For my tenth birthday, my Dad bought me Sierra’s Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel. It was, without a doubt, the best game that I had ever played (at least at age 10.) I was fascinated with a game that allowed you to be a Police Officer, carry a gun, and learn to enforce the law with actual rules and regulations. It was this game that made me decide to actually get into criminal justice in the first place.

Sierra took the Police Quest series and went on to release three other, more traditional, graphical adventures before releasing the first Swat game in back in 1995. This game emerged back during Sierra’s (thankfully short-lived) full motion video phase. It generated some buzz, but was ultimately a flawed game. Though its premise was amazingly ambitious, it suffered from sloppy execution and confusing gameplay.

In 1998, Sierra, through Yosemite Entertainment, took another try at the Swat series with the release of Police Quest Swat 2. This game made use of a real time, tactical interface of Swat elements and terrorists/crooks. You were allowed to play from both sides and the game kind of worked like a real time X-Com, minus the fun. This game also had high hopes, but suffered from a clunky interface and abysmal execution. The once-powerful Police Quest label seemed doomed.

Finally, in 1999, Sierra itself took back control of the franchise, dropped the Police Quest label and released Swat 3: Close Quarters Battle. While not perfect, this game took a more Rainbow Six approach, making use of the first person perspective. Swat 3 saw many incarnations and was essentially rather fun, seeming to hold out hope for those of us who remembered the glory days of Sierra.

Nearly 18 years after I first played the original Police Quest, Irrational Games was tasked with making a sequel to the Swat franchise and improving upon what had come before. With such a choppy history, Irrational Games had a lot of expectations to live up to. Did they do it?

Gameplay
As a Swat simulation, most of this game is made or lost in the execution of the gameplay itself, something the previous Swat games, apart from Swat 3, learned the hard way. As is the case with most good games these days, Swat 4 begins with a simple tutorial, designed to introduce the game controls for movement, weapons use and, of course, equipment use.

The weapons training includes your standard basic target shooting, grenade and flashbang tossing, and sniper marksmanship. The number of weapons at your disposal is impressive. From the standard MP-5 9mm to the GB36s assault rifle, you will have the ability to outfit yourself and your team with the weapons and equipment needed for success.

Speaking of weapons, let us discuss briefly the less-than-lethal choices available to you. To those who don’t live in LA, most SWAT teams and even regular police units have access to a variety of less-than-lethal weaponry, including tasers, batons (sadly, not featured,) bean bag shotguns, pepper balls shot from a paint ball gun, and pepper spray. These tools are designed to be used to coax compliance from even the biggest and meanest of the bad guys out there. Learning to outfit and make use of these weapons will result in higher scores for you.

In the game, as in real life, the police cannot just go in with guns blazing and consider the deaths of suspects a success.

The grenades you can use are varied. There’s the flashbang, a wicked bright grenade that is used to stun, startle and disorient the occupants of a room long enough for a team to deploy and take control of the room. You may also employ the gas grenade, a great tool that will often de-escalate the situation without requiring deadly force. And finally, you can use the stinger grenade; this vicious device launches rubber balls which, while not deadly, can injure and stun the occupants of a room rather quickly.

For equipment, one has to mention the Optiwand. This little device allows you to slide a camera cable under a door and display what it sees on a small attached LCD screen, a great tool to use before just rushing into a room. Trust me: it will save you from being shot in the back. The door wedge is a tool which can go a long way towards setting you up for success in both single player and multiplayer modes. Basically, you apply the door wedge and it prevents a door from being opened. Have an entry with 2 or more possible escape routes? No problem, just wedge the other two doorways and move in. We can’t have the bad guys or opposing players escaping, can we? Finally, the last two pieces of equipment are used specifically for breaching, by far my favorite part of dynamic entries. The breaching shotgun fires special rounds which will destroy a door lock without penetrating the door or injuring anybody inside of the room. There is also the option of using small blocks of C-4 to breach the door.

