×

WHERE TO WATCH

SUBSCRIPTION

Hulu

Stream

fuboTV

Stream

YouTube TV

Stream

PURCHASE

Fandango At Home

RentBuy

Amazon Video

RentBuy

Apple TV Store

RentBuy

YouTube

RentBuy

Google Play Movies

RentBuy

Powered by JustWatch

Ready or Not (or RoN for short) is a Co-Op Multiplayer Tactical First-Person Shooter by VOID Interactive. Here, the players take control of "D Platoon", the S.W.A.T. Team of Los Sueños Police Department, in their war against crime. The game serves as a Spiritual Successor to the S.W.A.T. series, most notably the fourth installment.

The game was revealed on May 3, 2017, with a teaser trailer, and a gameplay trailer was released on March 7, 2019. It has also been promoted with an Alternate Reality Game named Carcosa ARG; you can watch its summary here. The game was released in Early Access on December 2021, with a full release (including a fully fleshed-out single-player campaign) on December 13th, 2023. From there, a series of Expansion Pack DLCs and updates which add new missions and equipment to the game have been released:

• Home Invasion (July 24, 2024): Features a trio of levels set in various residential areas in the aftermath of a major hurricane. Investigate a shooting within a homeless encampment in "Dorms", rescue an at-risk informant in "Narcos", and respond to the home invasion of an oil lobbyist in "Lawmaker".
• Dark Waters (December 11, 2024): Features three levels with a nautical theme. "Mirage at Sea" has you rescue kidnapping victims on a luxury yacht, "Leviathan" pits you against an Eco-Terrorist group who have occupied an oil rig, and "3 Letter Triad" has you intercept a criminal trade convention at an abandoned coastal resort.
• Los Sueños Stories (July 15, 2025): A free update to coincide with the game's console release which adds two new levels to the game. Attempt to locate a missing police officer within an apartment building in “Stolen Valor”, and respond to a gang meetup gone wrong in a local fast food chain in “Hunger Strike”.

It is unrelated to the film Ready or Not (2019), the sequel to the young adult novel All-American Girl (Meg Cabot), or the Canadian TV series from the 1990s.

This game provides examples of:

