Ready or Not is the best copaganda I’ve ever played

6 Mins read

VOID Interactive’s 2023 gritty tactical shooter Ready or Not is copaganda. Not necessarily in a bad way — but like any game (or media, really) that centers on the heroics of law enforcement, it inevitably shapes and reinforces how we perceive the police.

Copaganda is the shorthand critics use for media that paints policing in an uncritically positive light, smoothing over its flaws and presenting officers as the thin blue line between order and chaos. It runs the gamut from glossy network dramas like Blue Bloods or Law & Order — where the cops are always right and the system mostly works — to schoolhouse “outreach” programs like D.A.R.E., which critics say were less about teaching kids not to do drugs and more about putting cops in classrooms, and encouraging kids to report on their own families.

For the past month, I’ve been playing the newly released console version of Ready or Not on PlayStation 5 — a port surrounded by controversy and charges of censorship. VOID Interactive, the studio behind the game, said in a Steam post that changes were made to the game to help it get published on consoles. Not that Ready or Not is a stranger to backlash. Back in 2021, during its early access phase, the game’s developers parted ways with publisher Team17 after confirming to fans that, yes, a school shooting mission would be included — and it eventually was.

At its most cynical reading, Ready or Not plays to the reactionary fever dreams of right-wing paranoia: a dystopian urban hellscape — Los Sueños, a fictional version of Los Angeles — overrun by gangs, cartels, and pedophiles, with only heavily armed tactical units assigned to “bring order to chaos.” It’s a narrative that echoes the real-life messaging often pushed by law enforcement, especially when crime intersects with race and poverty.

Mission debrief screen with an NPC in an office.

Credit: Screenshot by Mashable/VOID Interactive

VOID Interactive — and the most vocal corners of its fanbase — position Ready or Not as an unflinching, hyper-realistic police simulator. Its lore and tactical realism approach have also made the game especially popular within the MilSim (military simulation) community — a niche gaming community filled with former and active service members alongside die-hard military enthusiasts.

The game, they claim, is meant to immerse players in the grim, high-stakes world SWAT teams face daily, no matter how ugly that world gets. And to be fair, the game plays all the greatest hits of modern American trauma: a school shooting, a Pulse nightclub-inspired massacre, a hospital siege, apartment block shootouts, and even multiple standoffs with libertarian and anarchist compounds.

Building missions directly modeled on some of the darkest chapters in recent U.S. history requires a certain appetite for edginess — and a noticeable lack of tact. Don’t worry, Call of Duty does it too. And yet, here’s the frustrating truth for players like me who aren’t aligned with its vision: Ready or Not is really fucking fun to play.

One of the biggest selling points of Ready or Not — and a huge part of why I love it — is that it’s functionally a survival horror game disguised as a tactical shooter. VOID Interactive basically said, “What if we took the vibe of SWAT 4’s Fairfax Residence mission and built an entire game around it?” The tension of breaching a door, the uncertainty of what’s waiting around the next corner, the rush of pulling off a flawless takedown, the oppressive atmosphere of dread — it all clicks so perfectly that it’s easy, for a moment, to forget what exactly the game is asking you to buy into.

That’s no accident. Because for all its reputation as an ultra-realistic shooter, Ready or Not absolutely leans into violence, and it doesn’t do much to discourage it. In practice, the game rewards you for clearing rooms and dropping suspects with lethal precision. Every encounter demands it: fail to follow the rules of engagement, and you’ll be slapped with failing grades at the end of a mission.

However, while non-lethal play is a part of the game, it’s treated more like a challenge mode for players chasing high S-rankings rather than a meaningful core mechanic. Your non-lethal arsenal in Ready or Not is limited: a taser, a beanbag rifle, pepper spray, gas grenades, and flashbangs. You can try to incapacitate suspects with low-caliber rounds instead of killing them outright, but that demands split-second decision-making in high-pressure scenarios where NPCs can whip out a gun and shoot you dead without warning.

