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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

This is a Battlefield 2 Mod
The award winning Project Reality Studios and Black Sand Studio teams are proud to announce the official release of Project Reality v0.9.
After countless hours of develop...
A total conversion for the Medieval II Total War - Kingdoms expansion
Main Features
1. The Middle-earth Map
Play on an extensive historically accurate map of Middle-earth as it was in the Third Ag...
flamenco...
Forgotten Hope 2 is a World War II modification for Battlefield 2™ and is based on the original Forgotten Hope, a modification for Battlefield 1942™, one of the most popular multiplayer games eve...
This patch will update your game from 1.8.25.003002 to version 1.9.22.
(c) Electronic Arts and respective copyright owners. This is not meant to infringe any copyrights, it is simply a re-upload of t...
This patch will update your game from 1.8.25.003001 to version 1.9.22.
(c) Electronic Arts and respective copyright owners. This is not meant to infringe any copyrights, it is simply a re-upload of t...
What is it?
UDK is Unreal Engine 3 â the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best ...
Call of Warhammer: Champions of the vile Chaos gods have stepped forward uniting into a northern tidal wave sweeping south. Orcs are growing restless in the cramped space of the Badlands. A WAAGGGHH!!...
[i]"Will you be a living legend or a forgotten casualty?"[/i]
By the 31st century, humanity has spread to thousands of worlds, while a handful of powerful empires wage continual war for the right to...
changes in version 1.2.1
# Multiplayer connectivity has been improved; users should no longer be required to forward ports to host or join multiplayer games
# Players who experienced distorted shadow...