• Aggressive Play Incentive:
  • The Stress mechanic is a nuanced example of this. Enemies have a hidden Stress stat that determines how trigger-happy they will be. Their stress increases when you use loud weapons or lethal force, but also crucially if they are allowed to retreat or take up a defensive position during an engagement. Stress is also contagious, so a stressed suspect who retreats to their friends will make them stressed too, and thus more aggressive. Overall, the Stress mechanic encourages you to play aggressively to take down suspects as fast as possible in order to minimize the odds of you getting trapped in long firefights.
  • Zigzagged when boobytraps are introduced midway through the game. These consist of grenades with tripwires strung across doorways, and will not only kill anyone nearby when a player or NPC steps across one, but can also be triggered by carelessly opening any doors so rigged. If handled as intended - i.e. by pausing at each door to check for a trap, then carefully cracking open the door and cutting the wire before entering - these present a serious impediment to aggressive movement. However, they can also be defeated by breaching the door with a shotgun or explosive from a distance...
  • "Elephant" is built around this, with suspects quickly starting to execute civilians if you're spotted early. There are also bombs on a timer that spawn in randomized areas, though the timer is relatively generous (18 minutes).
• A.K.A.-47: Zig-zagged. Some of the firearms in the game have their real-life names intact while others are abbreviated or fictionalized.
• Alternate History: Background details in the LSPD station will reveal that America is somehow on its 53rd president by present day. At the time of the game's PC release in 2023, it was only on its 46th.
• Anachronic Order: The missions do not take place in the order you unlock them, relying on you to discern where missions take place on the timeline via briefings and in-game lore that you have to go out of your way to find.
• Arc Villain: The game has several.
  • Amos Voll is the head of a child pornography ring operating within Los Sueños; dismantling it comprises the missions "23 Megabytes a Second", "Sinuous Trail", "The Spider", and "Valley of the Dolls".
  • The Left Behind is a domestic terrorist group composed of disillusioned veterans that are the main threat of "Ides of March" and "Sins of the Father", which take place within a single day of each other and target the same man.
  • The Hand is a foreign jihadist militant terrorist group that is retaliating in response to the United States' intervention in Yemen. They're the primary antagonists of "Neon Tomb" and "Relapse".
  • Los Locos is a criminal gang operating within Los Sueños that has connections to Mexican cartels and smuggles drugs across the border. They're the primary threats of "Rust Belt", "Buy Cheap, Buy Twice", "Narcos", and are the source of the meth distribution encountered in "Thank You, Come Again" and "Twisted Nerve".
  • The United Planet Front is an eco-terrorist group striking out against public officials and institutions for polluting the planet. They're the main enemies of "Lawmaker" and "Leviathan".
• Arc Welding: Several of the missions have elements that bleed into one another, with the biggest connecting tissue being the Spider organization.
  • The gangbangers who shot up the 4U Gas Station in "Thank You, Come Again" are connected to a meth lab operating in 213 Park, which is later raided in "Twisted Nerve". The benefactors of this meth lab are later implied to be the criminal cartel, Los Locos, who have been smuggling drugs into the United States. They're later confronted in "Rust Belt".
  • Amos Voll, the Arc Villain of the child pornography ring Story Arc, is an associate of the Spider trafficking ring, which deals in the human trafficking of women. The LSPD would later crack down on their operations in Port Hokan during "Hide and Seek".
  • The Carriers of the Vine cult are implied to be behind the abduction and murder of one of the Mindjot employees and had wished to get their hands on Voll, with the implication being that they'd found out about his association with the Spider group. The murder of the Mindjot employee also contributes to the security staff being hostile towards you when you raid their datacenter in "Sinuous Trail".
  • The Tran Family's illegal weapon manufactory in "Ends of the Earth" is the source of firearms wielded by various suspects the LSPD have been dealing with across the game. Port Hokan from "Hide and Seek" is revealed to distribute the brothers' illegally modified weapons, as well as automobiles from "Buy Cheap, Buy Twice".
  • The Anderson-Lincoln Mansion has a conspicuous model of an oil rig in Sven's office. The second time the LSPD clashes with the UPF is on an oil rig, which likely has ties to Anderson-Lincoln.
• Arc Words: "Bring Order to Chaos." Every mission in the game has this phrase as the main objective for dealing with suspects, which is taken from a slogan hanging on the briefing room of the LSPD Headquarters as shown in the page caption above. This is meant to encourage players to minimize or even refrain from killing suspects with the incentive of getting a much higher score and rank for doing so.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing missions at high ranks unlocks cosmetics to customize your officers including watches, armor vests, helmets, shirts, boots, and so on.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • In a previous public build, armor did little to negate damage. You were just as easily killed by some punk shooting at you with a machine pistol when wearing heavy armor as you were when wearing no armor. An exception to this, however, is the ballistic shield, which still stops bullets to an impressive degree. In gameplay proper, the various armor types and levels effectively give you extra chances if you're hit in the torso, but they're still far from ideal from facing perpetrators head-on, especially if their spraying manages to land a stray bullet to your head or limbs. All the more reason to stick to cover and check your rooms carefully to avoid a swift death.
  • Almost defied in the current builds. While the game is still a tactical shooter, and you are usually considered lucky to survive more than a handful of shots from any weapon (especially if that weapon shoots 7.62), armor can make a night-or-day difference between dying the second anything hits you, to practically ignoring smaller calibers if they hit center-mass.^note To be specific, there are 3 types of material you can insert into your armor (Kevlar, Steel, and Ceramic), and you can choose between light or heavy armor made of these materials; Kevlar is light but ineffective against nearly anything higher than a pistol round, Steel is the heaviest and can shrug off all but the heaviest rounds you will encounter, (though it can spall, doing minor damage to you over time), and Ceramic is the middle-ground. However, unlike the other types, it can shatter after taking enough damage, in which case it protects against nothing.
  • Enemies wearing plate carriers are also noticeably tougher to take down than those who are not, especially if you made the mistake of only taking JHP rounds over AP. Some of the tougher enemies can take an entire magazine from low-caliber pistols center-mass and still continue to fight. Even AP rounds from Submachine guns can take a worrying amount of ammo to down a single opponent if you don't hit a headshot or their unprotected limbs.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • The friendly SWAT AI has been massively improved in the 1.0 release, to the point where, with the right orders, you can realistically have them clear the entire mission without you having to fire a single shot yourself.
    • One example is that, if they are ordered to clear a room while one of them has a shield, they will automatically switch to it and be the first through the door.
    • If ordered to clear some of the larger rooms with multiple areas to them, they will search a single area, then wait for the other members to finish searching their areas before automatically moving to clear another area as a group, rather than going it alone. The exception is if they take fire.
  • While it still has its quirks, as mentioned below, the enemy AI can be surprisingly dynamic and has lots of tricks up its sleeves. Enemies can blind-fire, duck, take hostages, squeeze under beds and into closets to surprise you, hide behind doorways with knives, fake surrender/incapacitation, and even use their own breaching equipment.
  • On top of this, going against crackheads vs. militia isn't a simple difference of equipment; more skilled enemies are much more alert, more unlikely to surrender, and are far more able and willing to move around to try and flank your team. The easiest levels of the game will have you up against small group of gangbangers that quickly submit when surprised and panic frequently, while the harder levels will be against fanatic militia or terrorist groups that are better equipped than you are, will cover each other appropriately, and will rarely (if ever) give up willingly.
  • As of the Los Suenos Stories Update, using a flashlight can finally give away your position to suspects.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The single-player SWAT AI wasn't very consistent when reacting to threats during the beta. Sometimes, they would react accordingly and open fire at perps actively engaging them. Other times, they'd at best yell fruitlessly as you're gunned downed or they aren't, at worst stare blankly like idiots as you get gunned down or they do. They were also known to kill you by friendly fire on some occasions if you're standing in between them and perps. All of this was thankfully overhauled in the 1.0 release, as detailed above.
  • Sometimes friendly SWAT officers will swap out their less-lethal main weapons for their lethal sidearms and kill suspects with them despite otherwise having the advantage and being able to bring them in alive. This can be very frustrating when you're trying to get an S rank, which is immediately ruined by them doing this as all suspects have to be arrested.
  • An extremely bad oversight in the 1.0 release is that officers who are ordered to wand a door do not use unique lines for already arrested or downed suspects so you can be told how there's "armed" suspects behind a door, breach it and then it turns out that room actually links back to a room you already cleared with arrested suspects.
• Artistic License: Steel plates are portrayed as a viable alternative to ceramic plates. In real life they are virtually obsolete as modern high-quality ceramic plate inserts can provide good protection for less weight and without the risk of spalling and injury.
• Artistic License – Law Enforcement:
  • You have to cuff and restrain civilians, a staple mechanic taken from the SWAT series of games since the third as opposed to escorting them out (like in Rainbow Six or Counter-Strike). While there are good reasons for doing it that are explained to the player in the tutorial, civilians often complain that they're being treated like the criminals or ask why they're being arrested when they haven't done anything, because the SWAT team doesn't bother to explain why they're being restrained. That being said, tying down civilians and leaving them on the spot is a bad idea in logic and in real life, given how these will only make them more vulnerable to criminals. In reality, a special group of SWAT officers called "Trailers" (who aren't seen in-game, though are mentioned in some lines) would bring the hostages out/apply medical attention as the team cleared the rest of the area. As of 1.0, this can actually be subverted now that you can order civilians to run out of the area to be secured by the officers outside.
