Customer Reviews

SWAT 4: Special Weapons and Tactics

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Despite what some say, SWAT 4 delivers as it is supposed to. If you were a SWAT 3 fan, then say hello to SWAT 4, a more graphically advanced edition with some AWESOME control and a much improved "drop down" command menu, including the ability to command a "red" and "blue" element at different times, or the WHOLE element at once.

The bad guys are smarter, sneak up on you, and change positions. Some give up easily, others run, and others fight back. It's replay value is AWESOME, and Im sure multiplayer is just unreal...I just havent had the time to get to it yet since Im on mission 5 of the single player!!

This is not meant to be a Max Payne or Half Life 2 game, its a stricly "SWAT" oriented game, slow in pace, much like a Splinter Cell. This is NOT a run and gun, its a strategic first person shooter for SWAT series fans.

Be aware that it takes a few minutes to set up the keyboard the way that is most comfortable, and you may change the config a few times in the control panel before you set it for good. Having the controls set up to where you can access all commands easily is key to keeping this game exciting and not annoying!

The system requirements arent too bad...but PCGAMER reccommends a 2.4ghz P4 and a 128mb graphics card. For reference, Im running it on a 3.4ghz Extreme Edition CPU, 1 GB of RAM, an X800 XT 256mb graphics card, and surround sound.

This game is definitly the best in non-takedown oriented tactical shooters (although it's only real competition there is SWAT 3) and it is also one of the best tactical shooters in general. The graphics are nothing amazing (the rendering looks last-generation, plasticky) but the models are generally well done and the enviroments are detailed. The animations are pretty good, and the loadouts show on your character models.
While SWAT 3 had the option of arresting suspects, it pretty much gave you no incentive to do so. In SWAT 4 you can't beat it at the hard difficult unless you manage to take a fair number of the enemies out in cuffs (as opposed to body bags). It's also fun to develop new tactics you'd never come up with in Rainbow Six or such titles, such as flashbanging a room and rushing an enemy screaming "get down". Then, before he recovers from the bang you taze him to reduce his morale further...that sort of thing would never come up in most tactical shooters, and it really makes SWAT 4 stand out.

This game is full of suspense. I swear I nearly broke out in a sweat from the tension a few times when sneaking down hallways with multiple doors, any one of which could have armed criminals--or panicked civilians--behind it. You feel like you are really there. The graphics and sound are fabulous. Contrary to what one reviewer said, the sound actually is 3D: you can distinguish whether something is coming from the right or the left. Also contrary to what a reviewer said, I think the intelligence of both your computer officers and enemies is quite good. Your co-officers are as good or better than the player at certain tasks (such as distinguishing between enemies and civilians). They are not perfect, but neither are you.

The computer-controlled enemies are pretty intelligent. They are unpredictable, which is good. It is hard to know whether they will drop their weapons, shoot back at you or panic and try to run. When they wander around the maps, it is hard to predict where they will go, so if they run away, it can sometimes be tricky to find them again. They may go to an area you thought was clear, and then you will walk into an ambush.
The game is also realistic in that one shot usually kills you. Sometimes a bullet will hit your arms or leg, impairing that part of your body.

One reviewer complained that if you screw up you have to start the level over. This is really not a problem. First of all, the levels are not so long that this really sets you back too much.
Secondly, it adds to the tension--it makes you really worry about getting killed and making mistakes such as shooting civilians. Thirdly, the mission thankfully doesn't stop just because you screwed up (unlike games like Rogue Spear, where the mission ends immediately if a civilian dies). You can still play until you are ready to abort, and there are ways to compensate for your mistakes by doing other things right (such as avoiding injuries to your fellow officers).

The designers really put some effort into the voices. The things the suspects and civilians say are pretty entertaining.

Most importantly, the replayability is great. It doesn't get tiresome to play the same level multiple times because the civilians and enemies are in different places every time you play. You always have to think about what is around every corner. Also the ability to play customizable maps outside the main campaign is very good.

Multiplayer is loads of fun, with the only real problem being that there is no good mechanism for booting people who team kill(purposely kill their own teammates).
One thing I dislike about multiplayer in many first person shooter games is that you move so quickly that the best strategy is often to run around like a chicken with your head cut off dodging bullets. The designers of Swat 4 wisely made it so that you can't move so fast. So in order to win you have to think tactically, taking cover and moving stealthfully. You can't just run and gun, and this makes for a better game.

