SWAT 4 Review

SWAT 4 is the latest addition to the long dormant SWAT franchise developed by Irrational Games and published by Vivendi.

In da zone

It belongs to the same realistic shooter genre as counter strike and Rainbow Six. The player gets to be a part of a five member swat team. You can use your quick paralysing moves through 14 single player missions. Most of these are set indoors, each having objectives ranging from neutralizing threats and saving innocent lives. The single player campaign doesn’t have a storyline as such. The 14 missions have objectives streamed from Hollywood blockbusters that are stand alone constructs with specific objectives without a story which sews them together into a plot.

Talk to me

SWAT 4 features a very lucid command system for coordinating with your team during single player as well as team mates during online play. Options pop up when you place your cursor on the particular object regarding decision. Right clicking on the door gives you a variety of options from opening the door using stealth or barging in with your entire team.

Weaponsicular Cancer

The weapons available are the usual stealth material. There is the optiwand which is a renamed optic camera that is slipped below the door to watch what’s happening on the other side. You can divide your squad into fire teams, each officer having an head mounted camera that lets you keep a tab on activity in different areas of the map.

SWAT 4 is a tactical shooter, which means it places emphasis on you not being Duke Nukem in tights. Strategy, coordination, stealth, communication et all plays a vital role in determining the outcome of every mission. The replaybility factor for the single player is fairly good. The offensive AI spawns in a variety of locations, which keeps the tension of the game intact. The game supports multiplayer co operative, which is scarce in todays games. Along with your chosen teammates, you can battle the odds against the enemy AI. Although this may sound like a dumbed down look and shoot feature, it definitely isnt so.

IQ

SWAT’s AI is fairly competent and this is evident in the single player campaigns in which you must team up with the game’s AI to take on the forces of evil. During coop sessions too, planning and coordination are paramount since the enemy AI will reduce you to blubbering rubble of flesh and bones if you think storming in with an assault rifle is the smartest thing to do.

The games graphics are quite outdated with fairly high system requirements in contrast. Gamers who are found of games such as counter strike and rainbow six and relish the swat, team, realistic element in their games will find this to their liking. Although games like counterstrike source will seem and look better, the online community has long since been cribbing about gameplay issues. SWAT more than makes up for its graphical shortcomings by providing exciting gameplay, something that no amount of eye candy can make up for.

Lennon Lives

The sound effects in the game are comparatively much better, individual weapons complete with their respective muzzle flashes and high caliber appetites have been well done. Overall, although its skeptical that this title will be able to oust gene ingrained super hits like counter strike on the multiplayer front, it definitely is something that you should check out. SWAT 4 doesn’t revolutionize the genre and doesn’t claim to either, it’s just a normal shooter with slick gameplay that offers an insight into a world we rarely see, blinded too often by the vile cataracts that CS has secreted.