  • In reality, a lot of the call-ups would have at least one other Element alongside your SWAT team, as SWAT usually aims to out-number suspects as opposed to just a single squad (especially in situations like active shooters where the suspects are searching for civilians to kill). Presumably this isn't done as making an effective AI team would be difficult as well as mean they could possibly ruin the player's score or objectives if they slipped up.
  • As the mission takes place on an oil rig that is explicitly stated to be located within the Outer Continental Shelf, dealing with the events of "Leviathan" would be the responsibility of the Coast Guard or a federal law enforcement agency, not the nearby city's SWAT team. This one does get a Handwave, as a fictional amendment to the real Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (the law that gives the federal government jurisdiction over the OCS) is briefly mentioned to imply that the Coast Guard stand-in can delegate missions to local law enforcement in this universe.
    • Even before that, the name of the Coast Guard stand-in, C.O.A.S.T., is stated to mean California Offshore Air and Sea Team, implying the state already has control over law enforcement in the OCS area (the amendment is stated to simply allow them to partner with municipal law enforcement units, and their partnership with the LSPD is stated to have only started after the end of the base campaign).
  • The mission briefing for "Narcos" variously refers to Mike Esperanza, the undercover operative who just had his cover blown and is now under threat, as a police officer, agent, and an informant, with additional context implying he is a fellow member of the LSPD. In real life, these terms generally refer to three different types of people - officers and agents are both law enforcement, but tend not to exist in the same agency;^note "Officer" tends to refer to law enforcement officials at the local to state level; "Agents" tend to exist at the state to national level. informants, in contrast, are civilians, frequently criminals themselves, who provide information to law enforcement.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Defied. Even though the Hand are supposed to be Hate Sinks with full intent to massacre innocents, never display any remorse for their atrocities, and are active shooters - the SWAT officers will still take a drop to their morale if they choose to gun them all down.
  • Under most circumstances being swatted would earn whoever was on the receiving end a good deal of sympathy, but in the case of Michael Williams, even his own stream viewers cheer when you bust down his door and arrest him as he's a Straw Misogynist sex pest who constantly hurls abusive comments while gaming, and that's not even getting into the fact that he's also in possession of CP.
  • On the other side of the law, the Cherryessa Farm cult has been stalking and killing men who are domestic abusers and sexual predators, Senator Fremont wrote a bill that defunded the VA^note There's even a chance one of your officers will show sympathy for the Left Behind, pointing out that they did try peaceful protests and have only resorted to violence because that didn't work. This is one of the only times in the game your team will make such a comment, and the DLC map Lawmaker pits SWAT against eco-terrorists who stormed the mansion of a big oil lobbyist.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • A few suspects will try to shoot themselves when confronted by SWAT, so as to avoid being arrested.
  • George Brixley, the prime suspect of "The Spider", will attempt to take his own life if met with sufficient force from D-Platoon. This is to prevent himself from being used to incriminate his associates, but also likely to spare himself from retribution in prison for his involvement in child pornography.
• Black Comedy: In the reveal trailer, some SWAT officers investigate an absolutely horrific, Gorn-filled massacre in a nightclub... which is named "The Anal Staircase", in bold neon lettering.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The holographic sight is made by LEOTEC instead of the real-life EOTECH.
  • Mindjot is either based on Mindspark Interactive Network or Mindgeek. Might also qualify as Take That!.
  • You can find familiar looking bottles of vodka labelled "Absolutely Disgusting Vodka", which is almost definitely a Take That!.
  • One piece of evidence you can unlock in 23 Megabytes a Second is an anime figurine of a character called Pikumiku Chan, who is basically just a recoloured Hatsune Miku wearing a witch hat.
• Blinded by the Light:
  • The SWAT team has the classic flashbang grenade in addition to stingers and CS gas.
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • A few weapons available to the SWAT officers stand out for their age and are mainly present for their association with real-world SWAT units of the late 1990s, notably the TLE 1911^note a customized 1911 handgun based on the ones used by the real Los Angeles SWAT since 2002, with its only attachments being a fittingly 90s style flashlight or laser sight and the MP5A2^note a version of the MP5 identical to the main one except for its fixed stock and old-school handguard, with the only flashlight attachment available being the iconic Surefire flashlight/handguard combo. Given the game's high lethality, they're both still effective in the right hands.
  • Beating all the main missions unlocks a selection of SWAT '99 cosmetics to dress officers in, all based on late 90s gear and clothes used by LAPD SWAT units. The Dark Water DLC adds some vintage VBSS team gear cosmetics to go along with its nautical theme.
• Bomb Disposal: In missions such as "Elephant" and "Relapse", D Platoon must also deal with locating and defusing bombs scattered across the map within the allotted time before they detonate, thus encouraging players to move swiftly.
• Booby Trap: Come in multiple grenade flavours and all punish reckless breaching.
• Boring, but Practical: For lethal loadouts, the AR-platform rifles like the MK18 are typical choices due to their short length, light recoil, vast array of attachments, and reasonable damage even against armored foes (with AP rounds). For less-lethal loadouts, the Beanbag Shotgun tends to be favored over the pepper ball guns as some suspects can be immune to their effects and the brief window before the pepper ball effects set in can allow suspects to get shots off, as well as potential friendly fire from the aftereffects unless your officers are wearing gas masks.
• Bowdlerise:
  • When the game was still in early access, there used to be a couple of items such as a box of vitamins called "Bonor Health" from "Whore Foods," and a "Red Pill" box with "Noggin Joggers" on top of it. When an article mentioned these and stoked controversy, the developers posted a response claiming that, for the red pill box, they were unaware of any "hateful connotations" from the red pill reference and that it was intended to be a reference to The Matrix. While it and the other assets mentioned in the article were meant to be placeholders, the developers immediately removed it in the next update.
  • It was announced that due to feasibility and crossplay reasons, some aspects of the game had to be toned down in order to be published on consoles, which went through on July 15th, 2025. Among the changes listed is dismemberment now only occurring when targets are alive instead of dead, some explicit nudity being covered up, and changing the child's animation in "Twisted Nerve" to be unconscious or sleeping instead of convulsing. Some textures remain the same on the PC version, however, one example being in the "Streamer" level. While the images in the chat room are replaced with them trying to load on the console version, the images are still visible on the PC version.
• Cherry Tapping: There's a reason bean-bag shotguns and stingers are less-lethal, not non-lethal. Hit someone in the head with them and say goodbye to your S-rating.
  • After updates, it's possible to do lasting damage to someone with stinger and flashbang grenades, CS gas, and the breaching shotgun, though it's rare and has specific requirements.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: Played with. The Bland-Name Product counterpart of the CIA, the USIA, isn't depicted in the best light, with two former agents featuring as prime suspects in their missions and both are mentally unhinged. FISA, the not-FBI, seemingly acts within the law but at the same time the agent in "Greased Palms" is a corrupt thug working with a cartel and there's the hint of something shady going on when the FISA controller countermands TOC during "Hide and Seek".
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • Enemy AI will open fire through doors and walls at the slightest noise from you and your team. It's worse when they have a direct line of sight on you. They're inhumanly quick on the draw, and can shoot with pinpoint accuracy, even in full-auto and/or at long ranges. They can wipe out an entire team in seconds. Prior to the January 2022 patch, it was entirely possible to get killed the very moment you start the mission because some gangbanger killed you from 200 feet with a TEC-9, even though you are wearing full body armor. One Youtuber did some timing, and found the AI was literally reacting faster than humanly possible. And that's before you account for the marksmanship handicaps of your average drug addict.
  • There are even instances where you check a small room with no corners to hide in and everything seems clear, only to get killed by what seems to be an invisible enemy the moment you step in. Patches have updated the enemy AI to more tolerable levels, giving them a much longer reaction time (dependent on the type of enemy) and more realistic accuracy. That being said, any shooter will eventually zero in on you if you let them shoot long enough with suppression, and they have no qualms about blasting you in the head from 100 feet away if you let them aim.
  • Active Shooter suspects are not affected by pepper spray and pepperball guns, despite them wearing nothing that would specifically protect them from it.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Gerard Scott covers the walls of his cabin with insane scribblings, notes, and pictures alluding to some sort of Government Conspiracy within Los Sueños, with a disturbing focus on the protagonist Judge himself.
• Container Maze: The mission "Hide and Seek" takes place at Port Hokan, with plenty of shipping containers in the area for the team to navigate around while keeping on alert for civilians and armed suspects.
• Cop Killer: The impetus for several missions. "Lethal Obsession" is set immediately after Gerard Scott ambushed and killed LSPD officers, and "Carriers of the Vine" and "Buy Cheap, Buy Twice" begin with officers down and under fire.
• Cowboy Cop: As a SWAT officer, you're expected to follow procedures and give suspects an opportunity to surrender, and only fire if you're fired upon. While there's nothing stopping you from just ignoring all the rules and sweeping the whole level gunning down everybody without a second thought, your score will be heavily penalized for it.
