SWAT 4

This is a very cool game. I usually do not like "fragmented" games where you are randomly shuttled from one mission and location to another. It's reason I like games such as Half-Life, GTA, and Metal Gear where you're almost always in control of where you take the characters and how you do it. But given the fact that only real alternative for a game like this would have been to create some dreadful central storyline like the movie "SWAT" I'm glad they took this approach.

There are a few very dissapointing technical issues, which is strange since Tribes Vengeance was polished and even with the enormous maps the game always ran fine. This is probably one of the choppiest games I've played that runs on the Unreal Engine. There's some strange, unexplainable frame rate drops even in small rooms or when there isn't much going on. It's pretty strange given the fact that that the minimum specs are 1.0 GHz and 256MB of RAM, which my rig surpasses more than three times over. Then again, the woefully mediocre Brothers in Arms has a ton of bugs and does not run smoothly. As great as Epic's own games run, it shows how unoptimized games are when developers use "off the shelf" game engines rather than building their own.

On the plus side, even with the game's extremely tactical nature and somewhat harsh requirements for "passing" missions (you can fail to pass a mission even when all of the required objectives are met), it's very fun the play. Blasting doors open with C2, tazering scumbags in the crotch, and using pepper spray on somebody after you've already cuffed them is fucking awesome. Some of the weird AI and clipping bugs made the nightclub mission extremely tedious, but the "oxycodone" addicts and the serial killer keeping women in his basement are the type of situations you just don't see in (m)any games. Completing the night club mission by using the paint gun, smoke grenades, and tazer to stun every shitbag into submission in order to get an 86% rating was a very entertaining relief. Also good is the fact that every mission has randomized layouts, so if you're forced to run through them again (and again... and again) it at least stays somewhat fresh.

I really hope a patch is released that fixes some of the extremely annoying technical issues. Either way, it's still a very well designed game that rewards people who think about what methods they are going to use, and is often very funny in the process.