So, SWAT eh? It's a pretty fun game. Part of the grandpa of the modern day tactical shooters. It's also partcually why you've got games like Ready or Not.
So, what's great with S.W.A.T 4? Well, what's not great with S.W.A.T 4?
Well, most of the time you get dropped into active sernario. Such as, an active warrent search with armed suspects, a warrent search of a potiential kidnapper/serial killer, or an active shooting.
You get a choice of one or two enterences, and than you need to slowly walk your way through the map, checking every corner lest you get jumped, and try to arrest every enemy and rescue any unfortunate civilian there.
You get a handful of guns, my personal favourite being a suppressed 9mm rifle and a 9mm handgun. Or if you're in a seriously annoying mission of arresting everyone, bean bag shotgun!
On top of guns, you get some pretty cool gadgets. Such as pepper spray. Yes, that sounds really boring, but nothing beats pepper spraying that one annoying guys that didn't want to drop his gun or that one annoying old lady claiming her son was innocent.
There's also the grenades. Namely, a pellet one, a CS one, and a Flash Bang. Now, these are best for breaching into rooms, as well. It's the most dangerous part of any map. Plus none of these are considered lethal damange, despite uh... I don't think that's how it works in real life. It's still an explosion.
You also have an optiwand and door wedge, but I'll be honest, dear reader, I've literally never used either. I like the stress I guess of no optiwands and I was always too nervous to lock a door perminently when I might have to go through it again.
Okay, so every map has a few hostiles who will not flinch at shooting you. But, you are a law enforcement officer. You can't just gun someone down for no reason. So instead, you have to try to give everyone a fair chance to surrender or at least not shoot you.
The entire game marks you at the end of every level. It tallies up how many people you arrested, how many civilians you've rescued, all the evidence you sercured and the safey of your squad.
To get the highest score, you have to try to keep everyone alive, safe and able to be charged for their crimes. I mean, yeah, Mr. Fairfax did kidnap numerous young woman and harm them, but he is still a human citizen and must face legal justice.
However, not every mission will end well and mortality free. Some mission or at least runs might see someone getting gunned down. In my personal experience, it was me getting gunned down. But alas. As long as you clearly ask the tango to drop their weapons, give them a chance to comply and only return fire after you are sure the tango is trying to shoot you, you should be fine.
Now, you're the Squad lead. Under you are four people, Girad, Jackson, Reynolds and Fields. These guys are gonna be you most favourite and the most annoying part of the game. If you play single player, that is.
On the positive side of things, these guys are good officers. They'll keep you alive. Very alive. They'll shoot on site to keep you alive but they'll do it. Plus, five pairs of eyes are better than one. They'll follow you basic orders and keep tangoes from getting too close to you.
On the negative side. They are just a bit more trigger happy than I'd like. So, I usually gave them less-than-lethal weapons, like the pepperball gun and the bean bag shotgun. Than they tend to be too harmless against armored enemies. So... You win some you loose some :|
So, every mission is not connected to anything else. For example, one mission is arresting a guy who is illegally collecting guns, while another is arresting a serial killer and another is protecting the staff of a jewellery store. Most of the missions are wildly different, with different groups involved and armed with differen gear and weapons.
Before every mission you'll be given a run down on what's going on. From there you can plan your equipment and weapons aronud it. For some missions you can skate by with less-than-lethal and a few peppersprays, while others you'd be mad to not take a good gun and a lot of CS gas and Flashbangs or you're going to have to start over a couple hundred times.
You also need to change you squads gear. Everyone can only carry so much, so if you want a lot of grenades or a lot of guns, everyone has to lug about their own gear and a bit of gear for everyone else. It's only fair to help other people here, guys. Be nice, lug around at least a fifth of the groups gear.
Ooh, okay. I like FPS games with more urban environments as it's a lot of good gunplay that can happen in it. And S.W.A.T 4 is most certainly one of those sort of games.
Every map is from someplace in the city your PD serves. This includes, an university, a house, a take-out resterant, a jewellery operations office and so on. And every place is well designed.
I'm going to use the jewellery HQ as an example. All throughout the walls you can see posters advertising the diamands and rings the company makes. You also see a few presentations on how the company is funding it's stock from Africa and well... They're using blood diamans. So, now you've gotta save innocent people from a group of armed robbers in a HQ of a company that sources blood diamands form Africa.
Or, you get the Foodwall level. You have to rush into a take-out resterant and properly ruin some normal workers lives and potentially put civilains and innocents at risk because of the chance of a shoot-out.
Honestly, the best part of the maps, is that there's innocent people you are incentivised to make sure are fine afterwards. Like, i don't want the poor gas station worker to get hurt because some robber and I got into a shoot out over what? A fist full of cash? No ones life is worth that. So, most engagements turn into a stressful mix of not wanting to die, not wanting to hurt the tangeos, wanting to keep the civilians safe and sound and also trying to properly deal with the treat. It's fantastic.
Personally, running a local server and going through all of the possible missions with my brother was the most fun.
First of all, the in-game AI is good, but compared to an actual person? Yeah, it was way more fun. Plus, my brother and I are way worse at the game together. So a lot of missions had to be done over multiple days.
Plus, it's pretty fun to give actual verbal callouts. My poor parents probably had to hear "Tango, tango, tango!", "Go left", "Reloading", "'Nade" and what not from the game room.
Also, you can friendly fire. Which lead to an awkward situation where my bro accidently sprayed me and when we restarted the mission he thought I was going to spray him to get even so he rushed off and got lost. When we tried again, I peppersprayed him afterwards. Ha, fun.
I would say S.W.A.T 4 is not a new game. So the graphics is not on the exact level of Ready or Not, but that also means a potato could run the game. But for some people, the graphics might be an eyesore. Which is understandable, it is not modern gaming levels of graphics.
You do not have true iron sights. Trying to aim down sights is impossible. You can press z and zoom into the reticle on the center of the screen, but aimming down sights is not part of the game, I am afraid.
Sometimes it feels like there's an odd mix of bullets not doing enough but also doing exactly as much damange as you would expect. If you shoot someone in the foot or leg, they'll just hobble off fine, but any where close to the chest or head and it's immediatly lethal. So, it can feel inconsistant if you're not careful and used to a bit of jank.
Co-op is the only mode where your less-than-lethals effect you, while normal career mode does not let you get effect by the less-than-lethal effects. Which, makes me a bit sad. But it's only the CS that works like that. More consistancy would've been nice.
There's not that many maps in comparasion to bigger games. But you get waht you get for a about 3GB game. But the levels you do get are pretty big and could take about half an hour to properly run through.
Honestly, S.W.A.T 4 is a classic for a reason. There's very few complains I had that were game breaking and if you're used to older games, probably wouldn't even be as much of a problem. Plus for a game that's only around 3GB big and most modern day computers can run easily, it's a good game that won't take up too much of space and is pretty good solo or co-op.