• Crapsack World: US society has grown more cancerous than ever, so there's plenty for you to clean up. The voiceover in the gameplay trailer says it's "a unique, detailed and twisted facsimile of a modern United States. Ready or Not's vision of America is downtrodden, cruel, and corrupt."
  • Though it does need to be said that proper SWAT teams do not get called out for routine calls. You're going to be seeing the worst of the worst even for Law Enforcement because that's what SWAT is meant to respond to. Though conversations you can hear in the police station and stuff you can hear or see in missions indicates things aren't much better in the rest of the city.
• Cult Colony: Cherryessa Vineyard in "Carriers of the Vine" is home to a misandrist pagan cult that used to be a women's shelter, but now they are heavily armed fanatics willing to fight the police.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the rest of the Tactical Shooter genre, and especially when compared to the SWAT series that it was directly inspired by. While SWAT wasn't shy about engaging with heavy subjects (most notably in its fourth installment), Ready or Not takes it to another level with missions involving such things as the sexual exploitation of children, a mass school shooting, massacres at a nightclub and a hospital, a violent cult, and a human trafficking ring holding Sex Slave auctions, all shown in unflinching detail. The violence is also far more brutal than the SWAT games with a detailed gore system that features nasty gunshot wounds and even dismemberment.
• Deadly Gas: Downplayed with CS gas, which causes all manner of unpleasant effects like intense coughing, mucus, tear and saliva accumulation, skin irritation, burning eyes and other painful yet non-lethal effects. It'll stop suspects and civilians alike dead in their tracks and lingers for a while so you can easily detain them or keep non-compliant suspects in place, but isn't as instantaneous as a flashbang and is liable to also gas your squadmates if they're not using the gas mask or you have some particularly bad throwing aim. It's also important to pay attention to your opposition: some are used to being gassed and will ignore CS for a few crucial seconds, and others are wearing eye and mouth protection and will ignore it completely.
• Deadly Prank: "23 Megabytes a Second", a new mission added in the 1.0 release that serves as the single-player campaign's second mission, has SWAT going in to neutralize an online video game streamer who reportedly has killed his mother and taken his brother hostage. However, when you bust into their apartments, the supposedly dead mother is perfectly fine, the brother is just hanging around, and the so-called active shooter is playing video games; clearly, you've been duped and this is a "SWATing"^note this is the US criminal harassment act of getting emergency services (through a false reporting of a serious crime) to send heavy law enforcement response to another person's address. Unfortunately, he and his Dungeons & Dragons group who are also present just happen to be involved in something quite sinister and will open fire on the heavily armed SWAT team busting into their home, which will most likely lead to at least some of their deaths.
• Despair Event Horizon: In Commander mode, you need to keep track of your officers' mental health. If they witness too many traumatic events and aren't sent to therapy, they'll eventually crack under the pressure and quit.
• Determinator: Shooting a suspect to near-death but leaving them to lay where they fell without restraining them can sometimes lead to a nasty surprise where they'll eventually gain the second wind to get back up and try to hide, or even to seek you out and shoot you in the back. Make it a habit to restrain incapacitated and dead suspects alike.
• Developer's Foresight: In "23 Megabytes a Second", if you come across the streaming station, you can look at the screen and read the stream chat, which reacts to your actions such as shooting out the camera.
• Disguised Horror Story: First and foremost, Ready or Not is a Tactical Shooter. By default, that already makes actually playing the game extremely tense due to the slow, methodical nature of the genre, but that's not quite enough to qualify it as a horror game. However, the further you progress through the game, the more it overlaps with the horror genre as the game explores the absolute most horrific depths of evil humanity is capable of.
  • Your first mission is a (comparatively) simple gas station robbery that shows graphic civilian casualties, but you're eventually going up against trafficking cartels that lock their victims in shipping containers with next to no clothing, drug dens with children inside them, conspiracy theorists creating chemical weapons in a remote cabin, and worst of all, a child exploitation ring that uses a daycare and talent agency as a cover.
  • The environments themselves also lend themselves to the horror of the setting. Many of them are decrepit and run-down, with disturbing graffiti and artwork along the walls or, in some cases, entire murals and wall-to-wall coverings of insane ramblings and photos of their victims. In other cases, however, the level will be filled with corpses and bloodstains following a shooting or similar event. To emphasize the horror of these situations, the music will usually be a tense, unnerving piece that fits the nature of the crimes you're witnessing.
  • As the game goes on, missions become more and more actively dangerous. Suspects become less willing to surrender and will instead start shooting as soon as they get the chance, suspects begin to wear more and more body armor and require more rounds to be put down, the levels will begin to be littered with traps in doorways to kill anyone who walks through, and certain missions even have suspects wearing suicide vests (or even putting suicide vests on civilians, which they will blow up if they see you helping them). Other missions will have a time limit due to an active shooting situation, or even because bombs have been planted on the site.
  • Violence is not shied away from. Bullets will tear through people like paper and leave gnarly wounds and bloodstains, or even outright obliterate limbs and heads.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: If you want to move faster, you have to "low-ready" your weapon, preventing you from firing until you raise it again.
• Drugs Are Bad: 213 Park Home centers around gang activity using a downtrodden suburban neighborhood as their base of operations, producing massive amounts of meth and digging tunnels under the neighborhood, both in a drug-induced haze and possibly as a means of granting access under the borders to Mexico as the gang has commanded. All occupants inside are crazed and delirious, rasping ominous threats from their ruined lungs or shouting manically with weapons drawn, culminating in who can only be assumed to be someone's adolescent daughter overdosing on meth in her bed, death rattling as her arms twitch aimlessly and blood hacking up from her mouth with a blank stare.
• Dynamic Entry: Speed and surprise are essentially requirements for clearing rooms full of suspected hostiles. To that end, SWAT officers have access to a wide array of tools such as rams, explosives, and breaching shotguns to forcibly open doors as well as flashbangs to disorient anybody inside the room. C2 charges are the chief tool for this kind of entrance, the perfect choice if there are armed suspects guarding the door with the explosive force of the blast being enough to severely disorient anyone caught near the blast and intimidate unsuspecting people on the other side into surrendering with the sheer surprise of the explosion, or flat out kill/incapacitate them with the flying door projectile if they’re right in the way of it.
• Everybody Lives: It's not only possible to clear a mission without a single civilian or suspect being killed, but also pretty much required if you want to achieve an S rating.
• Evil, Inc.: Some companies aren't fronts, but legal companies who lacked scruples and funds so they resorted to aiding criminal organizations.
  • Mindjot is a data center company that used to aid Los Sueños with its financial crisis until their competitors lobbied for change in regulations, which lead to Mindjot providing servers for illegal activities due to sharply-declining profits and becoming really important for the child pornography ring that plagues the city.
  • Bolton Security is a private security company that serves as private muscle for Amos Voll. The briefing and enemy banter hints that they aren't a criminal front but veterans who take the bribes Voll offered them (we can see the cheques are signed directly to their names) to keep anyone away from his criminal activities, even if that means shooting the police.
• Evil Laugh: Raskin made one during her unhinged call to 911 in "Carriers of the Vine".
• Evil Versus Evil: The Carriers of the Vine cult has been warring with the Spider trafficking ring and its associates.
• Facial Horror: Certain powerful weapons (i.e. shotguns and high-powered rifles) can cause horrific mutilation to the face if someone is shot there, rather than simply making the head explode. At its worst, it's possible to leave nothing but a shallow crater filled with red mush in place of what used to be their face.
• Final Death Mode: The Ironman Mode in Single Player's Commander Mode is this, with the player's death causing the save file to be deleted and force them to start over from the beginning. Completing the game in Ironman Mode will earn you the achievement "The World", and completing it without losing a single officer will also earn you "The Hermit" achievement.
• Folk Horror: Keepers Of The Vine has SWAT raid the compound of a misandrist neo-Pagan cult that kidnaps and sacrifices abusive men to their tree goddess and looks like it's straight out of The Wicker Man (1973).
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: Once the dance music is successfully turned off in the nightclub of "Neon Tomb", the actual soundtrack kicks in, featuring heavy and slow usage of reverberating bells. Appropriately, this raid follows the aftermath of a mass terrorist shooting with the bodycount of victims being close to a hundred dead and dying, with the terrorists still blocking the exits in search of the few survivors hiding out.
• From Camouflage to Criminal:
  • George Brixley, the main suspect in "The Spider", is a former US Army Signal Corps officer who previously spent three years in a military prison for kidnapping and rape while still in service, and that's before getting to the crimes that D-Platoon is sent in to apprehend him for.
  • The "Left Behind" are a band of US military veterans who attempt to assassinate a senator for pushing a bill to pull funding away from veteran's hospitals.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Gerard Scott, the main suspect in "A Lethal Obsession", is naked except for makeshift body armor and netting covering his torso and head.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • The Mindjot security team have the 'ARTIST' procedure for responding to criminality:
    Announce your presence to any would-be trespassers.
    Remind the subject that you are armed.
    Terminate any remaining threats in the case of noncompliance.
    Inform local authorities.
    Secure camera recordings.
    Time to call a lawyer.
  • The US Coast Guard stand-in is named C.O.A.S.T. (California Offshore Air and Sea Team).
