Lots of grenades, a couple of shots and that's the end of the film scene. But you think you could do a better job. Well, now it is time to prove it. You are the leader of a SWAT Special Weapons and Tactics team , which means, you are the man in charge of making sure that the hostages , the casino's money or the President of the USA get out of each situation unharmed.
You have to make sure you or any of the people you have to rescue or defend come out unscathed, because this is a realistic game, in SWAT 4 , like in real life, a bullet kills. The thing i liked the most is about the maps.
These maps are driven in so much detail that you will love it. As the leader of the team member you have to focus on the crime at locations and show up. The main thing is that your tactics team members will follow you and you also have to leave no trace. You will be informed for every kind of occurrence in the city through your wireless.
Of course, this wouldn't mean a thing if the enemy Al wasn't up to scratch, but incredibly this is just as convincing.
Perhaps not STALKER convincing, but certainly good enough to react to your team of shouting policemen by either bottling it and surrendering, running away very fast in a mad panic or taking cover in an intelligent place and opening fire. What also helps the game is that each time you play, SWAT 4 sneakily randomises the level elements, so that bad guys, hostages, civilians and so on are never quite in the same place each time.
What this means of course is that you can never simply learn a level by trial and error, but actually have to rely on your wits to make progress. This is not only desirable in and of itself, but gives the single-player game a good degree of replayability. Which brings us neatly, I suppose, to the multiplayer game.
Normally we'd shove in a caveat here about there not being any servers up at the time of review so we'll bring you a more in-depth look in a future Online Zone. However, since we've been playing both the co-op and VIP modes pretty extensively in the office since the review code turned up and since there's only so many jokes about fly swatters to go around , it would be pretty remiss to ignore it.
Last month's preview detailed the modes available, especially the co-op game in which you can team up with up to four of your nearest and dearest to play through the single-player campaign. The only bugbear we had then was the issue of maintaining an acceptable chain of command, and unfortunately Irrational hasn't even attempted to resolve this.
Players are all still free to issue orders left, right and centre with gay abandon, meaning that unless you decide in advance who's the man and who are the man's little helpers, you're probably in for something of an uncoordinated time of it. Especially playing on the Internet where attention spans are so small you need atomic microscopes just to measure their ballpark figures and it only takes one whiny little Herbert to decide to take the law into his own hands and storm off all guns blazing.
Of course, if you do find yourself in a well-structured team willing to play sensibly, then co-op SWAT 4 is one of the all-time highs in multiplayer gaming.
Yes, it's that good. The sense of achievement that comes from conducting a well-oiled multi-team room takedown is second to none, although the game is crying out for some kind of integrated voice comms to properly coordinate things. Third-party programs such as TeamSpeak only work if you already know the players you're dispensing justice with and is therefore next to useless for random Net games.
Away from co-op. The aforementioned VIP game has enough novelty to make it interesting. Rather than a simple challenge to get from point A to point B, the Suspects SWAT-speak for bad guys have to capture and hold the VIP player for a full two minutes before being allowed to kill him.
In the right hands as is so often the case with Internet gaming it can make for some pretty cool gunfights. Suspects charge about setting up impromptu defensive barriers around the capture point, SWAT members try to storm in from any and every direction, gas grenades and flashbangs fill the air and in the middle of it all the VIP player mills around making life difficult for everyone.
Will it replace Counter-Strike: Source as the online team game of choice? Of course it won't. Nothing will in the near future and it's an act of purest optimism to have posed the thought in the first place. But much as Splinter Cell's unique spin on multiplayer gaming has captured a small but loyal audience, so too should SWAT 4's interesting diversion from the standard deathmatch scenarios.
Multiplayer gaming appears to be growing up at last, stretching its toes a little and seeing what it can do. Hooray for that. Beyond multiplayer, longevity can also be found in the SWAT4 mission editors.
First is the ingame editor, which is little more than a tool for altering the parameters of the single-player campaign missions. Fill a previously deserted level with terrorists, reduce a teeming nest of bad guys to a single mano-a-mano pistol hunt - it's fairly comprehensive but of little longterm interest. The idea is to create scenarios to swap with your friends, but it's a safe bet that your friends will soon tire of playing the same level time and again but with a different combination of bad guys to shoot for no discernable reward.
Although hideously complex to look at -and even scarier to actually try and use - the inclusion of the tool for those with a masters degree in working out the blisteringly unfathomable goes to show that Irrational is foursquare behind supporting the modding community.
