SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle
But doggedly, they stuck with the concept - and I'm sure glad they did. Thanks to some utterly convincing 3D-modeled graphics, SWAT 3: Close Quarters Combat will grab you by your body armor and drag you into the action from your very first assignment - and once there, you'll find yourself hooked by the game's superior artificial intelligence routines, seamless interface, and the sweaty tension of each of the 16 missions. The first two SWAT titles felt like games; by narrowing its scope to focus intensely on in-the-field tactics, Sierra Studios has made SWAT 3: CQB feel like the real thing.
You play as an officer of D Platoon in LAPD SWAT, and though the action is set five years in the future, the events that frame your missions are frighteningly plausible even today. An international anti-nuke summit featuring representatives from every nation in the world is about to take place, and it's SWAT's task to ensure the safety of all of them. That won't be easy, because despite the name, this is no City of Angels: besides being faced with the threat of terrorists drooling at the thought of so many potential hostages being crammed into one location, you've also got to deal with the indigenous crazies that call L.A. home. In a move more developers should follow, Sierra Studios has opened up every mission of the game for instant access - but it's much more rewarding to play those same missions in Career mode because you'll learn more and more about the threats your squad will face and the events leading up to each crisis.
There are a ton of environments to charge into, all modeled after actual photos and each looking very sharp. They include private residences, a nightclub, underground sewers, and even the Los Angeles International Airport control tower.
SWAT 3 features four basic mission types: capturing barricaded suspects, serving high-risk warrants, hostage rescue, and deploying rapidly to the scenes of emergencies with little knowledge of what you'll be facing. The vast majority of situations fall into the last two categories, but each mission is still exciting and unique because of the tactical challenges posed by the various locations and the characters you encounter during each operation. All sorts of audio tidbits add to the ambience - hostages and captors choke and cough when hit with CS gas, terrorists laugh maniacally as they squeeze off automatic-weapons fire, rescued victims take umbrage at being cuffed, and downed suspects groan in pain as they lie bleeding on the floor.
The interface is so slick and seamless that you'll be able to focus on command decisions even from the game's first-person perspective. There's no mission-planning segment in SWAT 3: all orders are issued on the fly, enabling you to adjust a team's actions instantly to reflect changing circumstances. Simply point your reticule at a door, hallway, or person, and you can quickly issue the appropriate command via a menu tree that's always visible. You can even control teams on the other side of a room or building by using a Search command and listening to their audio feedback as they advance.
The only distractions you'll face in the line of duty, in fact, are what might be the most convincing character graphics and special visual effects ever to grace a first-person game. Suspension of disbelief? It comes pretty easily when you can see creases in your team's uniforms and a flash of fire erupt from their muzzles as they open fire. Character faces and clothing are equally realistic, and the end result is that you really do care about saving the lives of as many people possible on each mission - even the lives of the guys that were spraying machine-gun fire at you from behind a wall.
Yes, I said from behind a wall, because thanks to some impressive artificial intelligence programming, you'll be faced with that sort of lifelike behavior in SWAT 3. Some suspects can be subdued simply by shouting at them to get down and drop their weapons; some use hostages as human shields as they pop off rounds at your team; still others will ignore your commands and raise their weapons to fire even though they have four high-powered assault rifles trained on them.
There's so much to love about SWAT 3 that I'd instantly recommend it to any fan of squad-level tactical action - but that recommendation wouldn't be unqualified because there are some puzzling oversights here. The first is the manual: it's smug and poorly organized, leaving you in the dark about key aspects of play, particularly how your leadership performance rating is calculated (it also never mentions how to arrest a suspect - you need to use the "Evacuate" command). Then there's the lack of a multiplayer mode. To be fair, Sierra Studios made it clear in numerous previews that the multiplayer missions (and a level- editor) would ship after the game was released, but the fact remains that without a multiplayer mode there's little reason to come back to SWAT 3 once you've completed all the missions.
But you can count on quite a few hours of absolutely engrossing gameplay before you finish SWAT 3, and by then your command decisions and tactical skills will have been so challenged that you can hang on until that add-on arrives. If you're a fan of "thinking-man's shooters," SWAT 3 should be the next addition to your software collection.