Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/swat-4-2005-game-review/
SWAT 4 is both one of the best games that I’ve ever played and one of the most infuriating monitor smashing, keyboard snapping, stroke inducing games that I’ve played at the same time. How can a game be both of those things? Well, lets have a look, shall we.
There isn’t much of a story in the usual sense. Some of the mission briefings with have a few minor plot threads through out the game, but most of the the story that the game has is unique to each mission. Unlike previous installments of the franchise, where you followed the L.A.P.D. Branch of SWAT, SWAT 4 takes places in Los Angeles, California, the single player campaign taking place in the fictional East Coast city of Fairview (an amalgamation of New York City, Boston, a few other eastern cities). Taking place in the then far off future of 2008/2009. You can practice at the Riverside Training Facility, under the guidance of police Lieutenant Sunny Bonds, or jump right into the action.
Before every mission, you’re given the option to check your Objectives screen. This gives you a very throughout and detailed overlook of the situation, such as a briefing catching you up on the details, being able to listen to any related 911 calls, a map showing all of the entrances of the location and possibly the layout of the building that you can bring up in the pause menu, any known info on the supects, any civilians in the building, and a timeline of events. You can even choose which way you want to enter a building.
At the Equipment menu, you can choose the loadouts for yourself and your whole squad. The game comes with several loadouts included, but if you want to make your own personalized loadout, you can, and you save it. And you can copy any of the loadouts you’ve selected to the rest of your squad.
Your primary weapons include the Colt M4A1 Carbine, .45 SMG, Suppressed 9mm SMG, 9mm SMG, Nova Pump, M4 Super 90, GB36s Assault Rifle, AK-47, and Gal Sub machine Gun. And if you want to go in with a less lethal option, which is recommended in a few mission, are the Pepper-ball Gun, and Less-Lethal Shotgun, which fires sandbags.
Your secondary weapons include your standard guns such as M1911 Handgun, Colt Python Revolver, and 9mm Handgun. Less aggressive options include the Taser Stun Gun and Pepper Spray for the people who are refusing to be handcuffed or need some convincing to put down their weapon. Explosives include the Stinger Grenade cause quite a punch to anyone close to it, Flashbang, which blinds your enemies, and CS Gas, which can blind enemies with smoke and cause anyone close enough to it to go into a coughing fit.
If you come across locked doors, you have the Breaching Equipment, which includes a Shotgun that can breach locked doors by firing at the door handle or C2, which you can apply to the door around the same area, blowing the doors lock off.
Finally there is the Door Wedge, which you can used to prevent people from opening doors, essentially preventing them from escaping a certain way as you move around to another opening to a room, and the Optiwand, which lets you see under a door to check if there are any enemies in the room you want to enter.
To order your squad members around, there is a drop down menu that you can get to by holding down your right mouse button. You can order your team to follow you, move to wherever you’ve happened to aim at, to stack up at a door to check if it’s locked and to prepare to enter to room, or have them enter the room straight away. You can even separate your team, which is called “Gold” team, or “Element”, into two smaller teams, “Red” team and “Blue” team. This can help in certain strategies, such as them entering two doors of the same room, and taking on enemies from two different angles and having the element of surprise.
There are also few mode besides the campaign that you can try if you want some variety. There is Instant Action, in which you drop into the most recent mission that you’ve complete with the default gear. You can also create and play your own missions based off of the missions from the Single Player part of the game. There are a ton of options to choose from in this mode, including difficulty, whether or not you want the missions from the Single Player version of the level or a mix of objectives from a list, which entry point you want to start at and a time limit, and which load out you want to take in.
You can even choose to be a lone wolf or have a smaller amount of SWAT members on your team, and the amount of civilians there are in a level and the amount of and types of guns terrorists are holding. You can make any level as easy or insanely impossibly as you want, and is probably the most fun part of the single player experience.