Complaints:
1. There should be more maps. I'm sure that the manufacturers will be happy to sell more maps in an expansion pack, but they should really have included a few more in the game itself.
2. The manufacturers could have done a better job providing continued support for customers. They have released only one patch, and their website only answers technical questions--they don't even provide a FAQ for gameplay questions. There are plenty of little issues that a patch could deal with, such as the difficulty in ordering to your teammates enter one door of a room while you enter another door at the same time, and the way the friendly AI charges into a room after using tear gas before the tear gas has a chance to affect the suspects (resulting in your teammates getting killed). I believe that some of these issues were fixed in the expansion pack, but things like these should be fixed at no extra cost to customers

3. The snipers are useless--but that doesn't really matter--I just don't use them.


Still, overall a great game.

SWAT4 is a great game. I like the ability to direct my squad
to do various things. This is no run and shoot-em up game,but
requires you to think and evaluate a situation,to determine
what is the best thing to do to protect you,your squad and the
innocent civilians. You achieve the best scores after completing
missions,if you use lethal force as a last resort,when suspect resist arrest and become violent. I recommend this game along with Ghost Recon,and Full Spectrum Warrior. These are other
great squad based first person shooter games.

Also if u have a subscription to Fileplanet.com,you can download the Realism Mod for this game,which add real weapon statistics and real situation set ups.

I am a huge fan of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield so I found this game just recently and decided to go with it based off of other's reviews. I am very happy with it, as it is so similar to Raven Shield in many ways. This is a tactical shooter first and foremost - meaning it is not a run and gun game. You direct (or lead) a four-member SWAT team into rather disturbing real life "situations", NOTE: there is a particularly deviant map at a cult hideout that would make this game a no-go for kids. In this game the goal is to NOT kill suspects unless absolutely necessary, and they push what necessary means. You actually get graded at the end of a round and its very hard to not get points detracted. The varying levels of difficulty require different scores to pass, for instance EASY requires nothing but survival and to not kill key civilians or targets. If you kill without giving threats a ridiculous amount of warning time, you will be penalized (see below). Here are my pros and cons:

PROS

Great graphics despite being older, they are better than Raven Shield, yet nowhere near FarCry/HL2 standards, but it looks as good as you would want it to on a rig that could handle those two for this type of game. The maps are very detailed and realistically rendered.

Immersive, you really feel in the moment with your team and you tend to get tense when things go unexpectedly. The maps are the best I have seen for small-scale tactical gaming.

Choices in gear matter, be warned - you cannot kill anybody but those either shooting or getting ready to shoot you, your team members or a civilian. This is a very tactical game and it challenges your thinking.

Unique, this game is going to challenge your FPS skills as well. You can lean around corners (but not while moving), use an under the door camera wand, throw flash bangs, CS gas, stinger grenades (rubber ball loaded grenade that stuns suspects) or use hand held CS for tactical advantage in a map.

Weapons are excellent, but they are real world SWAT weapons so they are no-frills. This is worlds away from Rainbow's endless load out options but much more realistic. You have the usual suspects: MP5, AR-15, UMP, auto shotgun and pump action with handguns going Colt 1911 and the Glock 19. The non-lethal shotgun, taser and CS paintball gun are actually quite effective and nice as you can shoot anyone with them and not get penalized. You also can choose a special breaching shotgun for doors, you have C2 otherwise - you cannot use that entry shotty to kill effectively though.

CONS
Bulky team interface makes using your team member head cam view almost unusable - this makes me rarely break my team up so I can see what everyone is doing. You can see through their cams, but it takes too long and is too cumbersome to use in action. You also cannot give delayed commands like Zulu in Rainbow, meaning you have to tell the team to go in manually through the interface. This makes two point entries a challenge as you need to use the remote unit's headcams, tell them to go - switch back to your view and hope you are quick enough to get into the same room in unison.

