SWAT 4! Man, it even sounds exciting. One day I’ll do a negative review on this blog, I promise, but those that are hoping that I’ll finally crack out the gently ironic bile will have to wait a little while longer while I get super enthusiastic about a police simulator from 2005. (To be fair, I don’t buy games that I don’t think I’ll like, which pretty severely limits my choices for game-hate. For some reason I haven’t got to the point where publishers will send me their games for free to review).
SWAT 4 is a no-nonsense tactical FPS in the vein of Rainbow Six, or at least what I imagine Rainbow Six to be like, which is full of shouty men, jargon and flashbangs. And by ‘no-nonsense’, I mean ‘SWAT 4 is a game about shouting at people until they do what you want them to do, and hoping they don’t just say “Fuck off” and shoot you in the face’. It’s a game where it’s illegal to kill someone who hasn’t directly pointed a gun at you, even if you know – from replaying the level ten times and recognising the character model – that they’re about to pull out a MAC-10 and spray bullets over everyone in the room. I almost failed a mission for that very reason; while my squad were securing one room, I rather foolishly wandered into the next, to be confronted by three terrified hostages – or, rather, two terrified hostages and one grey-suited suspect pretending to be a hostage, who staggered towards me mumbling for help. I had played this level many times, and, even though it’s populated differently in every playthrough, I recognised a perp when I saw one; lacking any kind of non-lethal weaponry, I fired a single bullet into his leg, while mashing the shout button – “POLICE! Get down on your knees! NOW!”. He kept coming towards me, now dragging his useless right leg behind him. I put another bullet in his leg. He kept coming. I fired again, and he fell backwards, dead. And, sure enough, there was the SMG he had been a few seconds from pulling on me, lying next to his body. I reported the death, took his weapon as evidence, secured the hostages for extraction, and rejoined my squad.
I completed the mission, and received by far the lowest score on completion that I’d ever had – 57%. Normal difficulty requires that you get 50% or higher to progress. Why was it so low? ‘Unauthorised use of lethal force: -10 points’. I had killed a man without knowing that he was a threat to me, a fellow officer, or a hostage, and that is not a thing that the police do. In the next mission, I outfitted my team with pepper spray and ‘less-lethal’, beanbag-firing shotguns, and subdued an entire tenement’s worth of crazy, M4-wielding cultist-martyrs without a single injury (after numerous times of being shot in the face and starting again, obviously). It’s a great to play a game where you are, utterly and unambiguously, the good guy; any game that features widespread slaughter of living things is always going to be morally dubious to some degree, even if it’s just my dad wandering in and asking if I have to shoot all the aliens, but in SWAT 4 it’s your job to save as many people as possible, and it’s brilliant.
(I’ve just trawled Wikipedia, and ‘beanbag rounds’ are bags full of lead shot that are fired out of a shotgun at a person. Man! No wonder it’s ‘less-lethal’ and not ‘non-lethal’.)
The AI for the squad mates is fine – they get stuck on each other sometimes, but get into a reasonable position when clearing a room, and know when to shout at someone (all the time). The system for ordering them about is smooth and fairly intuitive, and they’ll almost always do what you say immediately. Sadly, though, they don’t realise that one of the best things about playing a no-nonsense tactical FPS is when you accidentally hit yourself in the face with a flashbang and then tase the officer in front of you, all the while hitting the shout button over and over again. It’s fortunate, then, that SWAT 4 allows you to play through all the single player missions – there’s no story, just “We need a SWAT team! NOW!” situations – in co-op, with people that appreciate the funny side of a CS grenade bouncing off a door frame and back into the room you’re standing in. Fortunate, and amazing. Alternating between giggling hysterically at some unfortunate mishap – on one mission I never once managed to deploy a sting grenade without bombarding everyone in the team with rubber pellets – and this-is-serious-business breaching and clearing, the co-op mode in SWAT 4 is, quite simply, brilliant gaming. Pulling off a perfect arrest – checking for hostiles with the Opti-Wand, blowing the door open with a breaching shotgun, lobbing a CS grenade into the room and then stomping in, finger poised over the shout key – is great fun in single player, but doing the same with a friend or two over the Internet is vastly more rewarding.
SWAT 4 is, in its hardcore way, a very rewarding game. Not the first few times you play it, and not when the first suspect you see shoots you through the eye within seconds of starting the level; but it’s a game that rewards patience, consideration, tactics, and the kind of compassion that only capsaicin to the face can deliver. There’s a common conception in games, and it’s what I told my dad when he asked about my mass alien slaughter, that it has to be them or us. Them or me. Yes, I have to kill them all, because otherwise they’ll kill me. SWAT 4 feels like a breath of fresh air, or at least it would if it wasn’t from 2005, because it says: Yes, they’ll kill you, but it isn’t you or them. It’s both. Every death in SWAT 4 is a genuine defeat, and it feels like it. For the most part, the people you fight in SWAT 4 aren’t evil; they’re misinformed or brainwashed or terrified or high or have genuine grievances, and when you save them, you win.