One of the best features of SWAT 4 is the multiplayer. The multiplayer features several game modes, all of which are team-based. These include Barricaded Suspects, in which Teams gain points by arresting or neutralizing members of the other team, and whoever hits the score limit first or has the highest score when the round ends win, VIP Escort, in which a random member of the SWAT team is selected to be the VIP. The suspects must arrest the VIP and hold him for two minutes before they can execute him. SWAT must escort the VIP to the extraction point in the mission area while preventing suspects from arresting him.
Rapid Deployment, in which three to five bombs are placed throughout the map, and the SWAT team must locate and disable all of the within the time limit, and if they fail to do so, the suspects win. And Co-op, in you can play through all of the single-player missions with up to four other people taking place of the computer-controller SWAT officers.
Graphically, the game still holds up fairly well. Every location looks exactly like what it’s real world counterpoint would look like (I.E. Restaurant, Convenience Store, Medical Center, Jewelry Store, Run Down Apartments, etc.). Some levels even have a fantastic and creepy atmosphere that really drive home the point that you’re dealing with some pretty disturbed people, such as a level where a man has a kidnapped woman in his basement, and a level in an run down apartment building that has a cult in it.
What really stands out are the small details around each level that make the game world feel like the events in the game are actually happening, such as news reports on the radio of current and previous missions, and even in one mission, there is a live news report happening, giving away your SWAT team’s presence to the terrorists. The other squad members even comment on the situation as it’s unfolding along with occasionally commenting on certain things located around a location, and even give a few sarcastic remarks about the situation, location, and even about each other.
There’s even a few missions that have new objectives pop up as the mission goes on, giving the feeling as if the situation is unfolding before you. It’s small details like these that you wouldn’t even notice that make it seem like the developers were actually putting a lot of effort and love into each location.
The only minor complaint I have with the graphics are the mirrors, which look hilariously stretched and weird. But they do actually serve a purpose in the game, as a few spots in a few levels, you can use the mirror to spot enemies around corners.
SWAT 4 is also pretty impressive on the audio side too. At certain points, the game will appear like there is distant gunfire off in another part of the level, adding to the whole situation unfolding in front of you vibe the game is trying to give off, using what limitations the game has to make it seem like more is going on than possible. The soundtrack is dynamic to whatever situation is going on at the time. Whenever your team is breaching a room or coming into contact with enemies around the map, the music goes from the usual ambient music that plays when you’re exploring the area to a tense music that puts you on edge, really making it seem like a situation could go south any second.
Speaking of going south, the biggest flaw of SWAT 4 rears it’s ugly head. The thing that really brings the game down is it’s bullshit inconsistent enemy AI and absurd difficulty spikes. The first two levels are tutorial levels to ease you into the games concepts, but by the third or forth level, for some insane reason, the enemy difficulty spikes incredibly high, and a mere thug can take out your entire squad of 4 members with a 9mm handgun right as their going through a door, sometimes literally the first door of a map, simply by firing said handgun at them as they’re piling through the doorway. And it doesn’t help that every now and again a fellow SWAT member can be hung up on the side of some part of the level because the path finding got confused for half a second.
This can happen several times in a row, and then for no reason, you’re able to get through a mission with little to no difficulty. There can be 4 missions in a row that are incredibly difficult, and suddenly one is incredibly easy. And vice versa, where 4 mission are incredibly easy, and then for no reason, one mission is insanely hard. This is where another feature of the game, which is that the civilians and terrorists are randomly placed around the level, giving each level some level of replayability, becomes a curse. You’ll never know what happens next, making it even more difficult to predict where everyone is, making the difficulty spikes especially bad.
I’ve even failed a mission because a SWAT member was firing at a terrorist and killed a civilian. This happened multiple times. And that’s not even mentioning the infrequent cases of an enemy happening to clip through a wall and firing on me and killing me. Its like the game was 95% done, and all that was left was simply testing out the AI to make sure the game was balanced for players, only for the published to go “Lol, nope, we’ve got to publish this right now!”, making the game way too unbalanced. Either that, or the developers knew the game had too few levels or content and though that punishing AI was a way to combat that.