• Game Mod: Many, with some of the most famous ones being the one that overhauls the game's gunplay mechanics and another that adjusts the infamous effectiveness of the suspect AI to the player's liking.
• Gameplay Grading: Upon completing a mission, the player/s will be given a lettered rank ranging from an F to an S, which depends on the number of main and soft objectives completed, the number of civilians, suspects, and evidence secured, and the number of officers that survived. Any unauthorized or excessive use of lethal force, as well as civilian casualties and friendly fire, will have a negative impact on the mission's final rank. Meanwhile, killing or incapacitating even a single suspect will prevent an S rank from being achieved, thus necessitating the use of less-than-lethal weapons such as Beanbag Shotguns, pepperball guns like the VPL-25 assault rifle and TPL submachine gun, and tasers to force them into surrendering.
• Glass Cannon: Suspects and SWAT alike are appropriately vulnerable to gunfire without heavy armor, which even then can only take so much punishment before their wearer goes down in a few shots, or worse, are bypassed entirely by armor piercing bullets. Being ambushed by criminals who get past your squad's watch can spell doom for an officer, and likewise a clean shot or two to the chest is enough to bring down a suspect.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: One of the overlooked mechanics in the game (not even detailed in the tutorial) is the "punch" button: if a suspect is non-compliant but not actively threatening anyone^note Usually seen as a suspect laughing off your demands to surrender, but not point their gun at you, you can run up and punch them, and they will almost always comply and surrender immediately. Almost always: if you don't get to them fast enough, or if you're alone and they think they can take you, they will bring up their gun and shoot you.
• Goggles Do Nothing: In "A Lethal Obsession", several of the suspects are wearing gasmasks due to working on chemical weapons. Despite this, they are still vulnerable to CS gas.
• Gorn: It was always a rather brutal game, with a somewhat detailed "skinning" system in place on character models, but the 1.0 release added in tons of opportunities for bloodshed. On top of the general violence being enhanced in regards to set dressing with more detailed blood and wounded/killed characters, the ability to fully dismember was also added. A well-placed shotgun round or explosive can and will blow off a limb, leaving a bloody stump with blood pouring from the wound. This also extends to the head, as a shot from most weaponry is capable of killing someone in a single shot to the head and spraying brain matter and blood onto the wall behind them, or even flat-out popping it like a watermelon. The gameplay also takes this into account: while you normally have to restrain all suspects even if you think they're dead, just in case they are actually just playing dead, you don't have to do so for suspects that have had bodyparts blown off, as it is clear they are dead (or soon to be dead).
• Greater-Scope Villain: Numerous pieces of evidence and background material make reference to some kind of wider conspiracy even greater than the Spider organization, involving the USIA, an MK-ULTRA-style mind control program, and an unseen group known as the Mariposa Lily Order.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Door traps are introduced in the mission "Sullivan's Ridge", and any player learn instantly to dread them. They're not explained in the tutorial, are near invisible, and it's hard to see signs of these traps even with the optiwand. It can instantly kill any of its victims, and in Commander mode, where every loss is accounted for, it makes for a harrowing experience especially how there will be random door traps from then on.
  • You can tell civilians to flee the scene via the command menu if time is important (such as in "Elephant") as well as tell surrendering suspects to move before you cuff them but the tutorial never explains this.
  • In single player, a "Search & Secure" command for the AI team members is made available after dealing with all hostiles in a mission, in which they will roam the entire level to secure any evidence and hostages still remaining. The game never tells you about this command, even though it can save a great amount of time for a player who would have to do that work themselves.
• Hand Cannon: The Grizzly Mk V introduced with Los Sueños Stories is the mostly powerful handgun in the game, being a 1911 chambered in .50 AE and largely impractical for policework. It's even noted that the department didn't even buy them, they just found some during "Hide & Seek" and decided to start using them.
• Hate Sink:
  • Amos Voll, the main suspect from Valley of Dolls is the leader of a network of pedophiles, making him one of the most despicable suspects in the whole game. Although you incentivized to arrest him for his crimes, a notable number of players have admitted to executing him and his guards once they learnt about his crimes, protocol be damned.
  • The Hand, a terrorist organization hailing from Yemen, rooted themselves in Los Sueños to avenge the US bombings of their homeland and the killing of countless of their civilians and children by orchestrating vengeful shootings. Their dialogue, translated from Arabic, is spiteful and remorseless of the mass death and destruction they wrought against civilians, their body count first coming close to over a hundred dead in a nightclub mass shooting followed by even more carnage in a hospital, where they were executing visitors, staff and patients alike. On top of all this, some of their victims in the Nightclub are wearing suicide vests against their will, with their captors having zero qualms about blowing them up if they spot a cop trying to help them.
    "This is war now, no one is innocent."
    "We have sent the demons straight to hell."
    "They died like cowards, there is no honor in any of them."
• Hide Your Children: Downplayed, the game is willing to depict some pretty horrific things happening to minors such as finding one that's seemingly OD'd on drugs in the "Twisted Nerve" mission but full on visible death is notably not depicted, this is most notable on the missions "Thank you, come again" where Crystal Leighton is in a closet away from danger, invulnerable and your weapon is automatically lowered when facing her and "Relapse" which involves a Hospital shooting, you clear out an entire pediatrics section yet not a single child is seen with all victims being adults^note One of your officers may comment how it's lucky the staff managed to evacuate all the children before the terrorists got to them. "Elephant" was also notably changed from a high school to a community college (as such, both the suspects and victims are in their late-teens to early-twenties). In Lawmaker, Sven Anderson-Lincoln's children have managed to lock themselves inside one the mansion's panic rooms ahead of your arrival (and are thus only interactable via a grimy video feed in the security room).
• Human Shield: Sufficiently panicked suspects can grab nearby civilians when confronted. Maximizing one's score in this situation requires a solution that does not involve injuring the civilian. While the clear solution is to Shoot the Hostage Taker, the death will result in a lower score (no S rank for you). Instead, you have to separate the two: pepperball rounds will do it^note unless the suspect is wearing a gas mask, and stinger, flashbang and tear gas grenades will do it as well. However, if the suspect ''sees'' you attempting this, or you take too long to do something, they'll kill the hostage. Flanking is advised.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The first two of three difficulty levels are this: Casual for "Easy", and Standard for "Medium".
• Implacable Man: In Commander Mode, player character Judge doesn't require time off, therapy, or recuperation time. Compared to the physically and mentally-fragile officers under his command, he is noted to be a highly effective, highly lethal killing machine and is possibly the most dangerous man in Los Sueños. And certain pieces of unlockable evidence suggests that he's connected to a USIA program to create agents with unequaled loyalty and abilities.
• Incompetence, Inc.: Mindjot is a tech company whose main business is in providing servers for hosting content without asking questions, which has led to their servers becoming a hotbed for all sorts of illegal dark web activities. The higher-ups either don't care enough to do anything about it or are directly profiting off of the illegal acts, and their offices have been hit by criminals enough times that they've hired heavily armed security guards with itchy trigger fingers to patrol the building. None of this has done any favours for their bottom line, with a whiteboard in the meeting room showing their rapidly declining profits. By the time D-Platoon pays them a visit, they're desperate enough to have started selling off their top-quality servers at fire sale prices in exchange for cheap ones from Asia (to save on maintenance and power costs), some of which are causing blue screens on their own computer systems.
• Implausible Deniability: Some of the suspects' canned arrest lines can get rather incongruous depending on where you arrest them. For example: "I didn't do anything!" While holding a FAL... and standing inside a shipping container... with an emaciated human trafficking victim.
• Instant Death Bullet: Generally averted, save for powerful shots to the head or what can only be assumed to a vital organ being struck, killing the target quickly. Suspects shot by SWAT teams can be audibly heard dying slowly, choking on their own blood as they fade away or screaming in agony until they're dead, or occasionally having entire death animations where they stagger in shock or flail on the ground if they're shot in the throat or limbs. Regularly, though, suspects will still cling to life and be left on the floor, ready to be detained by SWAT and still being counted as alive despite their injuries. Risky if the objective is to arrest a suspect alive, but could be your saving grace if it has to come down to deadly force. In contrast, SWAT players will die rather instantly and quietly when they take a fatal shot, playing this straight.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • In the initial 1.0 release, some missions require you to arrest a specific suspect alive. If you seemingly kill them, but the game doesn't say the objective has been failed, that means they are playing dead. On a related, but one-time example, there is an achievement for incapacitating a suspect with the blast of a C2 charge. If you seemingly kill a suspect, but the achievement doesn't unlock, they are also playing dead.
    • Due to updates, this is no longer as reliable as it used to be. Suspects that are down may be incapacitated, which means they are not dead but rather unconscious, and they can be knocked out by C2 charges, gunshots, a battering ram, and even flashbangs. However, they can wake up and grab their guns, meaning you should really secure them before they do. Suspects that are incapacitated by gunshots will not wake up, unless they are shot in body armor, in which case they might. Trust nothing and remember that down is not out.
