So above and beyond what a tactical police shooter would reasonably need to have in so many different areas that you wonder how it even came to be. SWAT 4 may sit at the top of the very narrow category of most anxiety-inducing simultaneous first and second person shooters with needlessly detailed environmental storytelling, but it’s led me to a much broader, more general thought – for how saturated and longstanding a genre it is, how much has what you can do with a shooter really been explored?

A few things about it bring this question to mind, but the main one for me’s its morale system. Each enemy and civilian has a different level of morale which affects how likely they are to surrender, pretend to surrender before pulling some kind of stunt or be nakedly noncompliant whenever you and your squad shout at them. By themselves, these kinds of reactions go a long way toward making it so that the player can never guess what’ll happen when they open any given door, but what takes this system to the next level is the sheer amount of factors which can affect it; whether they’re a group of trained gunman or a single inexperienced gangbanger, whether they’ve been stunned with some form of nonlethal attack, whether there are any hostages for them to take advantage of or hostiles to point you in the direction of, how many of you there are versus how many of them, how much damage they’ve sustained to each of their limbs and, my favourite, surprising them with warning shots. I’d never realised until playing this that hitting or missing a target in a shooter doesn’t necessarily have to be a dichotomy between success or failure – here, the latter can also be a tool for intimidation when Officer Backloggd User’s vocal chords aren’t cutting it alone. Firing a shotgun near someone’s feet to twist what’d normally be a failure state into something potentially advantageous extends past the fantasy of feeling like a Michael Mann character and gets the mind wondering about the uncapitalised potential of not just this genre, but others too. Why, for instance, do RPGs still often limit us to dialogue boxes labelled (Intimidate) or whatever when a far more organic implementation of that sort of interaction’s right here?

This sort of unpredictability which causes each attempt at the same level to play out differently every time’s a specialty of SWAT 4. Choosing different entry points coupled with NPCs’ semi-randomised spawns contribute a fair amount to this too, especially when specific characters are part of the mission’s objectives in some way, though the fact that the aforementioned limb-based damage system also applies to you and your squad plays a large role as well. While the extent to which this game wants you to take it slow’s immediately felt in the pairing of its relatively low movement speed and how harshly guns’ crosshairs widen, it becomes even more apparent when you’ve got an injured leg, head or arm. Suddenly, you find yourself even more hesitant to attempt to follow a fleeing suspect through a series of doors they’re shutting behind them, and whatever strategies you had in mind when selecting your long-range equipment have been scuppered by your diminished accuracy. If it sounds restrictive, don’t worry, because it can open up about as many avenues of play as it can close; one example I particularly enjoyed involved clearing a mission which heavily encourages you to use nonlethal weaponry by instead aiming for unarmoured limbs with 9mm FMJ rounds, since it’s easier to skirt around score penalties by incapacitating hostiles rather than killing them.

Although there’s an easy comparison to be made in terms of the replayability of individual encounters with its contemporary F.E.A.R., down to how heavily this stems from the AI’s dynamic behaviours, there’s another, less expected parallel in how thickly it lays on all things atmospheric. Breaching a two-storey room filled with explosive canisters and over half a dozen heavily armed death cultists is nerve-wracking enough, then it decides to hit you with a scene like this just moments after. It’d be easy to think of moments like this or a much earlier, loose equivalent of VTMB’s Ocean House Hotel as borderline genre pivots, but they’re more tonally synergistic than they seem at first. This is a game in which you die in two clean hits regardless of difficulty, so much as taking your eye off a bodycam for a second can prove to be fatal and, as noted above, you can never fully anticipate what’s going to greet you on the other side of a door, so it makes sense to ensure that the player can never anticipate what’s up next on a conceptual level in addition to a mechanical one, as well as to occasionally dial up the horror and exacerbate the uneasiness that average Joes with Uzis are already so good at instilling.

Irrational’s prior experience with horror isn’t the only instance of their ancestry rearing its head in the least likely of places, either. If you weren’t aware that they originated by splintering off from Looking Glass, having played one of the first two Thief games prior to this will probably clue you in, because SWAT 4’s incomplete, often hand-drawn, hastily annotated maps are straight out of those. You can only ever make a rough mental approximation of the layout of wherever you’re about to raid because of it, and chances are it’ll have geographical changes, potential hazards or other objectives they can’t possibly account for. It’s a small but brilliant touch which makes every eruption of overlapping GET DOWNs and WHERE’S MY GODDAMN LAWYERs mixed with gunfire all the more hectic as you’re inevitably forced to piece together your own whereabouts in the thick of it, usually while juggling your own perspective with that of a squadmate’s bodycam or a sniper feed to boot.

Despite how spur-of-the-moment all of this makes it sound and how many different ingredients are packed into it, up to and including some of Eric Brosius’ funkiest work, SWAT 4’s really a game of exceptionally singular focus; as the objective menu puts it, restoring order to chaos. It’s felt even in the size of its levels, which are just right for how many moving parts they each have and the number of ways in which those parts can be manipulated – you can charge me on account of lying if I told you that it’s always fun hunting down the last remaining suspect regardless, but it is always intense, and in general the most minor of blemishes on what’s otherwise one of many attestations to the fact that we’d probably be grand if games had just stopped progressing past what they could do in 2005.

Keep your cool, fiddle with your squadmates’ equipment and make regular use of the command menu to breach whatever obstacles are between you and giving this game a try, boss.