It doesn’t seem to help that changing the difficulty doesn’t seem to do much other than change the amount of points that you’re supposed to get by the end of the level. There are 4 difficulty levels. Easy is 0 points, meaning you can just run into every situation and fire off into every direction, and as long as you complete your mission goals, you can complete the level. Other difficulty levels include Normal, which is 50 points, Hard, which is 75 points, and Elite, which is 95 points. This is great is want to try and get through a level as close to procedure as you can, but I just wish there was an extra difficulty tab for enemy AI, maybe making the enemies more aggressive or strategic or something. As is, it feels like I have to abuse the games logic and rules to get through some of the levels.
While going through a level, you can also receive injuries from terrorists gunfire. I guess the point of this was realism, but it can make certain longer missions tedious, making it take an extra ~15 to ~30 minutes at least, and some missions literally impossible to complete without restarting them. There is one mission where you have to disarm bombs within a time limit, but you’d better not have one or both of your legs injured, because you have to restart the entire mission unless you’re somehow lucky enough to not get injured or injured with just enough time left, which I doubt.
Since you don’t want to lose a ton of points because you didn’t scream “Get Down!” at a terrorist before you had to fire upon him in a kill-or-get-killed situation, or get your legs injured and tediously spend ~45 minutes tediously walking throughout a level, you have to send in your fellow SWAT members so they can take the brunt of the situation. And when your fellow SWAT members can be taken out in half a second because enemy AI has instantaneous reflexes and eagle like sight, is not what you want to do, despite being something you have to do.
Because of the shitty AI, a lot of the small nitpicks become significantly worse. Sometimes, an enemy is sitting in the corner of some part of the map you might not know about or haven’t double checked. And if you’ve walked around a level for ~45 minutes only for an enemy to kill you, meaning you have to restart a mission for the umpteenth time, that minor problem suddenly becomes a massive rage inducing problem.
While you can order your squad members to handcuff people, you still have to report the person in, along with collecting dropped weapons as evidence and anyone who was either killed during the mission or killed or injured before you got there. And if you’re trying to reach the point threshold to properly complete a mission, all while your legs are injured, you’re now spending the next half hour slowly limping around any given mission.
Also, if I’m playing a professional SWAT member, why am I reacting this badly to gun recoil? I can even tap the mouse button without the gun suddenly finding itself aimed at the roof. And the spread for the guns seems way too far apart when I’m just firing off in short bursts.
Every now and again, one of your SWAT members can get caught up on the edge of a doorway or the side of a way when turning into certain hallways. You’ll inevitably notice this when you order your SWAT members to line up against a door, ready to enter on your command, and you sit there waiting for 10 minutes wondering why the rest of your SWAT team aren’t entering a room only to realize that one of them is somewhere in the map, stuck somewhere.
There are even SWAT snipers on a few levels that can give you info on certain people located in certain levels. You can even take control of one of these snipers and take out one of the enemies from a distance. These don’t deduct from your overall score, so I would recommend using the snipers as often as possible. It might be gaming the system, but when it comes to this games bullshit AI, you kinda have to.
I know this seems weird saying that SWAT 4 is still worth playing despite the fact that I ranted about it being atrociously unfair with it’s AI and the small accumulating problems that seem to just pile up, but SWAT 4 is worth playing to some degree. Just be aware of some of the bullshit problems this game has. If you can deal with the infuriating difficultly spikes and inconsistent friendly and enemy AI at the best of times, or have friends that think that playing as a member of SWAT is a fantastic idea and can overlook the games flaws to spend a couple of hours with friends to have a blast playing one of the better co-op games out there, SWAT 4 can be a lot of fun. Ironically, this is probably the most polished and mature game in the series up to this point.
