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SWAT 3: Game of the Year Edition

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review (belated)
Article Date: March 22, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: SWAT 3
Category: Squad-based Tactical First-Person Shooter
Developer: TakeDown Studio
Publisher: Vivendi Universal
Release Date: Released
Min. Spec: PII 266MHz, 64 MB RAM, 550 MB hdrive space, 4X CD-ROM, 8 MB video
Files & Links: Click Here

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Better Late Than Never!

Back in 1999, COMBATSIM.COM ran a preview of SWAT 3 that ended with the words, “Watch for a hands on report soon!” Well…. Now it’s 2002, and you’re finally getting the review. In fact, I’ll be up front with you: this is a rave. I’ve had SWAT 3 since sometime in the late spring of 2000, and since then it has never left my hard drive. It’s been a steady favorite on our home LAN and gets steady single-player time as well. This is a review in that I’ll be telling you about its flaws as well as its sparkle. But if you want some advice…go out and buy it now.

Mirrors are reflective, and bullet penetration through walls is modelled as well

Not a Military Shooter

Let’s begin with some notes onSWAT 3’s versions and an explanation of what the game is about. SWAT 3 was originally released as SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle, followed by the Elite Edition and then the Tactical Game of the Year (TGOTY) edition. However, all of the game material included in the later editions can be downloaded from Sierra, and this review assumes a game that has been patched to SWAT 3 TGOTY version 2.1. The TGOTY version of the game comes with a CD of materials on LAPD SWAT tactics. The materials are interesting, but not worth much extra cash if you can get an older version cheaper and patch upwards easily.

SWAT 3 is a simulation of police assaults. There are some key differences between police assaults and the military assaults in the other tactical sims. Rogue Spear, which also takes place at close quarters, is mostly about balls-to-the-wall assaults, carefully pre-planned and then executed with maximum speed and violence. SWAT 3 keeps a slower pace some of the time, and emphasizes the possibility of subduing and arresting the enemy as much as shooting them. This may sound like a wimpy option, but it works amazingly well for gameplay, because SWAT 3 models intimidation, reaction times, and monitors proper use of deadly force to generate a dynamic tension between your need to follow the rules and your need to avoid getting shot.

Thus, if you flashbang a room, and charge into it with several officers all shouting for compliance, the bad guys will be dismayed, and may surrender without firing a shot. Use tear gas, and they are more likely to surrender while choking and gasping. But the suspects may also run away into another room, and then fire. They may squeeze a shot off despite the flashbang. You don’t know, and your rules of engagement forbid you to fire unless the bad guys have pointed a weapon at you and one of your squad has called for compliance. (Fortunately you can issue a string of compliance calls to go through a door continually shouting for compliance!)

The element is stacked on the door in stealth mode

Rogue Spear drops you into situations where you know you’ll have to shoot. It is possible, in SWAT 3, to win a mission without firing a shot—yet this enhances the tension of the mission, because of the rapidity with which the situation might change from controlled to deadly, back and forth between arresting and assaulting. There’s certainly tension as you watch a suspect try to decide if surrender is the better part of valor, not pointing a gun at anyone to give you an excuse to fire, but able to end the mission all too quickly by blowing an AK round through you. Your own officers’ tolerance for stress is also modeled, and some of them may overreact if things are too hairy.

With a flashbang thrown by the officer on the right, the element prepares to go down a stairwell

Command and Control

None of this would work with a preplanned interface such as used in Rogue Spear. SWAT 3 comes through with the most useable on-the-fly command interface on the market. As in Operation Flashpoint, you give orders via number keys that drill down through a series of menus. When you look at something in the world, the menus change with the context. Moreover, SWAT 3 is built around this interface. You normally play as the commander of a five-man element: yourself, the Red Team, and the Blue Team. The AI that controls the Element, the Teams, and the officers in the teams is superb. They will occasionally put a foot wrong or mis-toss a grenade. They will sometimes all be mowed down at one door. Nine times out of ten, however, they execute your orders in a manner that is efficient, effective, and tactically sound.