Now that we are outfitted with equipment, we need to look at the other people on your team. This game essentially makes use of a 5-man team. This team is broken down into you (the leader, of course), the 2-man Red Team and the 2-man Blue Team. Through use of a button, you can switch between the commands for you, the red team or the blue team. This is actually done quite easily and only requires hitting the tab button and clicking on the command you want. This interface will be used to issue nearly all of your commands for your teams. These actions include stacking up on a door, checking the lock, using the Optiwand to look underneath the door, breaching the door, and placing a hostile or suspect in handcuffs for their safety, just to name a few. This is actually a rather simple setup once you get used to it and it never feels too cluttered. Just remember to issue the commands to follow you or they will wait for you wherever you leave them.

Fortunately, the AI of your teammates is fairly good, so if you are in a room and a bad guy comes in shooting, have no fear—your team will defend you, sometimes much faster than you can even react to the threat. The enemy AI is also quite good and will vary on every mission you play, from being threatening with lethal force, to being compliant and responding to verbal commands. Occasionally, you may experience your teammates moving in front of you, shooting you or getting stuck on furniture while moving. This didn’t happen often, but it did happen.

The final gameplay area I want to discuss deals with the methodology behind the SWAT teams themselves. Contrary to what many think, the SWAT team is not a death squad or a group of shoot-em-up commandos. The SWAT team’s presence itself is often enough to elicit compliance from many suspects. When that fails, the SWAT team is brought in to infiltrate swiftly but safely, assess the situation, save lives and bring suspects under control. When the bad guys have to be shot, the SWAT team has not truly won the scenario. Granted, any incident where there is no loss of life from civilians or the police is not a defeat, but the true victory is when the bad guys are taken safely into custody and everybody goes home at the end of the day. To this end, SWAT has a rating system, where you get a score at the end of every level. You need a minimum score in order to proceed to the next level, so it’s important to play well. Your score depends upon things like securing evidence and radioing in when you have rooms and suspects under control. So when you kill a suspect instead of taking him alive, you get fewer points. If you fail to give verbal commands to a suspect and you open fire, you will lose points and possibly fail the scenario. Sometimes you may only have seconds to assess a situation before you react and those seconds can make the difference between life and death. It’s very easy to get excited and shoot a bad guy who was in the process of complying with your commands. This is where the realism of the game rockets up, as police officers are constantly forced to justify any and all of their actions, including whether or not they used the proper response for the proper scenario. Not only does unnecessary force get an officer in trouble, it also opens him up to a civil lawsuit. All of this has been carefully crafted into this game, so if you like killing people, try Far Cry. If you are looking for a highly realistic SWAT team simulation, then play this game.

Graphics
Considering the good graphics we have come to expect from Irrational Games, it’s no wonder you will need some high memory and a strong graphics card to keep this game running and running well. Especially when, at any given moment, you could be in a room in which numerous people are running around, screaming and shooting (possibly because you threw a gas grenade in before your entry). For a game that showcases the chaos and insanity of dynamic entries, it’s amazing how well the game did and how smoothly it ran during play.

From your standard graphical standpoint, Swat 4 features very well-rendered locations, ranging from a nightclub to restaurants to the just-plain-creepy houses that you will enter in this game (I will save the surprise for you). The weapons and character models are also very well done, if a tad dramatic when shot. However, it’s in the other toys that this game really shows its polish. Ever wonder what a flashbang looks like when it’s deployed? Simply don’t turn around, then marvel as your character is momentarily blinded and listen to your teams do their jobs. Want to know what pepper spray does? Just get a whiff when your teammates are deploying it (which sometimes cannot be avoided) and then watch as your screen distorts while you eyes tear up and you are basically (at least momentarily) defenseless. Having had pepper spray deployed on me (you have to get sprayed in most places before they let you carry it) I can assure you it will kick most people’s posteriors.

All in all, this is one of the better looking games on the market today and should please those who have a thing for eye candy. There is certainly violence included in this game and if you are squeamish, you may want to move on, as some areas have more violence than normal. This is definitely a game designed for those mature enough to see and deal with violence.

