossible missions in a challenging situation, but if you can find a few friends to play with you, you'll really need to tap into the full fun of Ready to Play.