If you tell someone to surrender (a key mapping you will use more than any other in this game) and they don't drop their gun - yet don't point it at you, you have to wait till they threaten somebody or you can also shoot their leg, gas them, taze them or so forth - you have NO melee options. Failure to do this results in an "Unauthorized use of lethal force" penalty to your score - 10 points per infraction in a 100-point maximum schema. This causes extremely annoying situations when your team enters a room with five suspects and four civilians with everyone screaming "get down", "hands up", "drop it" - invariably you neutralize a non-threat. I assume SWAT members in real life do not wait for a guy running at them in a small room with an assault rifle to aim for them when there are other people shooting at them already. So realism suffers a little there for game play, as otherwise you could mop up with your AR-15.

No saving - which means if you are going through a long and challenging map - you have one shot at it. As the lead man you also cannot get killed, your team members can, but you will be penalized for this at grading time. Also if you are wounded badly - you move VERY slow - slow enough to make it impossible to finish if only half way through some maps.

That's far from everything, but there are some thirty odd reviews out here so I just wanted to add a recent one for those of us who don't go after only brand new games. I would have given it five stars, but the interface, threat system and lack of an in game save made me hold back. SWAT 4 is still very good and with the expansion pack coming soon - well worth the investment for those who like tactical shooters. If you are uncertain, check out the demo, but if you like Rainbow Six - don't waste your time, just buy this now.

OK, I'll start on a positive note. The 4th instalment of SWAT uses the Unreal Tournament 2004 engine, which provides fantastic graphical and audio effects. The textures and scripted animations (for example, cockroaches) are excellent.

Now the negative: the game itself is lacklustre and offers nothing new over SWAT 3. In fact, SWAT 3 was better in some AI respects... read on..

The gameplay is exactly the same as SWAT 3, except that the enemy AI has been brightened up a bit. The bad guys will run away if shot at, and take cover in dark corners to spring ambushes.

"Good", you think, except that the SWAT officer AI is dense. Very dense. This is due to the "fire only when about to be fired upon" logic which spoils the game.

Every time the AI sees a suspect with a weapon they will shout "drop the weapon" - so far so good- but if the suspect declines to drop the weapon, the officers will not incapacitate the suspect and ensure he drops the weapon, instead they will repeat themselves forever, until either the suspect turns around with the weapon in hand and takes one of the officers out (it happens a lot - the bad guys turn really fast) or the officers kill him. Bearing in mind the officers don't seem to turn that fast, you can lose all your officers with this very random event, no matter how careful you are.

If you try to take the bad guy out before he gets the drop on your fellow officers, and you haven't issued a "drop your weapon" statement, you will have points deducated from your mission score. This is very frustrating.

The danger is compounded further by limits of AI communication. You cannot tell your officers that there is a bad guy round the corner, if you use your "opti-wand". So when you say to the team "clear the room" they will go in oblivious to the threat. They may bump into each other as well, with the end result that all of them are shot dead by a loony with a shotgun.

In these cases you normally try and take the bad guy out yourself, but he spins round too fast... and you're dead. You can't save during missions, so you have to restart from scratch.

You cannot tell your officers to look in a certain direction. They can move to certain points in a room, though. Guarding certain doors can be hairy sometimes, as a result.

Ha, and if you run out of ammo (easy to do on automatic firing mode) you can't take any from your downed colleagues???!!

I just felt like I was playing a game of rock-scissors-stone in SWAT 4. I never felt that my actions would affect the outcome of a mission, it was down to luck what direction the terrorists were facing in a room, and whether they'd shoot my men first or they'd be shot.

The first few missions are enjoyable but then everything gets difficult and you will probably end up working vigilante when the AI team are dead. Considering that some baddies need multiple shots to die (body armour?) and you can't pick ammo up on the way, you might end up out of ammo and can't complete the mission anyway.

Don't get me started on the snipers... they are useless!

If you're a lucky sort of person you might enjoy this game. If you're not, you will probably end up hating it. I would wait for a patch before buying the game, to be honest.

This is a fundamentally great game with a few minor shortcomings. The gameplay is pretty solid - realistic physics, many options for solving problems (and many different tactical problems that require solving). The difficulty levels make a reasonable degree of difference - that and the behaviors and random placement of bad guys and hostages means that the game is extremely replayable. The AI of your team is better then any of the other SWAT games (though it seems to me that they use scripts - they occasionally go places that make absolutely no sense based on the tactical situation, such as right into the line of fire). Terrorists and hostages have similarly impressive behaviors, lurking or trying to sneak around behind you. And I've got to give a lot of credit to the level designers. There are some levels that were so creepy and mood-setting that they left me with my knees shaking.