Sound
Really, a game like this only needs to make certain that the guns sound right and the explosions work well. From the fairly good, although strangely expletive-free, verbal commands to the interesting 911 calls you get to listen to during your briefings, it’s apparent that what little voice acting there is works fairly well. You will get to listen to wounded people crying and moaning as well as criminals telling you how tough they are and how lucky you are, or how they are actually innocent.

Some of the in-game music is a tad annoying, but that is really just a nitpicking session. There is really not much, outside of sound effects, going on to detract from your gaming experience. So turn up your speakers and confuse your neighbors with the sounds of gunfire and explosions. Given the nature of the game and the police in general, the game is surprisingly clean, considering the amount of vulgarity one would hear in real life.

Multiplayer
Now, while this game is certainly fun enough to play through as a single player, it truly shines in multiplayer. For starters, the game includes the tools needed to create your own missions, which can be used for play in the single player mode or shared with friends. Online, you can expect to play the Barricaded Suspects mode, VIP Escort, Rapid Deployment, and a sure favorite with many, CO-Op play.

Barricaded Suspects mode is certainly my favorite and entails 2 teams, one SWAT and one Suspects, battling it out in a race for kills. Given the realistic nature of combat in this game, it will be more akin to Counterstrike, where you can be killed with one or 2 shots and cannot rely on run and gun tactics. With a maximum of 16 players, this mode can be quite fun and it definitely makes it interesting to go up against somebody in a game which (thankfully) does not include a jump button. Nope, folks—you will have to do things the old-fashioned way in this game.

VIP Escort mode is an interesting variant of what many will recognize from the old Counterstrike escort mode, where the SWAT team attempts to get a VIP to an extraction point while the Suspects attempt to capture the VIP, hold him for 2 minutes, and then kill him to win. This mode was entertaining, especially given the fact that if the hostage gets killed by the Suspects too early or accidentally, the SWAT side wins. This becomes an interesting race to see who knows the layouts of the areas best and how good the VIP is at staying out of sight.

Rapid Deployment mode is where 3-5 bombs have been randomly placed in the mission level. Similar to Counterstrike, the idea is to defuse the bombs before time runs out, or the Suspects win.

There are a variety of other options available in the Multiplayer modes, including tweaking friendly fire, disabling respawning, and allowing the use of non-lethal force only, creating arrests instead of kills. As you can see, Irrational Games included a robust multiplayer component and with the ability to create your own scenarios and the promise of released maps, this is a game that can be played for some time.

Replay Value
Given the large multiplayer component and scenario builder, Swat 4 should be enjoyable for a long time. One unique aspect of this game is that it is a different game every time you select a mission. The AI constantly changes and you may go from a bloodbath in one game to a complete compliance love fest in the next. This again brings home the concept of how you never know what you will get when you go into a house or building. One negative is the small number of Single Player missions included in the game—only 14. This game is great for multiplayer fans, but it seems that, at least for the single player campaign, they could have added a few more missions, especially when there are missions that do not last beyond 5 minutes.

Conclusion
While this game actually includes a character claiming to be Lt. Sonny Bonds (a nod to us old school guys), Swat 4 has certainly come far from the simple days of the Lytton PD. This departure is not a bad thing; in fact, SWAT 4 is light years beyond the previous games in the series. Irrational Games seems to have a knack for taking Sierra franchises and making them better (see Tribes: Vengeance). This game comes very close to capturing the realism of what police SWAT teams actually do. While we will never have a perfect game simulation of this, I am not sure that one will ever come as close to reality as SWAT 4, unless SWAT 5 is even better. It’s very refreshing to see a game which involves guns and shooting that also focuses on learning to use force properly. While I am certain that many will try to play this game running and gunning, the folks that get the highest ratings will be those who learn to determine the level of the threats they face and instantly act based upon those determinations. Being a SWAT team member is not an easy task and it’s great to find a game that showcases just how difficult law enforcement can be.

Key High Points

- Ultra-realistic SWAT simulator which pays attention to the use of force model concept

- Easy-to-use interface makes squad control fun and accessible

- Very robust multiplayer component with a very active SWAT 4 online community

Key Low Points

- Slightly on the short side for single player gamers

- Somewhat steep computer and graphics requirements

- Occasional AI issues with pathfinding