SWAT team preparing to breach a door with command menu open.

Credit: Screenshot by Mashable/VOID Interactive

In this way, the gameplay echoes police narratives on dealing with crime. The developers, after all, did speak with multiple law enforcement officers to accurately reflect their experience. An experience that, if they are to be taken at their word, involves a world where every door conceals an armed suspect, every call could spiral into a shootout, and hesitation can mean death. It’s a perspective that reinforces the idea that constant, overwhelming force is the most rational response. It’s deeply problematic — and it also makes for incredible level design.

“You almost have to go on to every traffic stop assuming there is a firearm in that car,” said an Ohio police sergeant to Spectrum News back in May. Yet, according to a Mapping Police Violence report, police killed 108 unarmed civilians in 2024 and 77 so far in 2025. Out of the 1,260 total deaths at the hands of police MPV reported last year, the organization said 619 occurred during responses to suspected non-violent crimes — or in situations where no crime had been reported at all.

If Ready or Not were truly chasing police realism, you’d be filling out endless reports, running traffic stops, and standing around at concerts while you collect overtime.

Early in development, the developers promised that no subject was too controversial, no tragedy too sensitive to depict. Ready or Not would dive into the darkest corners of society without restraint — and players loved that. It’s why the game has spawned a whole ecosystem of YouTube video essays with titles like “THE MOST DISTRUBING SHOOTER I’VE EVER PLAYED.”

And it’s also why the game was review-bombed when it finally hit consoles. Depending on who you ask, the changes are trivial at best: toned-down gore, previously naked female NPCs covered up, and a convulsing child swapped out for a sleeping one. But to the hardcore fanbase, it was the developers caving to corporate pressure, selling out the very “no compromises” ethos that made Ready or Not stand out in the first place.

The data doesn’t exactly back up the fan outrage theory. When Ready or Not dropped on consoles on July 15, it sold over 2 million copies in just two weeks — this despite getting review-bombed on Steam over the censorship changes. The numbers make it clear, though: people are playing, and they’re having a good time.

In fact, they’re having such a good time that some players have been sharing their own gameplay clips — many of which feature, uh, gleeful examples of brutal extrajudicial police violence. So… yeah.

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For a long time, as a kid and then as a teenager, I never really understood why people hated FPS games. To me, it was just a game. Studies have shown again and again that they don’t cause real-world violence, no matter how much the Jack Thompsons of the world tried to build careers pretending otherwise. My mom hated them, and as my dad got older, he grew more ambivalent too — even though some of my best memories are sitting next to him watching as he gunned down enemies from an AC-130 in Call of Duty 4. They were fun then, and I still believe they’re fun now.

But fun doesn’t mean harmless. A study in the National Library of Medicine concluded that “exposure to violent video games increases the risk of desensitization to violence, which in turn may increase aggression and decrease prosocial behavior.”

Player aiming at a downed suspect in tactical shooter game.

Credit: Screenshot by Mashable/VOID Interactive

Games don’t turn kids into killers, that we know for sure, but they do shape how we think about violence and authority. Spending hours in digital meth houses and rundown apartment complexes can normalize certain ideas — that violence is the fastest solution, about who “good guys” and “bad guys” look like, and that shooting your way out is the natural end to conflict. It’s not cause-and-effect in the cartoonish way moral panickers try and claim, but it does leave an imprint.

This isn’t me saying that everyone who plays Ready or Not or other tactical shooters like it is waving #BlueLivesMatter flags. Call me woke if you want, but a lot of the game really does boil down to busting into low-income areas and arresting poor POC. And for all of Ready or Not’s deep gun and gear customization, it feels damning that I can’t change my character’s skin color in single-player (though I can in multiplayer).

Yet here I am, gunning down a Black guy in a durag. I don’t know — maybe that does add to the “ultra gritty realism” the game prides itself on.

This article reflects the opinions of the writer.