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Swat 4
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Game Name:
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Swat 4 |
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Console:
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PC |
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Reviewed:
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Unknown |
SWAT is short for Special Weapons and Tactics. They are an elite division within the US police force that deal with dangerous situations – particularly those involving heavily armed criminals. In SWAT 4 you command a SWAT element through a range of missions.
This game is played from a first person perspective where you directly control the leader of the SWAT element. The element is comprised of 5 men – including you. The other four members of your team are broken into two smaller squads – blue squad and red squad. You can issue commands to each squad of two or issue commands to your entire team which is designated gold. You also have backup in most missions in the form of snipers positioned outside of the building. These will notify you when they spot certain targets and you can take control of them to shoot suspects without endangering your team.
SWAT 4 is a tactical first person shooter. That is to say, the game is pretty realistic in how it handles things. This isn’t like Doom or Half Life where you can happily exchange fire with the enemy. You and your team-mates can usually survive a few shots since you are wearing body armour, but don’t go looking for health packs or expect to survive getting hit too many times. Your squad stays the same throughout the entire game so they are effectively immortal. They will go down if hurt too badly but will be ready to go in the next mission. If you do get shot, the game factors in where you get shot and adjusts your performance appropriately. For example, if your legs are badly hurt you won’t be able to move around as fast. If your arms are hurt your aiming will suffer. If you are hit too many times you will become incapacitated and you will fail the mission. The game uses a crosshair system much like Call of Duty. Your crosshairs are four small strokes leading out from the centre of the screen – when you start moving around your crosshairs move further away from the centre indicating that your shots won’t be especially accurate at that time. When you stop or crouch the crosshairs move back in. If you move while crouched your crosshairs will actually move all the way back in as long as you keep moving.
The criminals you face are armed with a variety of weapons – pistols, shotguns, assault rifles etc. They might have body armour on and may also have gas masks. Your team has a somewhat larger range of equipment available to them. Firstly they have a range of lethal weaponry available to them – assault rifles, shotguns, pistols and submachine guns. Most of the weapons have flashlights attached to them for negotiating through dark areas. However, these items are not what SWAT is about – your objective is to arrest people, not kill them. This is reflected by the scoring system. At the end of the mission you are given a score out of one hundred. A full 100 score means you did the mission perfectly; points are deducted for doing things “wrong”. Having squad members get incapacitated will see points deducted, so will killing or wounding suspects or civilians. You also need to secure dropped weapons from any criminals you have nullified and report the status of everyone you’ve encountered.
Since you want to avoid killing people, it’s best to go for less than lethal solutions. In terms of firearms you have a few options. The first is a pepper-ball gun. This is more or less identical to a gas powered paintball gun – except it is loaded with pellets containing tear gas. If someone is shot with these they will be temporarily blinded and unable to shoot at you. They might try to run away from you though. This weapon has a very large ammo supply of 200 pellets which means you don’t have to worry about running out and can fire with impunity. However, this weapon is useless against anyone wearing a gas mask. A second option is the less lethal shotgun which is loaded with beanbag rounds. These are designed not to kill a target but to hurt like heck and convince a target to become cooperative. The shotgun only holds 8 rounds though and you have to reload each new round individually. You also don’t carry much ammo with you. The third weapon you have for taking suspects alive is the taser pistol. This fires a pair of electrodes into a target before shocking them with an electric jolt. This doesn’t incapacitate a target but makes them far more likely to surrender. On normal difficulty I’ve rarely seen a suspect refuse to surrender after being tasered once. The taser gun has fairly limited range though and can only fire once before having to be reloaded which takes a few seconds. I find it best to use on stunned opponents who still refuse to cooperate. All three options are a welcome improvement over SWAT 3 which had only one less than lethal weapon which most suspects tended to ignore.
