Good Morrow to thee and Wilkommen

Weeeellll now, hello there.  You might be wondering what in the hell this blog is going to be.

Well I’ll tell you.  I plan on finding experimental games I like, or maybe experimental games I DON’T like, and blabbing on at you for a page about how good they are and what makes them experimental and different from other, similar games.

 

I’m going to start today with a great game from 2005: SWAT 4.

I’ve decided to talk about SWAT 4 because quite frankly, it astounded me on the first playing.  It’s different to most FPS games in that your objective is not to shoot everything that moves, but to preserve peace.  Almost every mission you’ll get the objective “Bring order to chaos,” amongst others such as “Save all the hostages” or “Neutralise specific suspects”.

“Bring Order to Chaos,” in basic form, means rescue civilians and subdue the suspects.  And by ‘subdue’ we mean you can’t shoot them.  Well, you can’t shoot them initially.  To play the game, you should go through the training, otherwise you’ll be completely lost.  Like me.

When you come up against hostile forces, the first thing you must do under SWAT protocol is to shout at them for compliance.  When you press the Use key, you hear through the speakers (or headphones if you’re like me and enjoy everything being in makeshift surround sound) “GET DOWN AND PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!”

This is rather satisfying, especially when the subject actually goes ahead and drops his AK and kneels down.  Now you have to go and secure the evidence (his gun) and secure the suspect himself by equipping zipcuffs and restraining the wrongdoer.  If there are other enemies nearby it may be more suitable to direct one of your team mates to restrain the suspect.  This is done through a simple menu brought up by holding down the right mouse button.  You can press tab to cycle through your team mates, too.

If the suspect does not stop, or points his gun at you, or opens fire, you have the authority to return fire, and sometimes authority for the use of deadly force.  If you did not follow SWAT protocol properly, you get marked down at Debriefing and can fail the mission for shooting a terrorist too early.  You also have to remember to restrain civilians, even when they haven’t done anything.  Failure to restrain civilians for evac before you leave the mission may cause you to fail the mission entirely.  Not only that but you have to report downed suspects, incapacitated hostages injured teammates and so on by looking at them and radioing in to Mission Control.

You would think gameplay where you’re not supposed to open fire and can even be marked down for it would get boring after a while.  This natural assumption is assuaged quite easily with the variety in the rest of the game.  You can have teammates blow open doors and throw flash grenades in, you can have teammates back you up with shotguns while you pick locks, you can even use their in-helmet cameras to send your team round the building while you hang around outside and have a cigarette. (Not really.)  You get to use CS gas, stinger grenades, flashes, C2 breaching charges, lockpicks, optiwands for looking under doors and round corners.  “Deploy C2″ becomes pretty to watch as one of your mates prepares to throw a grenade in through the door while the other one counts down under his breath and blows it open with a bang.

Wimpy suspects will stay on the ground, but proper terrorists (in later levels you have to disarm BOMBS) will get back up, pick up their guns and open fire again once you’ve gone past.  Some won’t even put their gun down, they’ll pretend to and while you’re looking the other way stand back up and probably inevitably get gunned down by the guy at the back with the 12-gauge.

The game offers you two great moments, though.  Suspects barricaded in a petrol station was my first favourite moment.  Sierra 1, one of your sniper units, says he’s seen an unknown in his sights in the main office.  You were just about to open the door into the main office.  You switch to your sniper cam while your team stacks up on the door and aims their wide variety of weaponry at it.  Gazing into the sniper cam, you realise the guy is holding a machine gun.  Suddenly you take control of the sniper cam and shoot him in the leg, at the same time commanding your team to bust the door open.  Suspect down and ready for evac.

The second moment was in an office block.  The CEO wasn’t too happy about the police breaking in and ordering him to put his hands up.  He wouldn’t crouch down or surrender, kept folding his arms and saying “I’ve got influential contacts in the force, I’d like to see you try and arrest me.”  I shot his laptop with a semi-automatic SMG.  He still wouldn’t get down.  I shouted until I was hoarse and he was being quite obnoxious.

Changed to my secondary weapon and tasered him.  Joy.

Overall game rating: A solid 8/10.  Some parts of the AI could be improved but BOY this game was good fun.

~ by ninjaduckie on September 6, 2009.