The Good -Deep RPG mechanics offering many different playstyles -Decent A.i in combat but much room for improvement -Decent gunplay with good variety of base weapons -Mostly stable performance -Good atmosphere -No crashes -The story is decent if unremarkable The Bad -Street cred requirments for cyberware are too high -Most guns sound like toys -Frequent visual glitches -Game breaking bugs in main story quest -Lots of bugs, even a year and a half post-launch -Lackluster weapons modification -Cyberware can be entirely ignored -Crafting is tedious and boring -Some voice actors phoned it in -Difficulty is poorly balanced -Entire game mechanics go unexplained or are poorly explained in tutorial -Cars only exist to sink money into and get you from point A to B -Wanted system is so underdeveloped and easily subverted it may as well not even be in the game. Cops spawn in from thin air, can only pursue the player on foot, and give up if you so much as run around the corner -Pedestrians are zombies, react weirdly or not at all to player action, and routinely walk through solid walls and objects -Pacifica feels unfinished and really lacking content -This game didn’t need to be a “looter shooter” it adds nothing but a lot of pointless busy work after every combat encounter. I dealt with it, but I would have preferred a more concise upgrade path for gear -Life paths don’t matter beyond the first 30 minutes of the game and the occasional optional dialogue choice -Dialogue choices don’t feel like they matter at all and are just pushing you from one story beat to another – might as well all be cutscenes -Last but not least, the context menu for interacting with loot is horrible and broke far too often In conclusion: give it a pass, you arn't missing anything special.
No one would blame you for hitting that refund button on this one, it was pushed out way too early, and the lack of QA shows. It’s a bad start for a promising developer—that is to say, I like the game, and I’ve had some novel fun with it so far. But there are fundamental problems that detract from the overall experience. If you like the look of this game, check back in on it in a couple months, hopefully by then the major issues have been worked out. I really do hope they fix this one, because it has a lot potential, but in it’s current state I can’t recommend it.
This game is very disappointing to me. It's oversimplified and lacking modern content. The graphics are shoddy at best. Best avoid this title.
First and foremost you should know I was only able to get this title working with a mod and some third party software. The native GOG release of this game did not work for me, and I consulted support before stumbling onto a solution. In SWAT 3 you will be taking on the role of a SWAT team element leader operating in the city of Los Angeles, and as far as I can tell it’s set around the time the game was launched so 2001. The meat of the game is in its campaign, of which there are two, the original base game campaign and the GOTY extended campaign. Throughout the main campaign you will be equipping and leading your 5 man team into various scenarios such as: hostage rescue, anti-terrorist operations, and bomb defusal. Unfortunately the customization options are a little lacking and you are only really given a handful of primary weapons to choose from. There are different ammo types that you can bring along, but I found myself often forgetting that this was an options. It’s somewhat hard to really notice a difference in the weapons as recoil is not simulated and there are no first person models of your weapons. The campaign is rather fun and challenging. Thankfully though there are three difficulty levels you can choose from and you can even adjust the trigger speed of suspects on friendly ai officers. The ai, while it sometimes stumbles is very good, in fact I’d be willing to say it’s better than a lot of ai in modern games. Your ai teammates will be saving you far more often than getting you killed. My only real complaint is that some of the maps are really bad, and the gameplay can feel lackluster and repetitive at times. All in all I’d say I rather enjoyed my time with SWAT 3. There are still those technical issues I mentioned that probably need to be ironed out, but as a complete package I’m not dissapointed I gave this title a shot.