With any luck, it won't take long until we start to see a wealth of extra maps and missions, in much the same way we did with SWAT3 all those years back. One other thing that you may remember from the SWAT 3 special editions was that the multiplayer side of the game was only added later on due to overwhelming pressure from fans.
Aside from creating maps, one thing the small but loyal SWAT community might want to campaign for this time round is an enhancement in the physics engine being used.
Told you those jokes were limited is the rather static nature of the game world. In this modern age of Half-Life 2 and Havok physics and all that, SWAT 4 can feel rather old-school - no doubt a hangover from the protracted development period. Aside from doors, certain windows and the occasional beer bottle, not very much in the world of SWAT4's urban rescues is interactive.
It doesn't detract too much from the overall enjoyment of the game, but it will serve to date things very quickly. You can't help but wonder at just how much more compelling a lot of the gunplay would have been had chairs and tables been usable as impromptu cover and so on.
Consequently, you can come away from SWAT 4 thinking it's a little short in the technical trousers. Mind you, Irrational has certainly done its best to make the most of things, and the mission design generally achieves an impressive sense of atmosphere and tension.
Certain levels, such as the Fairfax Residence, in which a psycho loner has taken to kidnapping young girls and forcing them to perform' for his cameras, are particularly unsettling.
This is especially true as you creep past ghostly face masks, with a whimpering girl lying on a rancid mattress in front of a video camera and walls full of newspaper clippings about kidnapped children. Even more creepy since you've already had to subdue his ageing mother who continually protests the innocence of her little boy. Sometimes it's all a little too close to home, especially with news reports about paedophiles cropping up almost every day on TV nowadays.
Even your Al mates can be heard muttering things like Sick and Man, this is disgusting as you proceed through the level. In some ways it's brave of Irrational and VU to include something like this rather than sticking with safe' subjects such as robbers, terror bombers and cultists.
The fact that it's handled with the appropriate gravitas and not trivialised in the slightest almost demands that everyone should play it, and certainly puts the unintentional comedy in using non-lethal devices on civilians into sharp relief. Sorry, this has all got rather serious and weighty hasn't it? Try another fly swatter joke - Ed. No time. Instead I should probably just sum things up by saying that Irrational has done an absolutely bang-up job in saving the SWAT series from what was looking like certain death its prior Urban Justice incarnation.
All it needs now is a more advanced engine to power a sequel, a more involving sense of training and life in a pair of SWAT shoes. That, and a willingness to continue dealing with the dark underbelly of real world criminality without pulling any punches.
One area of SWAT 4 that Irrational could really have gone to town on is the training aspect of the game. I know from experience I watched a documentary on Discovery that when a SWAT team isn't in the field shootin' bad guys, they spend their time brushing up their tactics and training with cool weapons and gadgets.
The in-game training, however, is bog-standard stuff - no more than an interactive version of the manual. You learn how to move. How to look up with the mouse.
How to open a door. What it doesn't even touch on are the relative merits of using a Colt M4A1 assault rifle in a situation over a GB36s. Or when you should use a gas grenade over a flashbang.
Or anything useful that a SWAT officer might actually want to know. What Irrational should have done is properly simulate the life of a SWAT team - mixing ongoing training sessions that fl teach you new techniques with actual emergency call-outs. Creating some sense of cohesion rather than just giving you a series of unconnected missions with little sense of progression.
To say that we were underwhelmed would be putting it mildly. The game was, quite frankly, a disgrace, with appalling Al. Exactly why it was shown is anyone's guess.
But fear not - much has changed since then. In fact, everything has changed since then. The SWAT 4 that now stares back at you from these pages with come-and-get-me eyes is a totally different game, developed by a totally different team the one responsible for the excellent Tribes: Vengeance. It also features a totally different engine. The Unreal engine and the Havok physics library to be precise.
Quick Mission Maker: Create detailed custom missions for yourself and your friends. Share this post Digg Tweet Stumbleupon delicious reddit Facebook. Related Posts. Final Release. V Initial Release. Recent Posts. Recent Comments. Iron Harvest Free Download.
Comment by Repacklab. Honey Select 2. Repacklab have over But you think you could do a better job. Well, now it is time to prove it. You are the leader of a SWAT Special Weapons and Tactics team , which means, you are the man in charge of making sure that the hostages , the casino's money or the President of the USA get out of each situation unharmed. You have to make sure you or any of the people you have to rescue or defend come out unscathed, because this is a realistic game, in SWAT 4 , like in real life, a bullet kills.
The SWAT team is one of the best-prepared units to resolve special conflicts , like armed robberies with hostages in which dialogue has failed or even taking a building in which a terrorist group has barricaded itself.
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