Ready, Steady, Ship! PS5 Review. Ready, Steady, Ship! is the newest chaotic cooperative multiplayer game on PlayStation. While there are other games that invoke a similar feeling, Ready, Steady, Ship! tries new things every step of the way. Does it all shake out to make an excellent, frantic cooperative experience? Read on to find out!
Ready, Steady, Ship! (PS5) – Do The Warehouse Shuffle!
The game opens with your player character flipping through the channels on television when they come across an emergency broadcast. The anchorman is telling viewers about how the general population has grown too lazy to even go outside, so delivery workers are more in demand than ever.
He then invites the viewers to apply to work in a delivery warehouse, if they were brave enough to leave their home. Luckily, our player character is as courageous as the best of them.
We then speak with our manager at the warehouse, who will act as the human tutorial for the remainder of the game. He outlines our job and what we need to do to complete it, and then it’s off to the races.
Beyond this, there is additional story at the beginning of each chapter, which will introduce you to new tools to add to your truck packing arsenal. It is light and breezy, but it helps to make sense of the changes in gameplay, which is the real star of the show.
Pack, Pack, Pack the Truck!
In Ready, Steady, Ship! the player has one single goal: get the boxes packed into the truck. The game does not care how the player accomplishes it, so long as the right colored boxes go into the correct trucks. This kind of freedom can make for a lot of fun, but also a lot of frustration.
Before I get too ahead of myself, let me explain how the game works.
You begin each level with an incomplete conveyor belt that takes boxes from the point that they enter the room to the trucks that they belong in. The player is tasked with completing the conveyor belt and getting the boxes to their destination. Simple, right? Not so.
While this may seem very straightforward, the variety comes from what the player must do to get the pieces into the right spot, and what tools they have to get the job done. This can include using a crane to fish for conveyor parts and using a forklift as a stepladder, just to name a couple.
Needless to say, it is anything but simple in practice. Each chapter sees new and exciting tools added into the fray as well, so there is never a shortage of possible antics to be found in each level.
It is not without its frustrations, though. Working with someone is never easy, but that is especially true when the gas pedal will send your forklift into the nearest structure if you are not fast on the wheel, and you will end up turning it over.
Once you tame these beasts and learn to operate them well, it is a very rewarding experience. After that, you mostly just have to worry about the various hazards placed in the rooms, such as acid and melting floor grates.
Single-Player? Multiplayer? We Ship for You!
Many of these levels are extremely intricate, to the point that I wondered how any of them could possibly be completed by a single player. The answer I found was that they don’t expect them to be.
When you begin the game, it asks if there is one player or two, and depending on this, it will present you with either a single player campaign or a co-op campaign.
I was surprised to find this to say the least, as in my past experiences I’ve seen either a single person controlling two characters or simply relaxing the score goal for a single player. I was even more surprised to find that these levels were completely different for each campaign.
The single player levels and multiplayer levels share few elements, such as introducing new tools and the increase in difficulty. Outside of those two things, the campaigns are completely unrecognizable when compared, as if they were two whole games put into one package.
The level of comedy and fun when playing with another person is unrivalled in the multiplayer levels, but if you find yourself frustrated more often than not, single-player may be for you. The levels are very inventive and just as fun as any you will find in the multiplayer mode.
Ready, Steady, Ship! is a fantastic spin on the chaotic cooperative game formula. It gives players a variety of tools and a sometimes head scratching puzzle to use them on. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but that’s okay. The developers added a ful single-player mode for you when you need to cool off or want to play in between sessions with friends. This is a great package for anyone who thinks this style of game may interest them, with plenty of challenges to sink your teeth into over time.