SWAT 4: Gold Edition

5 Of us in a room playing BF5 for a few hours till we grew bored and realised not alot of 5 player squad or co-op games out there. Well try swat I said, and everyone moaned because its old and possibly crap. Well I passed around my DRM free installer for GOG we played mission 1 and we played till around 4 in the morning. The stories this game creates are brilliant for example. We stormed a basement of a local cult, we subdue one suspect with non lethal bean bag rounds and secure him but one cultist will not put down his AK47. 5 of us surround him in torch light and yell "get down, put your hands up". but he refuses and even after pepper spray he dose not release the assault rifle. At any moment he could raise this gun and kill any of us and tensions in the pitch dark room are running high. In the torch light i gimps a silver barrel of a magnum style revolver, It presses against the mans head then... target neutralised and silence. we all look around and notice that only one of us has a silver revolver. "what?" says the owner "he had a gun, its not like we have to plant one on him". That's the beauty of this game and why it works we go from gamers who kill hundreds of players online to a bunch of guys who were shocked that we had murdered a Suspect. Turns out the cult had killed the children and buried them in the basement soooo we didn't feel too bad in the end. I've played this game solo and LAN/multiplayer and its a great game made sooo much better with friends and yes we all bought the game after an entire night of entertainment we felt it had earned the £9.99 price tag.

I was obsessed with this game back in the day. I really hope the multiplayer is alive and kicking as it was great. Even if it isn’t it’s well worth the cash.

Is it difficult? Yes, but it all feels fair. You have so many options as outlined by the in-depth tutorial, and so many of them are easy to access quickly (most of the squad commands come from literally holding down the right mouse button and scrolling down a list) your only excuse for a mission gone bad is usually impatience. You've got the tools, a great team A.I, and plenty of choices to accomplish your goals. It seldom feel like you got shortchanged by RNG or bad A.I or technical issues but more like you made the wrong call, and that's the way a SWAT game should feel. It is incredibly satisfying to shout down a perp, zip tie them, and collect their weapons for evidence as much as it is suspenseful to open each new door or have a running suspect open fire from the shadows. A large variety of missions, tons of dialogue both humorous and dramatic, effective music that changes according to scenarios and level of danger, and tight gun controls that makes it one of the best fire-from-the-hip FPS games I've ever played. If you like cops, action, squad mechanics, gadgets, a variety of load outs and situations, you can't go wrong.

I played the game and the expansion to the end and I had a lot of fun, it's cheap, it's fun and it worked right away on my PC (I had to edit a file to make it 4k res but it's understandable from an old game). I definitely recommend this game to anyone that likes shooters.

Even though this game was released in 2005, it's still one of the best, if not the best, tactical shooters.