SWAT 4: Gold Edition

This game's focus on nonlethality combined with its realism makes it a very planning-oriented and deliberate tactical shooter. It creates a very engaging cadence between careful stealthy infiltration and frantic breaching tactics. I highly recommend the Swat Elite Force Mod for a lot of new features and quality of life additions, adding a lot more depth and tactical options. There's a plethora of fan-made maps out there as well, which are admittedly a mixed bag to sift through, but with a lot of gems to discover,

I remember when this game was released. It had numerous bugs, and the SWAT team AI was unreliable at best. Despite that, it was way ahead of its time. Combat is fluid, the tactics are realistic and the random positions of enemies ensured that no replayed mission was ever the same. It's very, very repayable. When missions go wrong, it's frustrating but you generally accept that YOU messed up. When you succeed, saving all the hostages and walking away with your team intact, there's an unparalleled sense of satisfaction. In some of the earlier missions the atmosphere is spot on. As you progress, missions just seem to get bigger, and harder, and the atmosphere is lost - but they're still good missions. A solid game, and worth anyone's money.

Heard good things about SWAT 4, so I bought a copy to see for myself, and I must say the only disappointing thing about it is there's not enough of it. That's not to say there aren't flaws, but I'll get to that down the line. The game discourages playing it like a typical shooter. Unless you're playing on Easy difficulty, you will be penalized and unable to complete missions if you decide to light up everyone holding a gun. You need a minimum of 50 on Normal, and 25 points extra every difficulty above that. However, the only thing failing you on Easy is allowing hostages to die or allowing bombs to go off, or dying, which is easy because enemies will hit more often than not, and you only have so much health. It's not the prettiest, but the graphics are clean and detailed, and I get a laugh just reading all the posters they put in the game. The levels feel lived in and tell a narrative if you pay attention. I find the aesthetics of the game appealing, and honestly it feels half like a horror game when it comes to how grounded everything is. The levels are little sandboxes that depending on the level usually have you go in a spiral to clear out the floors, or otherwise are a series of sprawling corridors where one door can lead to different part of the level. Aside from some parts of levels, it's never an A to B linear road. The thing keeping this from being a 5 star review is that it has a few stinking flaws. For one, your squad is kinda stupid, and will often get wiped for lining up. The physics bugs also make it so that when suspects do surrender, their weapons will clip through the floor, disallowing a perfect score. And the rules of lethal engagement basically put you in harm's way. The game penalizes you for shooting dudes if they aren't actively threatening you, but that includes aiming their gun at you. I have been shot dead and failed a level too many times because a guy opening a door was a quick or the dead situation.

SWAT4 is an excellent, distinctly unique game rich with atmosphere and environmental storytelling. Everything is grounded, plausible, almost familiar. It's laser focused on what it wants to be, but has enough concessions to keep it enjoyable as a fun video game. What sets SWAT4 aside from nearly every other game is it's focus on de-escalation, and avoiding violence. A good mission in SWAT4 is one where barely any shots were fired, and you brought most if not all of the perps in alive to have their day in court. Tear gas, stingers, tasers, pepper balls you name it. You have the tools, and the game actively hands out a higher grade for restrained use of force. A lot of the characters are presented like.. well, people first, and enemies second, so you feel kinda vindicated when you go out of your way to pacify rather than harm them. Arresting a failed bank robber, and hearing him say "I knew this was a bad plan", it reminds you these are people. Not great people, but people still. Missions are a perfect length to match fatigue; they end roughly around when you need a mental break, as the game requires a lot of concentration and rapid decision making. There's enough variety to keep it interesting, and slowly escalate -- but never into the ridiculous. My only complaint, honestly, is that the otherwise stellar AI can be a little frustrating at times. Suspects are lightning fast on the draw, and often you don't have enough time to clock that they're not dropping the weapon before they've shot you. You're penalised for shooting before they've had a chance to surrender, so it can get frustrating. The team AI can often get wiped out for being too slow to react, or being blind, but it's less frequent then would be problematic. A few rough edges I wish they'd ironed out, but the overall package is a classic. I wish there were more games like this, it's really sad that the only one in nearly two decades is Ready or Not, which is still in development as of writing.

Boy, was that a satisfyingly tough game! If SWAT 3 took me 28 hours to complete, SWAT 4 took whole 64 ! The controls are more convenient here, but it’s balanced out by the increase in difficulty. Save maybe for the first few, each mission takes as two-digit number of attempts to learn and to get the luck you need to pass it, as sometimes you will simply miss when trying to hit an enemy dead in your crosshairs or get shot seemingly out of nowhere and there is nothing you can do about it (the enemies are once again placed randomly each attempt). On second thought, I was trying for the elite scores, so it might actually be easier on lower difficulties (The expansion ups the difficulty even more - you can no longer afford to lose a single team member if you're hoping to get the elite score in those missions). Now, unlike the previous game, SWAT 4 doesn’t have any big overarching story across its missions. The missions themselves ARE given context, which is often more detailed than in SWAT 3, but recurring enemies and/or the continuation of the nuclear treaty saga could have given the game a much greater sense of purpose, without which it’s just a collection of well-designed missions. The expansion actually does include the titular Stetchkov Syndicate as recurring bad guys, but it barely amounts to anything. But even without a story SWAT 4 is a good game… which requires a special mod or manual tweaking of its files to run at a modern resolution.