A series that started way back in 1987, Police Quest is the least funny Police Academy spin-off there is, which is saying something. Joking aside, the series continued for a while with Sierra making adventure games (as they often did) not too dissimilar to everything else of the time. It wasn’t until Police Quest: SWAT 2 that the perspective changed to an isometric real-time tactics title, with the following year’s SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle becoming a first-person title. We’ve all played a Rainbow Six game or even SOCOM: Navy Seals, both of which are behind me right now.

The last release in the series (that wasn’t for a handheld device) was 2005/2006’s SWAT 4, a fully 3D first-person real-time tactics shooter that puts you into the shoes of a SWAT leader. In recent years we’ve had Door Kickers and No Plan B, as well as a couple of online-focused titles like Ground Branch, Ready or Not, and of course, the xenophobic Six Days in Fallujah. Single-player titles focus on isometric or top-down perspectives. That focus is fine but I sometimes get that hankering for something direct. Rogue Spear isn’t looking any prettier, though few of us are.

With that in mind, I went back to the Gold Edition available through GOG and commanded my teams of two through suspected weapons dealings, gang shoot-outs, the plots of a thriller probably written by Stephen King or James Patterson, and robberies gone wrong. I’m including the slightly maligned expansion pack due to an interesting connection. The main game was written by Sara Verrilli, and she put in overtime. However, a year before writing and directing Bioshock, Ken Levine directed the Stetchkov Syndicate expansion. Between his two most successful games, Freedom Force Vs the Third Reich and Bioshock, he helmed an expansion for a game you’ve all forgotten about.

Being nearly 20 years old and old enough to be put in prison/be killed by excessive force, it is fair to say SWAT 4 might be a little bit dated by now. Beyond changing the .ini files or modding, you’ll have a lot of fun running the 9th game in the series in a reasonable 1080P, though oddly enough controller support is available. It should also be said that movement natively feels slow. Quick swift movement isn’t the focus, it was an attempt at realism mixed with the focus on careful steps in an active threat. Match that with the closing moments of a level being a game of cat and mouse with whatever objective and it is slow and frustrating.

Emblematic of the 2000s gunplay, an automatic weapon is wild to control on burst fire. Additionally, flashbangs blow out your eyeballs with blinding white followed by common dizziness, and everything is slow and purposeful. In the training, it is said that swapping for your secondary once your primary’s clip is done is best. I’m not boring enough to time it down to the picoseconds, but generally, they feel similar. Gripes aside, it was a stable platform to stick with back then for a reason, though it could have made the guns sound like at least something more than spitwads hitting a wet paper bag.

The missions, the setup, and how difficulty is scored are actually where I think SWAT 4 stands out against its modern counterparts. The first four missions provide enough variety: An assault on a Chinese restaurant with backroom gun-making and multiple murders, breaching Josef Fritzl’s house, an armed robbery gone wrong at a gas station, and a gang shoot-out in a nightclub. With 13 missions in total for the main title, there is enough to play a few hours on its own, though it is important to pay attention to the setup of each level.

Verrilli deserves her flowers in terms of writing, as most games would give roughly the same outline of going in and taking out whoever, whenever, blah, blah, blah. Every mission has a briefing which takes a couple of minutes to get through. Briefings early on will provide several assailants and victims, and later ones are a touch more vague allowing you to play at your own discretion. When the civilians are identified in this briefing, you are given their backstory as to why they are there, the suspects that are known will also be given one, such as the gas station gang being heavily medicated and seeking drug money.

Thus you can somewhat predict that they will act irrationally. Sometimes they’ll give up, and other times they’ll shoot on sight. Heavily armored and well-equipped combatants in later levels, such as the hospital or hotel, you’ll have a harder time convincing to drop their weapons. Less organized criminals who weren’t prepared for your assault are a bit easier. There is a lot of environmental storytelling to match this briefing and gameplay, and no level better illustrates that than Fairfax. A grown man who lives with his mother is suspected of kidnapping and murdering young women.

This is the first instance of how what you are told and the reality don’t always align, but in a way that makes SWAT 4 a horror game as much as it is a tactical shooter. Set sometime in mid-October, there are pumpkins outside, but what’s inside is more horrifying. On the upper floor you’ll mostly find a heavier-set older woman who may not want to surrender, but once you’ve cuffed her she pleads that her son is ill, mentally ill. On radios in the garage and in the living room surrounded by religious mementos, a woman pleads for her missing daughter to be returned home.

As you make your way through the basement, there are vivariums with dead rats, jerry cans, and generally an unkempt and disgusting backdrop as you hunt for Lawrence and the young Melinda Kline. Then you find his dirty little den with trash everywhere, a TV and mattress on the floor, etc. Once again it is not a nice-looking place, but there is a door leading further underground. Secretly excavated by hand (presumably) Lawrence Fairfax has been kidnapping, presumably drugging, and later killing young women before creating death masks that he keeps in the basement and which hang over an unconscious woman. 

While most titles now would try to avoid this or lighten the tone somehow, SWAT 4 doesn’t let you feel settled. You are supposed to feel unease, not only is there danger to you and the team you bring, but civilians and hostages too. It isn’t directly said, but the hospital level sees you securing a location after a failed assassination attempt on a South Korean diplomat. Both the writing and tone heavily imply a North Korean hit squad. Other levels detail conspiracy groups, religious fanatics, and of course Eastern European gangsters. Very little of which it is shy about.