  • Objective updates will sometimes clue you in by giving you points for major objectives. If you see "Bring Order to Chaos: Complete +500", for example, then you know that all hostile suspects have been neutralized and secured. The same is true for "Rescue All Civilians" and "Disarm Explosive Devices". Even the existence of "Rescue All Civilians" will tell you that there are people that won't be shooting at you on the map and to hold your fire. The final main game mission, Hide and Seek, only has civilians in the very last part of the mission, in the secret dungeon at the back of the warehouse. Everyone else will be hostile until you get there.
• I Surrender, Suckers!: Criminals will sometimes try to pull this on you when ordered to surrender and then either take too long or break eye contact with them, seemingly getting on their knees with their hands raised only to suddenly pull out a gun and open fire, or they may pull a knife and rush at their would-be captor.
• It Never Gets Any Easier: In the campaign, going lethal and killing suspects always causes your squad's mental state to take a hit. In fact, the best way to recover stress is to run the missions as a Technical Pacifist and use nonlethal methods to bring them in alive.
• I Want My Mommy!: Port Hoken, a hotbed for human sex trafficking, is raided by the SWAT team to disrupt their operations. A cargo shipping container on the first floor of the main building used to host 'auctions' has a bald, naked, and emaciated-to-the-bone woman locked inside with only dog food to eat. The only thing she can mutter out is a plea for help and for her mom, more than likely a hint of how young she is despite how unrecognizably decrepit her living conditions left her.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Hostile suspects are generally more likely to go out in a blaze of glory unless you convince them otherwise, and as the mandate of the Los Sueños SWAT is to bring order to chaos (and not kill people), you get a number of options for how to do it.
  • Flashbangs, CS Tear Gas, and Stinger grenades (both thrown and launched) are excellent at forcing compliance if you can follow up on them quickly while the suspect is still recovering. Flashbangs don't work on people wearing eye protection, Stinger grenades are not guaranteed effective if the target is wearing any kind of armor, and CS Gas is less effective against people covering their mouths (and completely ineffective against people wearing gas masks). Tear gas also takes a while to spread, during which a suspect may move away. The Forgotten are former soldiers, and they are resistant to Stinger grenades (due to their experience with war wounds), Tear Gas (it will incapacitate them, but they can ignore it for a few seconds) and Flashbangs (if they have difficulty hearing, they will ignore the effect).
  • If a suspect is non-compliant but non-aggressive, firing a warning shot may make them give up, but it depends on the intimidation factor of your gun. Handguns and suppressed weapons are not very effective, while shotguns and burst fire will be more effective.
  • Tasers will force compliance out of anyone, but have a short range, a two-shot magazine with limited reloads, and are difficult to aim effectively. If you hit a suspect in the armor, they will ignore the taser and immediately attack you.
  • While Not the Intended Use, the Breaching Shotgun uses special frangible rounds that are excellent at blasting door locks, but technically non-lethal: if you blast someone with the Breaching Shotgun, it's about as effective as hitting them with a Stinger grenade. However, the range on the Breaching Shotgun is exceptionally short by design, meaning you'll need to almost be standing next to the suspect to make it work.
  • If all else fails, a non-aggressive suspect can be punched by hitting the melee button; it won't work if they're already shooting you, and they might decide to attack instead, but you can repeatedly hit someone until they comply. Or smack them with the Battering Ram for the same effect.
• Leitmotif: Every level (except for "Elephant") has a unique ambient soundtrack, but Sins Of The Father stands out via its use of the US National Anthem. The terrorists have set up a recording playing on loop in one of the rooms, and the music echoes throughout the entire level, growing increasingly garbled and dissonant. Another notable example is the four-mission CP arc, which has a recurring flute motif that becomes more pronounced as the LSPD zeroes in on the source.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Riot shields let SWAT operatives shield themselves and fellow operatives from the bullets. But not knives for whatever reason. However, while the shield will take an infinite amount of punishment, the window in it will not, and the more the shield is damaged, the harder it becomes to see with the shield up.
• Make an Example of Them: The premise of "Narcos", the second mission in the "Home Invasion" DLC, is stopping a band of Los Locos hitmen from doing this to undercover cop Mike Esperanza after his cover is blown. The SWAT team shows up too late to stop them, and Mike only survives by escaping his captors and fleeing into the neighborhood after being stripped naked and brutally maimed.
• Mexican Standoff: Can happen in situations where a suspect isn't cooperating but isn't actively aiming their weapon at someone (meaning that you'll be docked points for unauthorized use of force for shooting them with a firearm).
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: A trend through many of the game's story arcs is that a low-level or seemingly isolated crime usually has an organized or systemic force behind it.
  • "The War": A group of young methamphetamine addicts robbing a gas station to fund their addiction leads to the discovery of a large meth production and distribution operation running out of an apartment complex. This complex is later revealed to have been supplied with their product by a criminal cartel known as Los Locos, who have been smuggling illegal drugs across the border.
  • "23 Megabytes a Second": SWAT responds to an apparent murder, which is revealed to be a "swatting" incident where the suspect is technically not guilty, though the suspect, a streamer, is revealed to be an online deviant who has been purchasing from a well-established pedophilia and sex-trafficking ring.
  • "The Left Behind": A deadly lone wolf attack on a police station turns out to have connections to a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group working to assassinate politicians and law enforcers.
• Mook Commander: Some missions have one or two prime suspects that you are required to arrest to earn the highest rating. "Mirage at Sea" is a noteworthy example, as that mission's key suspect, Sah'id bin Khalid, has the power to order his bodyguards to murder civilians if he gets spooked, so getting to him as fast as possible is a top priority.
• Moral Myopia: The Hand's members believe their wholesale slaughter of innocent people on US soil is completely justified by how US airstrikes in Yemen have been killing dozens if not hundreds of people on their homeland, including their own families. It's even possible to overhear some of their members calling US civilians "butchers" for doing nothing to stop the airstrikes, as if they had any power to do so.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: Averted; knife-wielding suspects are startlingly fast and can spell doom for an off-guard officer. Especially annoying when it's the ones who appear to surrender, only to shank you with a knife once you get close. Taken to ridiculous extremes sometimes because the current build's knife suspects are quite broken and can cut through bulletproof ballistic shields for some weird reason and instakill the player. Knife-wielding suspects were also known to fake surrenders a ridiculous amount of times in non-lethal runs, pulling out a knife each time they fake it, hilariously leading to a pile of knives littered around the suspect.
• Next Sunday A.D.: A rather grim example with the game's campaign starting in 2025, echoing and exaggerating the political and economic woes of the time it was released.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: In "23 Megabytes a Second", whoever swatted the suspect in the mission is clearly in the wrong for calling the police on a prank call, but it does coincidentally uncover an illegal server farm and evidence of a massive child pornography ring.
• No Communities Were Harmed:
  • The game takes place in the fictional city of Los Sueños, which is a pretty obvious Expy of Los Angeles. Its in-game geographical location, however, matches that of San Diego right down to its proximity to the Mexican border.
  • The Voll Health House in Valley Of The Dolls is closely based on the Lovell Health House, a landmark modernist villa that was also featured in media such as L.A. Confidential.
• Not the Intended Use: Breaching Shotguns are designed to open doors quickly when speed is more important than stealth. Shooting someone with a Breaching Shotgun from short range, however, will help with forcing them to surrender.
• Oddly Overtrained Security: The Mindjot Security from "Sinuous Trail" are more heavily equipped than necessary for their job, sporting bullet vests, helmets, and automatic weapons. This is because the datacenter has been robbed in the past by assailants impersonating law enforcement and the recent in-universe kidnapping of an employee has them on edge and itchy to shoot anyone wearing a badge. They're also being paid to safeguard the servers, which are used to distribute child pornography despite Mindjot being financially in decline.
• Ominous Oil Rig: The mission "Leviathan" from the Dark Waters DLC takes place in an oil rig off the coast of Los Sueños where members of a Eco-Terrorist group called the United Planet Front have been livestreaming their attack while killing off some of the workers on site.
• One Bullet Clips: Averted. Detachable magazines for weapons that feed from them have their ammo counts individually tracked. If you speed-reload, which drops a magazine on the ground, you lose the magazine. If you're hurting for ammo afterwards, you can find and pick up the discarded magazine.
• Only in It for the Money:
  • In a step away from the other missions, "Valley of the Dolls" has you fighting private security guards rather than terrorists or gang members. That's because your main target is a wealthy millionaire named Amos Voll, who pays his guards handsomely to keep all unwanted guests away, even SWAT teams, as well as not ask about what's going on in the basement.
  • Preluding Valley of the Dolls, Mindjot is the corrupt data center housing evidence of the aforementioned crimes whose private security team, men wearing kevlar vests, white helmets and wielding personal defense weapons, are determined to protect from intruders, including the SWAT team. Dialogue for when they're successfully arrested has them outright beg and whine that they're only doing what they have to do to survive, because there's no other good way to live out in the streets of Los Sueños. Them being willing to fight a SWAT team is actually explained beyond simply wanting a paycheck: a group of criminals disguised as law enforcement had recently robbed the center, meaning the guards aren't certain you are an actual SWAT team and believe themselves to be in a life-or-death battle with criminals.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Judge maintains a strictly professional tone when reporting in evidence, regardless if it's a crate full of illegal firearms, a meth lab, or Amos Voll's basement. The one time he expresses anything like shock or anger when reporting evidence is when he reports the shipping container full of human trafficking victims at Port Hokan.