SWAT 4 is both one of the best games that I’ve ever played and one of the most infuriating monitor smashing, keyboard snapping, stroke inducing games that I’ve played at the same time. How can a game be both of those things? Well, lets have a look, shall we.
There isn’t much of a story in the usual sense. Some of the mission briefings with have a few minor plot threads through out the game, but most of the the story that the game has is unique to each mission. Unlike previous installments of the franchise, where you followed the L.A.P.D. Branch of SWAT, SWAT 4 takes places in Los Angeles, California, the single player campaign taking place in the fictional East Coast city of Fairview (an amalgamation of New York City, Boston, a few other eastern cities). Taking place in the then far off future of 2008/2009. You can practice at the Riverside Training Facility, under the guidance of police Lieutenant Sunny Bonds, or jump right into the action.
Before every mission, you’re given the option to check your Objectives screen. This gives you a very throughout and detailed overlook of the situation, such as a briefing catching you up on the details, being able to listen to any related 911 calls, a map showing all of the entrances of the location and possibly the layout of the building that you can bring up in the pause menu, any known info on the supects, any civilians in the building, and a timeline of events. You can even choose which way you want to enter a building.
At the Equipment menu, you can choose the loadouts for yourself and your whole squad. The game comes with several loadouts included, but if you want to make your own personalized loadout, you can, and you save it. And you can copy any of the loadouts you’ve selected to the rest of your squad.
Your primary weapons include the Colt M4A1 Carbine, .45 SMG, Suppressed 9mm SMG, 9mm SMG, Nova Pump, M4 Super 90, GB36s Assault Rifle, AK-47, and Gal Sub machine Gun. And if you want to go in with a less lethal option, which is recommended in a few mission, are the Pepper-ball Gun, and Less-Lethal Shotgun, which fires sandbags.
Your secondary weapons include your standard guns such as M1911 Handgun, Colt Python Revolver, and 9mm Handgun. Less aggressive options include the Taser Stun Gun and Pepper Spray for the people who are refusing to be handcuffed or need some convincing to put down their weapon. Explosives include the Stinger Grenade cause quite a punch to anyone close to it, Flashbang, which blinds your enemies, and CS Gas, which can blind enemies with smoke and cause anyone close enough to it to go into a coughing fit.
If you come across locked doors, you have the Breaching Equipment, which includes a Shotgun that can breach locked doors by firing at the door handle or C2, which you can apply to the door around the same area, blowing the doors lock off.
Finally there is the Door Wedge, which you can used to prevent people from opening doors, essentially preventing them from escaping a certain way as you move around to another opening to a room, and the Optiwand, which lets you see under a door to check if there are any enemies in the room you want to enter.
To order your squad members around, there is a drop down menu that you can get to by holding down your right mouse button. You can order your team to follow you, move to wherever you’ve happened to aim at, to stack up at a door to check if it’s locked and to prepare to enter to room, or have them enter the room straight away. You can even separate your team, which is called “Gold” team, or “Element”, into two smaller teams, “Red” team and “Blue” team. This can help in certain strategies, such as them entering two doors of the same room, and taking on enemies from two different angles and having the element of surprise.
There are also few mode besides the campaign that you can try if you want some variety. There is Instant Action, in which you drop into the most recent mission that you’ve complete with the default gear. You can also create and play your own missions based off of the missions from the Single Player part of the game. There are a ton of options to choose from in this mode, including difficulty, whether or not you want the missions from the Single Player version of the level or a mix of objectives from a list, which entry point you want to start at and a time limit, and which load out you want to take in.
You can even choose to be a lone wolf or have a smaller amount of SWAT members on your team, and the amount of civilians there are in a level and the amount of and types of guns terrorists are holding. You can make any level as easy or insanely impossibly as you want, and is probably the most fun part of the single player experience.