Your squad is armed with more than just guns though. You can choose from a range of special gadgets for each officer – each person has five slots that you can place an item into before the mission starts. Pepper spray is a close range item that hurts and blinds a target. It doesn’t run out of ammo which makes it good for convincing people to comply. You also have three types of grenades at your disposal – stingers, flashbangs and CS gas. Each of these can be deployed to incapacitate targets. Stingers contain a lot of small rubber balls which scatter when the grenade detonates. In general it should stun anyone who gets hit by them. While it is supposed to be less than lethal it can badly injure someone standing too close to it when it goes off. Flashbangs produce a very loud noise and an extremely bright light when they go off. Anyone looking at the grenade when it goes off will be stunned for a short time – unless they are wearing some kind of eyewear that protects against the flash. As with a stinger, a flashbang can injure someone if they are too close to it when it detonates. CS gas fills an area with tear gas that causes temporary blindness and breathing difficulty. It won’t work on anyone wearing a gas mask of course. The first two grenades will also work on SWAT officers (especially you) if you aren’t careful – tear gas type weapons won’t work though. The grenades have certain weaknesses. I believe a flashbang won’t work on anyone who isn’t facing towards the grenade when it goes off. A gas grenade only covers a limited area so it might not get every suspect inside of a room if it is too large.
When your squad encounters a suspect they might open fire on you or run away. You need to be careful if they do the latter as you can’t blindly charge on after them. If the suspect encounters a door though you may well have an opportunity to shoot them before they can fully get through it. Suspects are more likely to surrender if they are suffering from something like being shot or are under the influence of tear gas etc. If a suspect is going to surrender they will move to drop their gun then get down on their knees and surrender. At that point you can apply special plastic handcuffs to them or order one of your squad to do so. On occasion they might try to trick you by moving to drop their gun then quickly try to shoot you. Numbers do seem to help; if several other SWAT officers are with you calling for compliance then the enemy is more likely to give up. Note that sometimes the same rules apply to civilians – they might be too scared or defiant to let you handcuff them (SWAT rules say you must handcuff anyone who isn’t incapacitated or dead since you don’t know who might be a criminal just pretending to be innocent), under those circumstances you are allowed to apply less than lethal force to convince them to surrender. A blast of pepper spray to the face usually does the trick. Killing a civilian causes a mission to fail.
Much of the action in SWAT 4 comes when going through a door and into a room. The room might be full of criminals waiting to fill you with lead, it might just contain a hostage waiting to be rescued or it might just be empty. Experience with each level may or may not help. The position of criminals and civilians/hostages is randomised. There seen to be some locations where someone is almost always hiding, but other times it might be empty. You also can’t be certain of how many suspects are in a room until you’ve fully searched it. SWAT is armed with a few tools to help with these conditions. The first is the optiwand, this device can be extended around corners or under doors to see what lies ahead. You can use it yourself or order your squad to do it for you. Optiwands have two main drawbacks – firstly, when used under a door they can only show you what is in front or to the side of the door. If a suspect is around a corner or is behind an object then they won’t be visible. As a result you need to decide whether to use one of your grenades, even if no suspect is visible. The second problem is that the optiwand is, of course, not a weapon. If you are checking a corner and a criminal comes wandering around it you may well find yourself filled with lead before you can switch to something that shoots. The second tool is the door wedge. This tool can be used to block a door so that it cannot be opened until you remove the wedge. This can be used to block doors leading into a room to prevent criminals running escaping or to restrict movement throughout the building in order to stop criminals coming up from behind. Your squad members also have a multi purpose tools which can be used to deal with a number of obstacles like locks, bombs and door wedges. For actually getting a door open you have three options. You can use your special tool to pick the lock – this is quiet but a little bit slow. You can use a special breaching shotgun to blow open a lock – this is quick but very noisy. Finally you can use a C2 explosive charge. This acts much like opening a door and deploying a flashbang. However, it can injure anyone who is too standing too close to the door.
The AI in the game is pretty good. Criminals will often react when they hear something and might come looking. If they see a group of highly armed SWAT members they might fight or decide to run for it. In some cases the criminals or hostages will help you out by speaking aloud indicating their presence or the presence of armed suspects respectively. There are occasional problems though like your squad members getting stuck or not obeying orders but these are usually fairly rare – generally the occur in the same spot each time. One thing that seems to hinder giving orders is the in game dialogue. Certain locations in the game will cause you to make automatic reports via your radio. This can interrupt orders you are issuing so that your squad don’t do what you wanted. This can be a major problem if you charge into a room only to find your squad doesn’t follow you.