  Judge: "TOC... We have a container full of women. We need TEMS down here right now."
• Pedophilia Is a Special Kind of Evil: A four-part mission arc encompassing the majority of the game has the SWAT team dismantle and reveal a child pornography ring that's found massive success in Los Sueños, beginning with the team finding a lead from a "swatted" streamer early on, along with obtaining data from the Mindjot Datacenter to give themselves leads to the operation, then raiding Brixley Talent Times, a repurposed safe injection site, to disrupt an operation that acquires children for photography and trafficking from desperate parents in the neighborhood. After the arrest and detainment of everyone here, it's revealed that Amos Voll, a celebrity porn star with massive wealth and influence, sits at the top of the child pornography ring. Finally having the location and permission, the SWAT team arrives at the residence of the man himself to either arrest or terminate him, disrupting the CP ring from the root. Implications across the latter two maps suggest that the victims were both provided by their parents in a desperate bid for money and prosperity wherever they might end up, as well as possibly smuggled in from overseas by human traffickers, with the basement of Amos Voll ambiguously having barrels piled up in a concrete ditch, with it being a toss-up on whether he was disposing of props and evidence or the bodies of the children he's been filming.
• Plot-Driven Breakdown: In the Elephant level, most of the college classrooms are equipped with sliding panic room walls. Evidently though, not a single one could be deployed in time, resulting in them not being able to save a single civilian from the school shooters.
• Private Military Contractors: Some of the enemies of Three Letter Triad are mercenaries belonging to Black Sentinel, a shady PMC made up of former western special forces members.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • It's standard procedure to restrain any and all people you come across during the mission, regardless of whether they are a criminal or civilian, dead or alive. After all, you can't be sure if the civilians are accomplices and downed enemies always have the potential of getting back up and becoming a threat again if they aren't properly supervised.
  • Mindjot's security forces don't open fire on you out of malice, but because they have a history of being attacked by criminals disguised as law enforcement.
• Regenerating Health: Downplayed. The player will recover up to half their health after bandaging themselves, but are only given the option if they take a hit that causes them to start bleeding out.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Many of the missions are at least loosely and sometimes straight up explicitly based on real events.
  • Amos Voll is a fairly straightforward expy of Jeffrey Epstein; He's an extremely wealthy and well-connected philanthropist, nymphomaniac and pornographer who has a side hustle of prostituting and trafficking children he 'purchases' from poverty-stricken families. Like the real Epstein, Voll also has a thing for grotesque pornographic art and for threatening investigators with hired security (albeit a little more openly).
  • "23 Megabytes a Second" has the SWAT team sent to the home of an online streamer to respond to an apparent murder, but it quickly becomes clear that you were sent on a prank call to "swat" said streamer. There have been numerous cases of this happening to prominent streamers, and there has been at least one swatting incident that resulted in an innocent person getting shot and killed by police.
  • "Neon Tomb" takes element of the Pulse nightclub shooting and the Bataclan theater massacre, with Middle Eastern terrorists assaulting a nightclub and murdering dozens of people in a mass shooting as retaliation for military airstrikes against their home country.
  • "Lethal Obsession" has Gerard Scott, who is very clearly an allusion to Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. Like Kaczynski, Scott was previously a highly intelligent individual who snapped and began committing terrorist acts, eventually withdrawing to a remote cabin in the wilderness, where he was eventually tracked down by police. It also has shades of Christopher Dorner for the targeting of police officers and setting in Southern California.
  • "Elephant" is meant to invoke the tragedy of various school shootings in the United States, particularly the Columbine incident in the late 90's due to the use of improvised explosives on the scene and multiple shooters. The in-game college building is also equipped with (at the time state-of-the-art) foldable panic rooms that became popular in the wake of the Uvalde massacre.
• Ruthless Modern Pirates: One of the two groups you face in Three Letter Triad is a pirate group from Latin America, who are selling a chemical weapon to a group of former special forces operators turned conspiracy theorists from across the western world.
• Serial Spouse: One of the civilians in the Brisa Cove level is an elderly serial philanderess with a wall's worth of photos with the husbands defaced, a sickly sugar-daddy for a boyfriend and one of the neighbours for a side-fling.
  [to the police when being restrained] "Which of my husbands put you up to this?!"
• Scenery Gorn: Dorms and Narcos from the Home Invasion DLC take place in a condemned building and residential neighbourhood, both of which have taken heavy storm damage from Hurricane Antonio.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Several missions task you with rescuing a hostage or other VIP. Frequently, you arrive only to find that they have been (often brutally) killed before you had as much as made entry.
• Shoot Out the Lock: The breaching shotgun is specifically designed for this, as the frangible rounds make it useless for anything else. Except subduing recalcitrant suspects.
  • Any gun can do this, provided you're willing to spend the ammunition, but the door itself determines how man bullets are required: wooden doors break easily with half a dozen rounds, metal doors might require half a magazine, and reinforced doors will laugh at your pathetic attempts and remain closed.
• Shout-Out:
  • Among many weapons, the respective serial numbers for the P92X, SuperNova and 416 are GFLHG003, 000352, and 65-000404. The M45A1 also has a QR code on the right-hand side of the frame. Scanning it reveals a transliteration of M1911's greeting line.
    Oya oya, kyo wa nani o shimasu ka? ^Translation"Oh my~ What are we going to do today?"
  • One of the missions is named Valley of the Dolls.
  • The 'Elephant' mission is named after (and loosely based on) Elephant, with the schools in both being named Watt.
  • Parts of the Neon nightclub (particularly its backroom pools area) are modeled after the Red Circle.
  • The DJ performing at Neon is Live Rat.
  • In the LSPD station, you can find an exhibit commemorating a past LSPD SWAT element lead who thwarted terrorist plots to set up an anti-aircraft missile launcher in LSX airport and plant a nuclear bomb in Los Sueños City Hall. These are direct references to missions in SWAT 3. Even the names of the terrorist groups responsible, the People's Liberation and Sovereign America, are the exact same.
  • Some of the comments in the streamer chat window seen in "23 Megabytes a Second" will say "bad boys bad boys" when you show up on the stream camera.
  • The ammo vests worn by the Secret Service agents in "Sins of the Father" are the ones worn by Neil McCauley's gang.
  • One Easter Egg computer screen in the police dispatch center reports eleven suspects tricking a casino owner into giving them all his money. Doubly funny since, in the actual 2001 movie, said crooks dressed up as SWAT officers to perform the heist.
  • The Spider features a wall mural near the start of the level that is a slightly modified copy of the ''Skid Row City Limits'' mural in the neighbourhood of Central City East, better known as Skid Row, in Los Angeles. Just like the real neighbourhood, the one the mission is set in is part of the city's downtown, and is also known for having a large homeless population, some of whom appear as civilians living in makeshift tents outside of the talent agency.
  • In "23 Megabytes a Second", one of the pieces of evidence you recover is a figurine called Pikumiku Chan, a brunette version of Hatsune Miku.
  • The achievement for unlocking doors with the lockpick is called "Click from 3, 4 is binding" are common words said by the Lockpicking Lawyer.
  • Another achievement is Say Hello To My Little Friend, awarded for stunning targets 30 times with the grenade launcher.
  • Yet another achievement for using the battering ram 20 times is Here's Johnny!.
  • The Grizzly Mk V has a "retro" laser sight attachment to evoke the ".45 Long Slide, with laser sighting".
  • Chico's in the level "Hunger Strike" is a fast food restaurant with a chicken mascot serving as a front for a cartel.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The game features an extremely detailed ballistics model that not only accounts for penetration and ricochets, but even models damage caused by the shrapnel of bullet impacts against hard materials. Bullets to the upper arms and thighs also have a chance of hitting a major artery, causing whoever is hit to quickly bleed to death.
  • Body armor acts almost exactly how it does in reality: Kevlar (soft armor) is fairly effective at stopping pistol-caliber rounds but is useless against rifles. Ceramic plates are effective against nearly any caliber but will break quickly under heavy fire, leaving the wearer completely exposed when they give out. Steel is the most protective and durable but also extremely heavy, and even steel plates can't prevent some damage getting through by way of the sheer blunt force of supersonic bullets smashing into your chest. Helmets and ballistic masks also act realistically, providing some protection against pistol shots but are ineffective against larger calibers or repeated hits.
  • Less-lethal weapons are called less-lethal for a reason: They can still kill under the right conditions. The beanbag shotgun has a high chance of killing with a close-range headshot. C2 door charges can be lethal if someone is close enough on the other side of the door. Grenades like the Flashbang and Stinger can do serious damage if they go off right next to someone. Even the breaching shotgun can be lethal if you repeatedly shoot someone in the head enough times with it. Less-lethal weapons are also accurately portrayed as inconsistent in their effects, with some suspects able to shrug off being hit with pepper sprays and tasers or being able to resist the effects of tear gas long enough to get shots off.
  • Unlike the vast majority of video game portrayals of the weapon, the MP5/10 is accurately modeled with its unique bolt release which even gets used during empty reloads.
• Stealth Pun: The Bland-Name Product brand for some of the optical sights the player can equip their weapons with is "LEOTEC". LEO is an abbreviation for Law Enforcement Officer - it's tech for cops.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: When a suspect’s stress level becomes high enough when cornered by D Platoon, there’s a chance they will attempt to kill themselves rather than surrendering. You best hope somebody has a Beanbag Shotgun or taser at the ready to stop the suspect, or you can say goodbye to that S Rank.
