SWAT 4

SWAT 4 has reawakened something in us. Something we've missed since the days when we'd pile eight guys into a Rogue Spear map and play co-op all night. The return of the SWAT series, this time in the hands of Irrational Games (Freedom Force, Tribes Vengeance), looks to be shaping up quite nicely, as evidenced by the meaty beta preview we've had a hard time putting down this week.

Hostile Situations

It's easy to compare SWAT 4 to the Rainbow Six games, since they follow down to the same basic formula: close-quarters indoor combat. The thirteen scenarios planned for the game cover hostage situations, kidnap rescues, armed break-ins, even high-risk warrant services. Your first goal in every situation is to prevent the loss of life -- including the bad guys -- so you can't just run around shooting everyone in sight. Instead, you'll be in full control of your team so you can methodically sweep room after room to keep injuries and fatalities to a minimum. Since enemies spawn in random locations each game, you never fully know what might be lurking in the next room.

In addition to yourself, SWAT 4 puts you in control of four other officers during each mission, and there are a lot of commands you can use to control their actions. Thankfully, the command interface has been a total breeze to use: there's usually a default command you can execute with the space bar, or you can pull up a menu with a right-click, and give orders on the fly. Everything is context-sensitive, so you'll get different menus if you aim at a door (Open and Clear, Pick Lock, etc) or another character (Restrain, Deploy Taser, etc).


For most of our testing, we tended to keep our 5-man team together, but it's possible to split your group up into Red and Blue fireteams to cover an area from multiple angles. Cycling through your fireteams is as easy as pressing the TAB button, and you can even pull up video feeds for each officer so you can see what he sees. (On certain missions, you'll have sniper support watching the building, so you can pull up video of what they're seeing as well.)

At the start of each mission, you'll get a short audio briefing on the situation, as well as a basic map showing the layout of the building. Don't expect exact blueprints of every location -- sometimes the best you'll get is some scribbling on a napkin from a bartender at a club where a gang war has broken out. Some missions give you the option of more than one entry point, which can vary in risk -- one scenario set in a diamond wholesale center has a dangerous front lobby as an entry point; you're much better served taking the alternate entrance.