![]() We were busting into a house to take out a single target: a lone nut-job who had a girl in his basement. ![]() Reassuringly, SWAT4 does not try and overplay its assignment, or make this more than it was. ![]() And that's all it was: all it needed to be. The low, grim ambient music, the mild comic interlude of the serial killer's angry mom, and the final (potentially non-violent denouement) of the arrest, all added up to a brilliant ten minutes. From decaying pumpkin lanterns on the front porch, through to the messy, stained innards of the house, it's a superb, understated piece of design. It's a believably shitty domestic environment. This psychopath's suburban dwelling is representative of the soup of detail that Irrational poured into this game. Tenacious and randomised badguy spawns left us reeling, and so after a couple more failures (with all three SWAT team members ending up MAN DOWN on the dancefloor) we moved on to one of the most entertaining single levels of any game: The Fairfax Residence. We charged in, blasting doors off their hingers, gunning down perps, gassing and stunning the occupants of bank vaults and underground car parks, shouting, shooting, and handcuffing everyone.Ī while later the rock 'n' roll club stumped us. SWAT 4 is packed with these kinds of details. One of the tactical maps is even hastily inked onto toilet paper - improvised in the chaos of armed men doing crazy shit. I love the brief intros and vague details on the assignment: realistic to a fault. An armed robbery gone awry in a convenience store, some terrorists in an office block. One that can proudly sit alongside any other shooter you can care to mention, because its ambitions are small, and it really works.Īnyway, we began with some tough assignments. In fact - now that I dwell on the notion - the ease of play really does seem unlike early games from the "kill terrorists" genre of door-popping squad-action games. There was only the most limited about of flapping about or getting lost on the way to the next moment of tension. Here we leapt in, understood how to blow open doors or handcuff crims, for immediate results. I remembered the game being intuitive and easy to handle, but nevertheless it felt exceptionally comfortable, quite unlike so many similar games in the squad-based tactics genre. We started off with three people, and, remarkably, everyone was able to instantly understand their role in badguy-bundling SWAT patrol. ![]() This time, however, we were determined to get stuck in, and the co-op takedowns were absolutely riveting. To my disappointment, we never really got to grips with it. I'd previously enjoyed SWAT4 when I played it at review, but the attention paid to the multiplayer section was reduced to a couple of distracted lunchtimes in a noisy magazine office. In there we mucked about installing patches and discussed the error messages being displayed by a desyncing instance of Supreme Commander. It was the JournoLAN: a tea-and-biscuits PC hookup in an editor's comfortable home. A couple of weekends ago Alec and I got together with some journalist chums and dragged computers and a folding table into our friend's lounge. ![]()
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