• Story Arc: What sets this game apart from the rest of its ilk is that many of its missions are rarely self-contained, instead being part of various interwoven narratives that point to how rampant corruption is in Los Sueños. Some of these arcs even bleed into each other at various points. For example, over the course of four missions, the LSPD uncovers a child sex trafficking ring and sets out to take it down. The story goes as follows:
  • 23 Megabytes a Second: A streamer named Michael Williams (aka "MilkyToes") is swatted as a prank call, and LSPD storms his apartment and arrests him. During the raid, the LSPD uncovers images depicting minors in compromising scenarios and searches the rest of Williams' belongings. There, they find evidence leading them to the following mission.
  • Sinuous Trail: The images on Williams' computer point to the Mindjot Datacenter housing a large storage of child pornography. The LSPD raids the building, apprehending the staff and guards and securing further evidence of the origin of the images, leading them to the next mission. Extra evidence obtained on one of the phone answering machines also names a "Mr. Voll" as a person of interest.
  • The Spider: A talent agency in downtown Los Sueños, run by showman George Brixley, is believed to be an originator point in the creation of child pornography. The LSPD raids the building, ending up in a gunfight with Brixley's hired security. After a pitched battle, D-Platoon secures the building and finds that Brixley's guards and some of the evidence are once again connected to Mr. Voll, which leads to the final mission in the arc.
  • Valley of the Dolls: The LSPD intel department digs into the evidence found from Brixley's agency. They realize that the person Brixley contacted is Amos Voll, a big-shot pornography producer operating in the Los Sueños area. The LSPD immediately closes in on his home, crashing his daughter's 18th birthday in the process. There, they uncover damning evidence of the pedophile ring in Voll's basement, effectively dismantling the network at its root.
• Story Breadcrumbs:
  • Missions lean heavily on environmental clues to give you further insight and context on the crime you are responding to, as well as the criminals you are working to take down. Aside from the briefings explaining why SWAT is being called in, the exact crimes being performed often need some proper investigation on the players' end to be unraveled. For example, players who listen to the briefing of 23 Megabytes a Second may be confused as to why the suspect's mother is still alive after he openly proclaimed that he killed her in the 911 call. It turns out he was swatted, and the call itself was faked. Players who enter into the suspect's bedroom can find his PC, still streaming, which contains a number of hostile chatters saying things like, "You got what you deserved", hinting at his bad reputation and possession of CP.
  • Completing missions with a S-ranking unlocks special items that can be viewed at the Evidence Locker at the station, some of which adds valuable context to the city or to certain missions, and others hint at subplots not directly touched on otherwise.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop:
  • Unlike every other mission in the game, "Elephant" has no background music at all due to the gravity of the situation (a mass shooting at a community college).
  • In "Neon Tomb", you can go up to the DJ booth and turn off the music, leaving the blood-splattered nightclub in eerie silence. Except for the constantly buzzing cellphones.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • If you try to shout down a suspect, they may ignore you, either because they don't think you're a threat or because they can't hear you. Wearing a ballistic mask or gas mask will protect you, but it will muffle your voice, and if you're in a loud environment, suspects might not hear you at all. Finding and muting ambiance can be vital to getting an S rank, especially on "Neon Tomb" (where the DJ music is so loud that no one will hear anything quieter than a shotgun).
  • If you shoot a suspect through a door and don't kill them, they will absolutely spray that door with bullets in an attempt to turn it around on you.
  • If you corner a suspect in a room full of wildly incriminating evidence, they will be less likely to surrender. This is most notable when you find the child pornography room in "Valley of the Dolls": if Amos Voll is cornered in this room (which is rare), he will be far more likely to shoot you rather than surrender.
  • The crimes of a suspect can also factor into their mental state and how likely they are to surrender. Hardened criminals like the Left Behind have to be forced into surrender, but the Tran family in "Ends of the Earth" are much more reluctant, and will be much more likely to surrender when confronted. Conversely, the suspects in "Elephant" want to go out in a blaze of glory, and will gleefully continue shooting when confronted, trying to force you to kill them; they are among the most difficult to apprehend without deadly force, to the point that even wounding them with shots to the arms and legs might not stop them.
• Tactical Door Use: It is possible to shoot through doors and certain walls to kill suspects without setting them off, provided the enemies are few to one. Of course, the enemies can do precisely the same thing.
• Take Your Time: Generally, the Barricaded Suspects and Raid game modes don't put any pressure on the player to complete missions within a specific time. The enemies won't attempt to flee the map or do anything that could cause a mission failure apart from attacking the SWAT officers. This means you can generally be slow and methodical with clearing the map. However, the Bomb Threat, Active Shooter, and Hostage Situation modes deliberately avert this. In Bomb Threat, the player needs to find a bomb and defuse it before it explodes, while in Active Shooter and Hostage Situation, the player needs to eliminate the suspects before they can kill all the hostages or civilians on the map.
• Time Skip: Although it doesn't factor into the story so-far, there is a noteworthy jump in time from the events of Home Invasion ("Narcos" takes place on February 25th, 2026) to Dark Waters ("Mirage at Sea" takes place on September 15th, 2027).
• Token Good Teammate: Only two members of Senator Fremont's Secret Service escort weren't moles for the Left Behind. However, they're as likely to shoot you as the rogue agents because they no longer know who to trust.
• Too Dumb to Live: Civilians on the scene of the crime are, understandably, terrified of both the armed criminals and SWAT they're caught between, which can lead them to do very unsafe things to do near armed officers while tensions are high. Namely, they might point their finger at approaching officers in a way that can be mistaken for them aiming a pistol right at them, reach into their pocket to their phone out and take a bunch of pictures of the cops aiming their guns at them (again, in a way that looks exactly like they’re about to quick-draw a weapon from their pocket), and run directly at officers to get their attention (regularly from behind), putting players familiar with knife-wielding suspects on edge given that they attack in nearly the exact same way. Trigger-happy players beware.
  • Due to updates, civilians can now be exceptionally dangerous: if they are subdued but not restrained, and there's a gun nearby, they might just grab it, and they might start shooting, and they might shoot at you. The second they do, you have no choice but to take them down, and you'll be penalized for it even if you use non-lethal methods, because you shouldn't have allowed that to happen in the first place.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • Going out of your way to execute surrendered suspects or civilians will unlock a command to request your teammates to put you down. Continue doing that even when the command is available, and the AI teammates will immediately gun you down, regardless of command.
  • Police procedure requires you to do certain things: you must announce that you are the police, you must take appropriate action, and you must attempt to take everyone down alive. The only exception is that you can return fire if fired upon. If you fail to do any of these things, you will be penalized with an "unauthorized use of force" deduction to your final score. This can account for things that might seem reasonable but fall outside police procedure, as well:
    • If you fire a pepper ball gun at a suspect but don't announce that you're the police, they might surrender, and you might take them alive, but you'll still get a penalty.
    • If you bust into a room with an armed suspect and gun them down without a word before they bring up their gun or fire a shot, you'll get a penalty.
    • If a suspect is non-compliant but non-threatening, you will get a penalty for injuring them in any way more powerful than a punch.
• Video Games and Fate: There's an optional, but heavily telling piece of evidence late in the story that reveals that the USIA has infiltrated the Los Sueños Police Force, placing handlers for an MK-ULTRA-style operation and keeping an eye on its test subjects, whose name is handwritten to be "Beaumont", the player character's surname. The program was designed to create extremely capable, unflinching, and loyal officers, retroactively framing the events of the game as being orchestrated to test "you" as Judge and "you" the player, someone who successfully completes missions without hesitation, burning out, or questioning why.
• Wacky Startup Workplace: Mindjot might look drab on the outside, but the inside looks more like a space station than a standard, common office. The guards even vaguely dressed like a combination of security officer and an astronaut.
• War Crime Subverts Heroism: If you have any sympathies for the United Planet Front as a group of Well Intentioned Extremists, then the fact that "Leviathan" opens with you discovering that they've been lynching the lowly oil rig workers will probably render them considerably less sympathetic.
• Weapon for Intimidation: The various shotguns are extremely powerful in their engagement range, even subverting Short-Range Shotgun if you load slug rounds, but the biggest advantage is that the sound of a shotgun going off will scare the absolute bejeesus out of just about anyone. If a suspect or civilian is refusing to comply, shooting your shotgun to scare them will work most of the time. Terrorists and people that can't hear you won't be intimidated. The biggest drawback of suppressors is that they reduce the intimidation factor of a gun when it's fired.
• Why We Need Garbagemen: The Los Sueños Sanitation Department has been on strike for a while, and many maps have dumpsters and alleyways overflowing with trash bags.
• Wretched Hive: Los Sueños, which takes the contemporary issues faced by real South California cities such as Los Angeles and cranks them up several notches. The few public services that haven't had their funding cut into uselessness are under attack by politicians, trash is everywhere due to a prolonged sanitation strike, and the amount of homeless within the city has grown to the point that sidewalks and alleys are lined with makeshift tents, all of which has caused violent crime to surge to an all-time high. It's said that 36% of the populace are dealing with some form of mental illness, and food insecurity might even become an issue in the near-future due to drought impacting the entire region. Things get even worse by the time of the DLC expansions, which take place after a major hurricane damages several areas of the city.