Ready or Not: Home Invasion Review

I bloody love Ready or Not. Although the SWAT 4 spiritual successor isn’t quite perfect, it’s still far and away the best single-player tactical FPS game on the market, and there’s nothing anyone can say that’ll change my mind. It has the best level design in any shooter I’ve played, its tone and environmental design showcase everything right with the medium as a whole, its AI is almost too realistic for comfort, and its shooting almost feels better than shooting guns in real life. It has flaws, most notably its performance and a few issues stemming from its long-winded development, but those aside, I can’t recommend the title enough to anyone who likes blasting baddies in hyper-realistic levels. And although its first expansion, Home Invasion, isn’t quite as extensive or amazing as its base game, it’s still well worth picking up provided you enjoyed that base game.

Now, just to be clear, Ready or Not: Home Invasion isn’t the biggest DLC to hit Steam’s virtual shelves. It includes three new missions, which you can play online even if you don’t buy it as long as the host of your session does, a handful of cosmetics, a few new weapons that are free for all players, and some minor improvements to the title’s code. It only takes about an hour to complete Dorms, Narcos and Lawmaker, but, not to repeat myself, that’s well worth doing provided you like Ready or Not’s near-perfect blend of high stakes shooting and depressing social commentary.

Dorms involves clearing out an abandoned college dormitory that’s been occupied by hostile homeless people who’ve taken shelter there during a hurricane. Narcos tasks you rescuing a police informant from the cartel who are hold up in a series of one-story houses in a way that was clearly inspired by the aftermath of the death of Kiki Camarena. Lawmaker is a hostage rescue mission of an oil baron and his family who’ve been captured by environmental terrorists in a giant mansion. All three of the missions technically take place during a major storm that takes place after the events of Port Hokan (the final mission in Ready or Not’s main story), but as with the base game, its overarching narrative has next to no affect on the DLC’s gameplay.

And, just like in base Ready or Not, that gameplay is superb. All of Home Invasion’s missions are almost perfectly paced, force you to confront the depths of human depravity through details in their environments and the specifics of your objectives, and, of course, are genuinely fun to play through as long you like hyper-realistic FPS games. There’s probably an argument to be made about how the DLC is a tad more police propaganda-ish than Ready or Not, as killing homeless people and Poli-Sci graduates without repercussions is a tad less morally straightforward than stopping a mass shooter on a college campus, but that argument is neither here nor there (there being the Google Doc of the article about it I swear I’ll get around to writing soon). The fact is that Home Invasion’s levels are great, and the cosmetics and firearms it adds are welcome if not especially noteworthy.

The thing that isn’t quite as much of a fact, but is still worth bringing up, is that the DLC does have two flaws you may or may not care about. The first is, as mentioned previously, it only loosely fits into Ready or Not’s core narrative, and isn’t especially consistent thematically. The hurricane that is ravaging Los Sueños, the game’s map, doesn’t have any impact besides there being a bit of rain on its missions, and the objectives themselves don’t really tie into the militant extremism/terrorism/child abuse/drug distribution aspects of the base game. This isn’t really a problem, seeing as the base game’s plot is a loose amalgamation of pre-mission briefings at best, but it’s still worth bringing up for all two people who actually read those briefings.

The other problem with Home Invasion is, of course, that it doesn’t actually add all that much content, but this also isn’t really an issue. The expansion costs £8/$10, which is roughly what a burger from McDonald’s will run you these days, and as long as one of your mates buys it, you can still play through its missions. VOID Interactive have stated it’s merely the first of many DLCs to come, too, and I for one am happy to give them my hard earned money if it means they’ll keep adding more content to one of my favourite games of all time. And you should too, because even though you can beat Home Invasion in the time it took you to read this review and look at its Steam store page, you’ll have more fun doing the latter than the former. By fun, of course, I mean you’ll probably end up contemplating the role of police in the United States after shooting questionably bad guys with some of the most satisfying shooting mechanics in the medium, but everyone needs a hobby, I guess.