SWAT 4

SWAT 4 is not your everyday shooter. Its measured approach to violence raises questions about genre tropes as well as limitations. The gunplay is certainly competent, but the way everything coldly works against you using it, sets SWAT 4 apart from the rest of the shooter pack.

Despite being the fourth entry in the SWAT series, it's only the second first person shooter after SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle made the genre leap. Like its immediate predecessor SWAT 4 follows the tactical shooter footsteps of the Rainbow Six series. You'll don the role of SWAT Element Commander. You have two squads of two and can order them independently around each mission. While the prospect of ordering separate units around in a first person game sounds daunting, each unit is equipped with cams that you can pull up on the fly to help order them around if you find yourself on the other side of a building.

Additionally you'll have a number of gadgets and tactical approaches at your disposal. Before each mission you'll be able outfit your crew with more or less lethal equipment, or specific tools to allow for certain room breaching maneuvers. SWAT 4's missions on a pass or fail score system that varies depending on the difficulty setting. To achieve high scores you're going to want to be as non-lethal as possible. It's mostly forgiving on the normal settings, but it beckons you to keep in mind that you're an officer of the law, and your job is to keep the peace, not spark violence.

Suspects will be ready to get violent, and you must prevent them from doing so with intimidation tactics like shouting or breaching doors with explosives, or subduing them with non-lethal options like beanbag guns or gas. If worse comes to worst, you might just have to put suspects down. You're not advised to shoot first, but you and your team will drop in one or two shots if you're too hasty in your approach. You'll need to open to every door with care and be ready for anything on the other side. The atmosphere is tense and forboding as it is, but it ratchets up a notch when a couple of officers have gone down partly due to your negligence and you have to now take on the remainder of the mission alone. Several situations and predicaments like this organically arise from the gameplay and induce self-reflection in a way the shooter genre generally fails to.

Disappointingly though, there is little cohesion and a lack of a substantive story. There's no through-line holding every operation together, but that's to be expected as you're in the role of an officer of the law, and not every case assigned to the police is going to be connected. However, you will go on every mission with the same group of SWAT officers, and it kind of begs that a little more soul was put into these characters with more and better banter. Thankfully, civilians and crooks alike are frequently difficult on site. Constantly hearing, "But I'm one of the good guys, get them" or "you got lucky" really drives home how thankless being a police officer might be. This, coupled with the mission briefings that do their best to inject some life into your duty as an officer help SWAT 4 avoid complete soullessness, but I still can't help but feel it misses an opportunity to deliver something greater, beyond its strong gameplay.

Though matters often turn violent, SWAT 4's shout first, shoot if they resist but subdue if you can gameplay leaves a profound mark on a genre that is often excessively so. It brings chaos to the order of the first person shooter. Fitting, that the key objective in every mission is to bring order to chaos.