Your squad has a certain amount of personality as well – they will make comments when you enter certain areas during a mission, these seem to be scripted though. They are sometimes a bit trigger shy though – if a criminal is suffering from tear gas for example and is running away they generally won’t shoot at them. On the other hand, if you arm then with lethal weaponry and they run into a suspect not suffering from anything they may well kill them before you can force compliance. Their responses are sometimes a bit off – I’ve had officers (including me) get incapacitated because a suspect recovered from being gassed and resume shooting even though several of my squad were pointing a gun at them. Certain items are useless in the hands of your squad. I’ve never seen them use the taser (possibly because their primary weapon still had ammo) or use pepper spray.
Leading into each mission you are briefed on what is known about the mission you will be undertaking. You can choose from multiple points of entry (if available) and review the floor plan of the building if one is available. If the mission is in response to an emergency call you can listen to the 911 call that initiated it. Often your information is limited and the number of suspects, hostages and floor plans might be unknown. The game has a difficulty setting which adjusts how hard it is to make suspects surrender and how many points you need to complete the mission. You can adjust the difficulty setting before each mission. I just about can’t imagine completing the game on the top difficulty level where you need a score of 95 to win. Even having one officer goes down prevents that score – I had a lot of trouble completing certain mission even on normal difficulty let alone keeping all of my squad intact.
The graphics and sound in SWAT 4 are both generally excellent. There are some video oddities though. The developers don’t seem to have grasped the idea of dynamic lighting and shadows very well. There are some shadows in the game which are impenetrable. Turning on a flashlight and shining it onto such dark areas doesn’t make them much brighter if at all. This is a pain in one mission where a criminal is almost always hiding behind a pillar with a dark shadow next to it. If they drop their gun into the shadow it’s very hard to find. The interface for SWAT 4 is very polished in general. You can quickly give orders to squad members by targeting a doorway or person, clicking on an action button and selecting one from a list. You also have a context sensitive command button which will offer the best action based on what you are aiming at. You can even select which way to select these actions from a list of four. On top of this, you can call up a camera view to see through the eyes of a squad mate, you can enlarge this view and use it to look around and give orders like the ones you issue directly. This ability can be very handy for coordinating an assault on a room from multiple entrances. It still falls short of Rainbow Six though – you can’t co-ordinate a synchronous assault with both doors being opened at the same time. The enlarged camera method is how you control your snipers by taking control of them and shooting at suspects. When reporting downed or subdued criminals/hostages you can do so using a single button click. This is a large improvement over SWAT 3 where you had to press on the numbers on the keyboard to select what you wanted done or wanted to report. If you press the escape key during a mission it will pause the game, show you the tactical map of the building from your briefing, tell you the status of your squad and also tell you how you are going with regards to police procedures. This last part is in the form of how many status reports you have given vs. how many you need to give and how many weapons you’ve secured out of the total so far. Normally the totals for status reports are for criminals/civilians you’ve actually seen and the total for guns are for the ones you’ve actually seen. This is good for keeping track of things – if you check this after clearing each room you can see if you missed picking up a gun or reporting the status of someone. If you have missed something you only have a small area you need to search in order to correct your oversight. However, if the mission states you need to locate a particular person or find a particular item then your required totals actually start as a positive number instead of zero. Unless you notice this in advance, it might make you think you’ve missed picking up a weapon or have failed to report something when it actually refers to something you haven’t seen yet. You will be told that you’ve completed a mission when everyone is secured, incapacitated or dead. The mission will not end automatically if you haven’t reported the status of everyone and collected every weapon. You can return to one of the entrances and use the door to force end a mission if you are completely stumped as to where the last gun you’ve missed might be for example.
SWAT 4 is an excellent tactical shooter. If you love run and gun games you might not enjoy it since you need to be pretty cautious to complete each mission. If you haven’t played a tactical shooter before then this is a good one to break the ice.
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