One of the best features of SWAT 4 is the multiplayer. The multiplayer features several game modes, all of which are team-based. These include Barricaded Suspects, in which Teams gain points by arresting or neutralizing members of the other team, and whoever hits the score limit first or has the highest score when the round ends win, VIP Escort, in which a random member of the SWAT team is selected to be the VIP. The suspects must arrest the VIP and hold him for two minutes before they can execute him. SWAT must escort the VIP to the extraction point in the mission area while preventing suspects from arresting him.
Rapid Deployment, in which three to five bombs are placed throughout the map, and the SWAT team must locate and disable all of the within the time limit, and if they fail to do so, the suspects win. And Co-op, in you can play through all of the single-player missions with up to four other people taking place of the computer-controller SWAT officers.
Graphically, the game still holds up fairly well. Every location looks exactly like what it’s real world counterpoint would look like (I.E. Restaurant, Convenience Store, Medical Center, Jewelry Store, Run Down Apartments, etc.). Some levels even have a fantastic and creepy atmosphere that really drive home the point that you’re dealing with some pretty disturbed people, such as a level where a man has a kidnapped woman in his basement, and a level in an run down apartment building that has a cult in it.
What really stands out are the small details around each level that make the game world feel like the events in the game are actually happening, such as news reports on the radio of current and previous missions, and even in one mission, there is a live news report happening, giving away your SWAT team’s presence to the terrorists. The other squad members even comment on the situation as it’s unfolding along with occasionally commenting on certain things located around a location, and even give a few sarcastic remarks about the situation, location, and even about each other.
There’s even a few missions that have new objectives pop up as the mission goes on, giving the feeling as if the situation is unfolding before you. It’s small details like these that you wouldn’t even notice that make it seem like the developers were actually putting a lot of effort and love into each location.
The only minor complaint I have with the graphics are the mirrors, which look hilariously stretched and weird. But they do actually serve a purpose in the game, as a few spots in a few levels, you can use the mirror to spot enemies around corners.
SWAT 4 is also pretty impressive on the audio side too. At certain points, the game will appear like there is distant gunfire off in another part of the level, adding to the whole situation unfolding in front of you vibe the game is trying to give off, using what limitations the game has to make it seem like more is going on than possible. The soundtrack is dynamic to whatever situation is going on at the time. Whenever your team is breaching a room or coming into contact with enemies around the map, the music goes from the usual ambient music that plays when you’re exploring the area to a tense music that puts you on edge, really making it seem like a situation could go south any second.
Speaking of going south, the biggest flaw of SWAT 4 rears it’s ugly head. The thing that really brings the game down is it’s bullshit inconsistent enemy AI and absurd difficulty spikes. The first two levels are tutorial levels to ease you into the games concepts, but by the third or forth level, for some insane reason, the enemy difficulty spikes incredibly high, and a mere thug can take out your entire squad of 4 members with a 9mm handgun right as their going through a door, sometimes literally the first door of a map, simply by firing said handgun at them as they’re piling through the doorway. And it doesn’t help that every now and again a fellow SWAT member can be hung up on the side of some part of the level because the path finding got confused for half a second.
This can happen several times in a row, and then for no reason, you’re able to get through a mission with little to no difficulty. There can be 4 missions in a row that are incredibly difficult, and suddenly one is incredibly easy. And vice versa, where 4 mission are incredibly easy, and then for no reason, one mission is insanely hard. This is where another feature of the game, which is that the civilians and terrorists are randomly placed around the level, giving each level some level of replayability, becomes a curse. You’ll never know what happens next, making it even more difficult to predict where everyone is, making the difficulty spikes especially bad.
I’ve even failed a mission because a SWAT member was firing at a terrorist and killed a civilian. This happened multiple times. And that’s not even mentioning the infrequent cases of an enemy happening to clip through a wall and firing on me and killing me. Its like the game was 95% done, and all that was left was simply testing out the AI to make sure the game was balanced for players, only for the published to go “Lol, nope, we’ve got to publish this right now!”, making the game way too unbalanced. Either that, or the developers knew the game had too few levels or content and though that punishing AI was a way to combat that.
