SWAT 3: Tactical Game of the Year Edition

The mention of this oldie brings back a lot of fond memories. At the time of its release the realistic tactical game genre was just getting started and this was certainly one of the best. That being said, the game puts you in command of four fairly competent AI friends, many games today fail to make friendly AI this good. That said they insist on using mirrors while standing in the middle of open doors and getting shot to pieces, sometimes their flashbangs will bounce off a wall and hit you instead of the bad guys. Eight times of ten everything is great, the other two will cause cursing fits. Enemy AI is simple, however every two bit crook is an ace marksman capable of downing armored swat officers in a fraction of a second. This adds to the be slow and tactical element of the game forcing you to carefully choose your approach to each subject and testing your command skills, but causes an awful lot of mission restarts. As for gameplay, the first few missions are good introductions, but after that things start getting messy quick. In the many years I've had my beloved retail copy I've rarely gotten past the sewer level, where enemies will often open fire with fully automatic weapons in an area filled with explosive gas that prevents the player or friendly AI from firing back. Aside from this I've found no major gameplay issues but will note the missions get very large, very complex and maddeningly hard. To this day there are very few games like this, the on the fly command system here is still one of the best really only surpassed by its sequel. There is a lot of fun to be had here, though one must be aware this is an older title filled with gameplay quirks and a very high difficulty when picking it up.

1. Download dgVoodoo2_52, it is an older version 2. Unzip to SWAT3 main folder 3. Take the three .DLL files from MS folder to the main SWAT3 folder 4. Run dgVoodooSetup.exe 5. Set VRAM to 128 mb from "DirectX" tab 6. Set SWAT.exe compability mode two Windows XP3 7. Dowload and instal last order 8. Run it with windows 7 compatibilitty and run it as admin 9. Toggle it on, choose the 800x600 in 3D and 2D tabs, save and Launch 10. Enjoy the game 2h faster than me since you don't have to search all that crap. 4/5 stars, the game is great but man, they made Gothic run on GoG, they should make this one run too.

One of the finest tactical squad-based sims ever. Easily as good as the (real) Rainbow Six titles and I prefer it ever-so-slightly to the oft-lauded and also excellent SWAT 4, since they are virtually identical mechanically and the TGOTY edition has more missions. I own 2 physical copies already, but I'm buying again.

Do not but this game if you are running Windows 10. It runs like 2fps. GOG.com should not be selling games which don't work with modern operating systems as it defeats the entire purpose of the site.