Point to a door and tell a team or element to “Breach Bang, and Clear”, and they’ll stack up, one officer will ready a flashbang, another will open the door, the flashbang gets tossed in, and when it goes off they’ll advance into the room. The AI is good enough that you not only can play many missions hanging in the back giving orders: it’s often a good idea. You have to rely on your teams, and can. The missions where you have to take point somewhere are those where two elements can’t control all the threat axes. Later versions of the game also let you give orders through small camera windows, so you need not be able to see something to give an order if one of your officers can see it. The friendly AI is the best out there, ensuring that your electronic teammates are truly helpful. The combination of an excellent on-the-fly orders system and solid AI is a winner.

A whiff of teargas often brings them to their knees

Missions and Campaigns

The missions themselves are quite varied. The missions in the standard campaign begin relatively small and simple and get increasingly complex as it goes on, but all the locations look and act as you’d expect, from homes to banks to construction sites, sewers, and convention centers. Better still—and this is one of the key reasons for SWAT 3’s incredible long-term play value—the locations of suspects and hostages is randomized very time you start a mission in such a way that the locations make sense, yet there’s tremendous variety. As a result, in place of the “I know there’s an enemy around that corner” you find in other games, you never know what’s on the other side of a door in SWAT 3, even once you’ve memorized the floor plan. You may even know where all the possible enemy starting locations are, but it still leaves you with that first-time uncertainty, because you don’t know where the game actually put them. This variety combines with the solid mission design to ensure that the missions don’t become stale.

Peering into a room with the Optiwand mirror tool

If you’d rather not play in the campaign, you can play any of its missions as a one-off. In addition, later versions of the game let you choose to change the nature of the mission in one-off play. Want more hostages? More suspects? A random number of either or both of them? All of these are possible. Want a second SWAT element in play cooperating with yours but under AI command? That’s fine too. As an interesting further option, you can choose to make the AI be an element leader, putting yourself into the role of a Team leader or a team’s #2 officer. The AI does a reasonable job of running the missions, and you can learn some interesting things from playing as a subordinate.

It's important that you search suspects for weapons

Multiplayer

Multiplayer allows you to put up to ten players into the game, either cooperating to play the mission in any manner allowed by single player with either one or two SWAT teams, or in a deathmatch, or in Team Deathmatch (which pits a SWAT team against a Terrorist team). In deathmatch, you gain a point for killing the enemy, and lose a point for being killed. You gain two points, however, for evacuating somebody: getting a non-player suspect or a hostage to surrender, cuffing them, and then keeping them from being killed for a bit. The other team can also steal your evacuees by standing near them for a few seconds. You also lose a point for killing a hostage, a friendly, or a cuffed evacuee. The non-player suspects are considered friendly by the “Terrorist” team in a Team Deathmatch, allowing players to balance things out as needed. On our home LAN, co-op Team Deathmatch (against the AI) is played as frequently as the normal SWAT 3 missions.

Red guards the lower doors while Blue moves to the balcony

Problems?

There are a few problems. There’s some kind of a bug in the multiplayer code that periodically causes a client to drop out of the game when getting it underway, which is irritating (it forces a reboot of the frozen client computer) but it isn’t the end of the world on a LAN. It would be much more irritating in Internet games where player communications are harder. In addition, the option to designate a dead suspect as “down” (injured) doesn’t disappear after one of your teammates calls the suspect in as dead, which can cause some embarrassment (and harm your campaign score for an incorrect call!) Paying attention to what’s going on and what’s presented in your interface gets around it, but it is irritating. In addition, the training missions are not a lot of use: you’re better off reading the manual and the HTML FAQ, and then playing the campaign a bit. It’s also true that SWAT 3’s graphics are becoming dated, but not so you’re likely to notice, while the speech from your own side, the hostages, and the bad guys is quite well done. In fact, you’ll get so used to being cussed at when you handcuff people that the one—and only!—person who is cheerful about it provides as much of a shock as the first person you’re likely to cuff (who calls you a dirty bastard).

The element searches up an open staircase

Plays Great and is Less Filling

Why is SWAT 3 still on my hard drive? It’s a winning combination of tense, realistic gameplay, plus a great command system plus enormous replayability. The command system and the smart friendly AI makes teamwork a reality, whether you’re playing the original mission as they were meant to be played, or also if you’ve decided to rejig the missions to be a full-out assault with no hostages in sight. If you haven’t tried it and you like tactical sims, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. There’s a downloadable demo, extra missions and skins, and excellent support through 10-David.com, and the game is now selling cheap to boot!



[Author’s note: the shift down to 640x480 in the screenshots makes the text a bit blurry. It is easily legible in the game.]

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