Ready, Steady, Ship!

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided to us by the kind folks at Untold Tales)

Ready, Steady, Ship!, released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is an Arcade-style game with an emphasis on co-op play that has players working to piece together conveyor belts to deliver boxes to a goal. The natural point of comparison here is going to be Overcooked, which features a similar tone and similar emphasis on co-op hijinks.

It is fitting, then, that Ready, Steady, Ship features colorful, somewhat cartoony visuals with characters that vaguely resemble LEGO figurines, backed by a whimsical soundtrack underlining this lighthearted tone. There’s little here that breaks the mold this sort of game tends to go for, nor anything to truly set it apart from numerous others in the genre, but it nevertheless works well enough for this style of game.

I keep saying “this style of game” and alluded to Overcooked earlier, and it’s hard not to refer back to what is still generally seen as the undisputed king of this style of co-op game, and Ready, Steady, Ship! is not likely to unseat it from its throne. The core concept works well enough, and I can certainly see how this game’s co-op elements really help to flesh it out, but unfortunately a number of other elements get in the way.

Of course, like most games in this genre this really is better with multiple players, but to its credit Ready, Steady, Ship! doesn’t suffer much even if you’re playing solo. However, both solo and multiplayer modes are plagued by issues with the game’s physics system and core gameplay. Conveyor belts regularly fling boxes off of them with seemingly little you can do to ensure their safe delivery, making playing efficiently a crapshoot. What’s more, context-sensitive commands are extremely finicky when it comes to when they will and won’t detect that you’re in range of an object to interact with – even so much as picking up a box becomes a thankless chore that can requite multiple attempts at times.

There’s another problem when it comes to multiplayer, and that’s the issue that it’s standard for levels to have characters sharing the same screen, but that screen doesn’t fit the entire level, and the game doesn’t even attempt to scale to fit both players in it when they separate and perform different tasks in different areas. Evidently the game does contain some split-screen, but it seems that the default sticks players with a woefully inadequate camera.

Then of course there’s the ways where this game just fails to live up to many of the standards we’ve come to expect. No online play, no 4-player multiplayer, no competitive multiplayer… these aren’t make-or-break issues, but add these all up on top of the rest of this game’s issues and it’s hard to see a reason to choose it over numerous other games in the genre, including the Overcooked games themselves.

Despite all my complaints, I do still find Ready, Steady, Ship! enjoyable – its focus on conveyor belts sets it apart from many other games in the genre, and as I said, the core concept is solid. It’s just unfortunate that the execution is lacking. As a result, I think this is a game that only die-hard fans of this genre will find interest in.

tl;dr – Ready, Steady, Ship! is a co-op focused Arcade-style game in the vein of Overcooked that has players piecing together conveyor belts to get packages to their destination. The concept here is good, but it’s undermined by some frustrating gameplay issues and a lack of features and options we’ve come to expect from games like this. It’s not bad, but it could have been so much better.

Grade: C

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