SWAT 4

SWAT 4 is very nice looking, and it has a lovely fluid feeling. I am yet to get close to it in any other game (reticule dispersion and weapon firing are absolutely sweet to play), and it has some reasonably intelligent bots also to challenge you in single player.

The best fun to be had with this game is in multi player for sure, but for those without that option there is a nice long single player to work through with rankings according to criteria; that is, arrests, no injuries or deaths to your team, no injuries or deaths to civilians/criminals and many other things. You are expected (to achieve the best ranking) to issue orders to drop weapons to bad guys, to not use unnecessary force, to cuff them and also to recover all evidence such as dropped weapons...all good so far, but now for my gripe.

You'd expect that since the game is based with about 8 weapons from assault rifles, shotguns and grenades you could get away with a little spraying in the heat of battle right? Wrong! Very wrong, and this is where I lost patience with it. If you see a criminal raise his gun and fire first, you will be penalised for not issuing a verbal order first. If you get shot and return fire you will also, on occasion, be punished for using unnecessary force!! The only way to get good scores in this game is to use the non-lethal weapons such as pepper ball paintball gun and needless to say, this gets very boring after a while.

This game is very much worth a look, and I would give it a good 9/10, despite what I said above.