The Children of Taronne is one of those very big taboos. Going in, you are told to keep an eye out for children as you breach this tenement housing complex which you execute a warrant on due to recent mass deliveries of fertilizer. Despite having all the taboos, SWAT 4 skirted the ire of Jack Tompson and Hilary Clinton a year on from Tompson’s third attack on GTA, yet it was smart enough to avoid having kids in a game with guns. It just goes about it by having you report that there are small graves in the basement, and it genuinely shakes the TOC personnel.

Not only are your interactions with the team voiced alongside briefings, but on select missions, there are 911 calls and unique dialogue for those levels too. It would be nice if the information being given to the team leader was subtitled or part of the written briefing, though it is mostly repeated and expanded upon by the leader (you) anyway. There are even ancillary details such as the timeline of what happened leading to you being called out. Those details matched with the equipment can sometimes make the difference between neutralizing a target or your team being heavily injured.

This is where I think some of the detail might be falling off the rails a little. A majority of the time you are going in to save some hostages, often of varying degrees. The Fairfax mission is young women who have been beaten or worse, the office building in the 6th mission has you focus on protecting the CEO while there is little mention of the other office workers, and later there is a hostel with mentally ill older men. There are ways to go in and clear a room with minimal crossfire, but as a result of either limitations of coding or decision-making, you can’t command the team to go in hot or check their fire.

For select rooms or sections of maps, this seems reasonable to have, especially now years on from release. There are mods like Elite Force and First Responders that offer expanded ideas, cut content from the original release, and add features from previous games. Both SEF and First Responders feel similar to Saints Row 2’s “Gentlemen of the Row” mod, which not only stabilizes the release but makes the game more of itself, for lack of a better term. There is sometimes a game of cat and mouse as you track down a suspect or evidence, and though the locations aren’t Hitman (2016-beyond) sized it can be as simple as searching for a needle in a haystack.

The first level, or second with the mod installed, is the Chinese restaurant in which you have to fix the gun connected to multiple murders. Sometimes that is on the guy that is suspected of the murders and sometimes it is elsewhere in the level. The Search and Secure command from the mod cuts out the needless combing of the location. However, the mod drastically expands the commands overall, possibly making it overwhelming at first to command easily. Split-second decisions are life or death here, and that’s entirely the point.

The difficulty is also interesting. Each level has a set number of suspects and civilians, which contribute to the overall scoring of your success, and I do mean high school test 0-100 style scoring. You and your team need to come out uninjured/alive (death is an auto-fail), civilians must be detained and reported similarly to suspects, and you must call out for suspects to drop their weapons. If they fire, you then have the chance to fire, and dead suspects must be reported back. Unauthorized force and killing anyone unarmed is a deduction of points.

What the mod adds as a quality-of-life feature over the base game is the addition of a small pop-up when cross-fire or something else negative occurs. Playing SWAT 4 without it can result in excess frustration when you get to the end of the level and you are told you just aren’t good enough. I don’t mind being a point or two out and having to replay the level, but when you are so far off the mark, it is frustrating. Though what do I mean by a point or two out?

Graded on Easy, Medium, Hard, and Elite, these have a set number you must meet to get a passing grade. Easy is 0, Medium is 50, hard is 75, and Elite is 95 (90 modded). Missing one of those by a couple/few points is quite frustrating, so why there wasn’t a default “this is what you could have won” pop-up doesn’t make much sense to me given that is ultimately your goal. I get that I am speaking of this from the modern mindset, and thus common sense and hindsight is 20-20. However, I can’t for a second understand why not showing that information made sense.

That said, even with pop-ups that tell you this, it doesn’t mean I am focused on that as I battle the menu to properly prep a room and keep the team safe. This isn’t always the case as the controls can be cumbersome now: Right-click to open the menu, Z to zoom or with the mod sights, C to crouch instead of Ctrl, V for your light, and X to swap fire modes. 1 through 0 are also your weapons/equipment, from your primary and secondary to your tactical outfits like door wedges, pepper spray, flashbangs, and stingers.

The tactical menu is where the majority of the slowdown comes though it does make sense why it was done this way. You can select between Right click and hold to open with release selecting the option or you can change that to left click, but to move around it you need to move the mouse through the drop-down menu, slide across to access it, and then select what you want. It could be a sensitivity issue, but I’ve found myself moving the mouse to no effect and I’ve seen trying to slow down so it isn’t so wild. Finding a balance in sensitivity is quite difficult for the type of game SWAT 4 is.

Swat 4‘s age is made up for in a reasonably well-designed set of ideas which we don’t often see anymore, at least not for single-player. The detailed briefings, AI that can be semi-competent from time to time, and variety without feeling overwhelming. It isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, though it also isn’t excessively saggy and ready for its coffin just yet. Ultimately, SWAT 4 was ahead of its time with some of its ideas of tactical first-person gameplay, and could desperately do with a modern (Single-player) counterpart to clean up its dated mistakes. Regardless it is still enjoyable nearly 20 years later.

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SWAT 4: Gold Edition

$9.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Unbeatable tactical gameplay, still 20 years on.
• A "story" that is unafraid of some puritanical taboos.
• A somewhat semi-active modding scene still years later.
• Actual replayability.

Cons

• Not all controls are exactly smooth.