It doesn’t seem to help that changing the difficulty doesn’t seem to do much other than change the amount of points that you’re supposed to get by the end of the level. There are 4 difficulty levels. Easy is 0 points, meaning you can just run into every situation and fire off into every direction, and as long as you complete your mission goals, you can complete the level. Other difficulty levels include Normal, which is 50 points, Hard, which is 75 points, and Elite, which is 95 points. This is great is want to try and get through a level as close to procedure as you can, but I just wish there was an extra difficulty tab for enemy AI, maybe making the enemies more aggressive or strategic or something. As is, it feels like I have to abuse the games logic and rules to get through some of the levels.
While going through a level, you can also receive injuries from terrorists gunfire. I guess the point of this was realism, but it can make certain longer missions tedious, making it take an extra ~15 to ~30 minutes at least, and some missions literally impossible to complete without restarting them. There is one mission where you have to disarm bombs within a time limit, but you’d better not have one or both of your legs injured, because you have to restart the entire mission unless you’re somehow lucky enough to not get injured or injured with just enough time left, which I doubt.
Since you don’t want to lose a ton of points because you didn’t scream “Get Down!” at a terrorist before you had to fire upon him in a kill-or-get-killed situation, or get your legs injured and tediously spend ~45 minutes tediously walking throughout a level, you have to send in your fellow SWAT members so they can take the brunt of the situation. And when your fellow SWAT members can be taken out in half a second because enemy AI has instantaneous reflexes and eagle like sight, is not what you want to do, despite being something you have to do.
Because of the shitty AI, a lot of the small nitpicks become significantly worse. Sometimes, an enemy is sitting in the corner of some part of the map you might not know about or haven’t double checked. And if you’ve walked around a level for ~45 minutes only for an enemy to kill you, meaning you have to restart a mission for the umpteenth time, that minor problem suddenly becomes a massive rage inducing problem.
While you can order your squad members to handcuff people, you still have to report the person in, along with collecting dropped weapons as evidence and anyone who was either killed during the mission or killed or injured before you got there. And if you’re trying to reach the point threshold to properly complete a mission, all while your legs are injured, you’re now spending the next half hour slowly limping around any given mission.
Also, if I’m playing a professional SWAT member, why am I reacting this badly to gun recoil? I can even tap the mouse button without the gun suddenly finding itself aimed at the roof. And the spread for the guns seems way too far apart when I’m just firing off in short bursts.
Every now and again, one of your SWAT members can get caught up on the edge of a doorway or the side of a way when turning into certain hallways. You’ll inevitably notice this when you order your SWAT members to line up against a door, ready to enter on your command, and you sit there waiting for 10 minutes wondering why the rest of your SWAT team aren’t entering a room only to realize that one of them is somewhere in the map, stuck somewhere.
There are even SWAT snipers on a few levels that can give you info on certain people located in certain levels. You can even take control of one of these snipers and take out one of the enemies from a distance. These don’t deduct from your overall score, so I would recommend using the snipers as often as possible. It might be gaming the system, but when it comes to this games bullshit AI, you kinda have to.
I know this seems weird saying that SWAT 4 is still worth playing despite the fact that I ranted about it being atrociously unfair with it’s AI and the small accumulating problems that seem to just pile up, but SWAT 4 is worth playing to some degree. Just be aware of some of the bullshit problems this game has. If you can deal with the infuriating difficultly spikes and inconsistent friendly and enemy AI at the best of times, or have friends that think that playing as a member of SWAT is a fantastic idea and can overlook the games flaws to spend a couple of hours with friends to have a blast playing one of the better co-op games out there, SWAT 4 can be a lot of fun. Ironically, this is probably the most polished and mature game in the series up to this point.