The problems I find are very minor. Occasional AI lapses do occur, and sometimes members of your squad get inexplicably stuck on world entities - I had a couple officers get trapped in corners and unable to extract themselves. Also, the squad interface isn't nearly as fast or efficient as Rainbow Six 3 was - in this one, you have to drag down a list to make orders. Sometimes, the list isn't nearly fast enough for the situation.

But all in all, this game is rock-solid, engaging, and plenty challenging. I recommend it for fans of tactical shooters like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon.

SWAT 4 isn't your average FPS. It's more of a squad-based tactical game with you overseeing your squad. I was very surprised when I saw that SWAT 4 averaged a 3.5/5 star rating here on Amazon. Horrible reviewers these days.

If you are a fan of SWAT 3, you will love this game, as the overall gameplay is very similar. However, it's been brought up to current game standards with beautiful graphics comparable to Half-Life 2, awesome sound, excellent AI, and a few new gameplay enhancements.

SWAT 4 is not a run-and-gun shooter. You work closely with your AI squad to take down terrorism. You get more points when you arrest a suspect, as opposed to having to kill them. You can apply all sorts of non-lethal force, such as a taser, bean-bag shotgun, non-lethal grenades, and more, to avoid killing suspects. And of course, there are plenty of guns to use if you are not a forgiving person and want to risk mission failure for some action.

There's not much to say about the graphics. They are simply excellent, and as I said before, comparable to Half-Life 2.

The sound is also decent, with eerie music at appropriate times, and upbeat music when the shooting begins. It's also funny to hear what some suspects and hostages have to say when you arrest them.

The AI is fantastic. Most of the time, the squad can really take care of themselves, unlike many other squad-based games. They even saved my life a few times by taking out a suspect that aimed a gun at my head. They know when to apply force, and when not to, and that's important in SWAT 4. Suspect reactions are variable. Some try to run, some fight back, and other give up (usually after a bit of force is involved). Hostages remain hostages.

Replay value is incredible, because every time you load up a level, suspects and civilians spawn in random places, so you will almost never play the same level in the same way.

I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard that multiplayer is pretty cool, especially co-op mode. There are also a few other game types available.

In the end, I simply say that SWAT 4 is an awesome and immersive game that you will either enjoy very much, or hate. The only cons I can find are unusually long load times, and some framerate coughs when the shooting starts. The only reason you'll dislike this game is if you are not a patient person, and are looking for plenty of action. You won't find too much of that here, till the later levels when enemies are more dangerous and less-forgiving.

After finally trying out the demo and loving it, I went out and bought Swat 4. Now I have never played any of the Swat games but I have played the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games so I knew what to expect. For starters, the game looks and runs really great. Although it can't compete with the newest games out there, it still looks amazing for a tactical shooter. Pretty much all of the missions are fun to play although a few can become really annoying at the harder difficulty levels. Now I do like the command system in the game but like others said you can't really use it that quickly as you can sometimes accidently hit the wrong command. Also, your teammates AI is either really alert sometimes or too slow to react other times. When a suspect is pointing a gun at them they need to shoot rather than insisting on telling them to surrender only to be shot 2 seconds later. At least your squad mates don't get hung up on objects very much or that would be another gripe.

As I stated earlier, the game is very difficult. I have had it where I was 95% done with a tough mission only to have an enemy nail me with pin point accuracy from afar which is beyond aggrovating. Still despite these flaws the game is a blast to play and the missions contain alot of replay value since you can try to accomplish things without killing anybody or by entering a situation through another entrance. However, I didn't really spend too much time on the multiplayer portion so I can't comment on that. Overall, if you're looking for a relatively new tactical squad shooter then this is the one to get.

I bought this game for my husband for Christmas, as well as the expansion pack, and he won't stop playing it! He has owned all of the other Swat games in the past and says this one is his favorite by far. I haven't played it myself, but he says it's worth every star it can get!