SWAT 4

"What the first Swat game wished it could be"

Swat 4 is a squad-based tactical shooter that puts you in the shoes of a Swat team. Although the series has dropped the “Police Quest” part of the title, the Swat games are actually spin-offs of the Police Quest adventure series. The original Swat game was also more of an adventure game, although it was very linear and nearly forced you to do things a certain way. This game, Swat 4, finally puts an end to that trend, once and for all. That, my friends, is a good thing.

Graphics
The graphics in general are nothing to go on about. The developers seemed to concentrate on the models of all the NPC's. They look very good. However, the environment is much simpler. Honestly, the look and feel for the whole game is very nice; it's just not a huge leap forward in terms of graphics. Not to mention that allows the game to play very smoothly. In a game like this, it probably is a better to put more detail in the player models than the environment.

Sound
The sound effects are near perfect in this game. The voices over the radios, the yells of the bad guys, the crying of the hostages, and all the explosions, are well done. There isn't much music during the missions, for rather obvious reasons. You will need to keep your ears open for the entire game.

Controls
Try as I might, I can't find any complains about the controls. There are a lot more than your average FPS, as this is a squad-based tactical game. If you go through the short training mission, everything is explained to you, and you should be good to go. The most interesting Keys that you will find yourself pressing quite often are the caps lock, home, and end keys. These are used to rotate between head mounted cameras of your teammates if you split up. The caps lock is pressed when you want to issue an order to your teammate by radio. If that isn't enough you can view and control high-ground snipers as well. What is also brilliant is that all the tactical commands are handled with the mouse. If you want your team to arrest a suspect, you point the cursor on the suspect, right-click and select Arrest. Irrational Games did an outstanding job on making the controls a simple as possible.

Game play
As stated before, this game is a tactical shooter, instead of just a normal FPS. To sum up, it's an FPS that makes you think constantly. What is the best way to enter? Which door to go into first? Are there hostages in the room? All these questions go through your mind as you play the game. Your team does most of the hard work, if you can properly control them, which isn't that hard. You can have your team mirror behind the door before you enter it; throw in smoke or a flash bang before charging into the room. The ultimate goal of this game would be to complete a level without shooting your gun once. That's right…an FPS that promotes no shooting. There is a whole plethora of non-lethal was to take down a suspect. The most effective is the smoke grenade. This causes everyone in the room to start coughing, allowing you to point a gun in their face. The next best would be the ta-zer; no one puts up much of a fight after you shoot them with that thing.

Even though you want to arrest instead of kill the bad guys, there are still plenty of guns to choose from. The MP5, M4, 12-gauge shotguns, and multiple other assault weapons are available to you. However, make sure you only use it if you have to, because you are deducted points if you kill someone who did not deserve it. At the end of each level you are given a score of how well you did. On higher difficulty levels, you will need to achieve a certain score in order to advance to the next level.

Each time you replay a scenario it is different. The suspects are in different places, the hostages are in different places, someone who surrendered easy last time won't the next time, and so on. One bad thing about the game is that there is no in-game save. However, this is probably the ONLY case where having no save game is probably better. If I was able to save during a mission, this game would have been easy, and I would have just quick loaded every time something did not go the way I wanted it. The game would have been way to easy, even if they offered just a limited number of saves.

The multi player is not all the great however. I only played a few times, and it was fun, but too much fooling around. You need to act like a team, and no server I connected to had that. Still, most people bought this game for its single player, and it's the single player that shines.

There are very few flaws in this game. Other than that you can't save during a level. Everything else is done flawlessly. The graphics are not exactly dazzling, but they are good enough. Not to mention the complex system of controlling your teammates during a tactical shooter is made simple and easy to follow.

If you were a fan of Swat 3 then get this game, hands down. It's also just a great squad-based tactical shooter in its own right. Plus, if you are a fan of the original Police Quest, Sonny Bonds makes a cameo! So pick this game up, there is almost no excuse not to.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/27/06