Full of bugs, even with up-to-date patches and fast hardware. Will boycott the developers' and publishers' future titles
Example #1:
Red Team stacks up at one door to a room, and finds it unlocked. You mirror under the door and see suspects near the door, but not near enough to knock out with a C2 breaching charge. You give the ‘Hold’ command for Red Team to ‘Open and Clear’ at that entry point. Then you tiptoe around the corner to another door to the same room that is further away from the suspects, mirror under the second door to make sure there are no suspects near it, open your door, fire in a gas grenade, wait and listen for the suspects to start choking, and give the ‘Initiate’ command for Red Team to ‘Open and Clear’ the room from door 1. Then you make entry yourself from the second door. A perfect plan, right? Wrong. You enter the room after giving the ‘Initiate’ command to Red Team only to find yourself alone, facing multiple suspects who are armed with assault rifles and wearing body armor. Where the $@#% is Red Team??? You look over to the first door to find either:
a.) the door still closed with Red Team standing idly on the other side, and the ‘Initiate’ command no longer available on the interface;
b.) the door opened and Red Team not saying or doing anything, just standing there with their weapons pointed at the floor;
c.) same as (b), and when you order Red Team to arrest the suspects, they refuse citing that they’re “busy here”, apparently stuck in a loop while waiting for the ‘Initiate’ command which I already gave earlier and cannot give again because it no longer appears on the interface.
Example #2:
Blue Team stacks up at a locked door to a large room with 2 entry points near opposite corners of the room, and mirroring under the door reveals a mix of civilians and suspects. You give a ‘Hold’ command for Blue Team to ‘Breach, Gas, and Clear’. Then you order Red Team to ‘Fall In’, and run downstairs and through a maze of corridors and rooms to the other end of the building where a second set of stairs leads up to the second entry point. All the while the ‘Initiate’ (Blue Team) command appears on the interface. Red Team stacks up at door 2 and finds it unlocked. You mirror under the door to make sure the coast is clear. Then you take a deep breath, get ready for the simultaneous entries, cycle through to give orders to Blue Team (default key=Tab)…, and the ‘Initiate’ command has magically disappeared from the interface!!! Blue Team is still at the other end of the building, standing on either side of a door which they already prepped with a C2 breaching charge, and waiting for an 'Initiate' command which no longer appears on the interface. WTF!
The command through 'Viewport' function is also noticeably inconsistent, as in when you use your team member's helmet camera to point him toward a door and order him to mirror it. You can see him make the movements to mirror under the door, but then your specially trained SWAT officer will not tell you (neither verbally nor with on-screen subtitles) whether he saw anything or not on the other side!
Besides such examples of obvious bugs and design flaws, the game continues to exhibit limited pathfinding AI which often means:
a.) one or more of your SWAT members is stuck on a staircase or a narrow part of the map,
b.) when you give the order to ‘Fall In’, your specially trained SWAT officers carelessly open doors to run through yet-to-be-cleared rooms, and consequently get mowed down by armed suspects.
Owing to bugs, the game is artificially difficult because the bugs cripple your ability to use listed features and commands. Otherwise, it would be just about right. You may also need to play many of hours to realize the bugs.
In addition, the frequent looping of phrases like “You’re in my spot, boss” and “Get out of the way” from your SWAT officers while you’re busy trying to mirror under a door, pick a lock, set a breaching charge, etc., gets annoying very quickly to the point where you’d like to shoot them in their heads yourself just to shut them up.
The game looks fantastic, especially if you have the hardware to run it on maximum graphical settings. However, that’s just the problem with SWAT4: it only looks great, but it sounds awful (with the frequent loops), and plays like an unfinished Beta.
Sierra's history with the SWAT franchise has been an uneven one. Just search here for old reviews of SWAT, SWAT2, and others to see for yourself. Time and time again I have shelled out a lot of money to buy the games at retail, because Police Quest had been a fun series and SWAT is a great premise. SWAT3 was a classic hit, so fans like me were salivating for SWAT4 and more, but the incompetent fools who gave the green light to put this piece of turd on store shelves just lost another customer. I will likely not buy anything from them again.