While this might seem straight forward, the success of your mission hinges as much on your decisions here as on the crime scene. Then you get to equip yourself and the rest of the SWAT team with a gratifying array of lethal and non-lethal weapons, grenades, and gadgets. In singleplayer gameplay, you're briefed with as much (or as little) as the department knows about hostiles, objectives, and possible civilians or hostages. You don't even have the luxury of knowing who is a good guy or a bad guy until you see the gun in their hands. All the tension of taking down hostile tangos in a counter-terrorism scenario with the added challenge of actually having to make arrests, not body counts, all while trying to protect civilians and collect evidence.

SWAT 4, as the name implies, thrusts you into the world of police Special Weapons and Tactics units. Now after having had the chance to play the full retail product, I can say that Irrational Studios has truly been working magic. I never played the preceding titles, having been firmly gripped by an everlasting addiction to the Rainbow Six games, but after test driving the multiplayer demo for SWAT 4 released earlier this year I was beginning to wonder if I had been missing out on something special. Clearly I'm not alone in this line of thought, what with the wild popularity of Valve's Counter-Strike, the Red Orchestra mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 winning the 'Make Something Unreal' contest, and the perpetual success of the Rainbow Six franchise.Īnd then there is Irrational Studio's venerable SWAT series and their most recent offering, SWAT 4. The run and gun gameplay of fast pace FPS games, diving for health packs or making a bee line for the rocket launcher, is most definitely enjoyable but it's nothing compared to the experience of a tactical first person shooter where realism deprives you of second chances in the form of health kits, power ups and a big freakin' gun 9000. The tension of hunting down your opponent, using your brain as much as your fast twitch skills as you try to take the right corners, positioning yourself ideally to get the first shot off… because one quick double tap of the left mouse button is all that separates the living from the dead… is peerless. I've long been a fan of the tactical first person shooter genre, dating back to my first experiences with Rogue Spear, Red Storm's second installment of the Rainbow Six series.

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